Category archives: Columns

The Dissident Spin Doctor: The death of the unitasker

by Emma King (@EmmainSA) I came across an awesome word the other day – ‘Unitasker’. It’s attributed most commonly to Alton Brown, ‘celebrity’ chef and TV personality, who apparently disdainfully coined the term to describe single purpose kitchen utensils that clog up a kitchen and which are only good for one thing. Like a corn kernel remover, or a cake pop maker, or a banana slicer.

Apparently, it can also be used to describe a person – someone who can only do one task at a time (I’m resisting the temptation to insert joke about men and multitasking here). But I’d like to create another way it can be used, in the workplace, to describe someone who clogs up a business and who is only able or willing to do one thing.

I think it’s a pretty dangerous to be a unitasker in this fast moving age. Back in the day, when there were limited channels and disciplines, and ages to work through a brief from a client, we had the luxury of being able to lovingly and single-mindedly focus on our preferred skill of copywriting or design or strategic research.

Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios – the cellphone wars

by Oresti Patricios. Cell-C’s latest campaign is being flighted with numbing regularity on SABC and e-TV, promoting the concept of switching networks, while keeping your number.

Hermaneutics: Jobs For Monkeys In Adland

Young and want to land a job in advertising? Join a circus. That is the gist of reader feedback on an Adland.tv story featuring a recruitment campaign by DDB Brussels in which prospective employees need to submit a 6-second Vine gif (hashtag #ddbexpress) in place of a CV.

Ten ‘new’ creatives will make the shortlist and be put together on a train to Cannes. En-route they will need to solve numerous creative briefs, on which they will be judged, and eight will be sent home (dropped off at the various stations en-route – apparently). The two that make it to Cannes will be ‘rewarded by an invitation to join the creative department of DDB.’ That’s not exactly an explicit job offer, hence some of the commentary on the original story referring to internships.

The campaign has been described as a rather demeaning process to land a job. Critics also point out that to enter you need Vine, which only runs on iPhones, and so excludes a fairly large group of potential candidates, including many for whom an iPhone would be out of reach.

Says the Facebook site created for the campaign “Creative Directors are very busy people, and new creatives need to be agile. Combine those two and you get our brand new way of hiring: 6″ recruitment. You have exactly six seconds to convince our Creative Director, Peter Ampe.”

Not too busy to make the train ride and make some kids jump through hoops, or to make the awards festival for that matter, just too busy to look down and at your portfolio. The agency seems to be snorting Cannes, really, counting the award shows they can enter with this ‘creatively lead’ take on recruitment.

Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios – Sta-soft’s ‘tough guys’

Who’s tough? Who’s the roughest, meanest dude you can think of? Chuck Norris? Rambo? Hulk Hogan? If your answer was all three, say “Whoo-hah!”

And what do all tough guys need? Softness, of course, because when it comes to creating an advert to show how effective a fabric softener really is, only the toughest guys make the cut and the tougher you are, the softer you need your clothes to be.

That’s the message from Sta-soft’s new ‘tough guys’ print campaign that uses Sly Stallone, Norris and Hogan look-alikes made out of the softest cloth to drive home the contrast between what’s soft and what’s hard. All kidding aside, I’m glad to see a fabric softener brand go for something a bit cleverer (and a little less obvious) that the usual cute baby (or kitten) to illustrate its USP.

The cloth caricatures in the new Sta-soft ads were created by Shaun Hill of Says Who, a Johannesburg-based branding, design and illustration studio. The fabric versions of the world’s most popular ‘tough guy’ personalities are beautifully rendered through the use of different materials, and the clever use of light and shade which creatively adds to the depth of the ad. O&M is the agency behind this simple but oh-so-effective campaign.

The lack of copy is a notable feature of the ad. Everybody knows the brand; it’s not necessary to labour the features and benefits of the product that almost every South African has grown up with.

Fair Exchange: Power in partnerships

by Erna George. Having started my career as a client at Unilever before spending several years on the agency side both in design and marketing insight & consulting, I have been ‘on both sides of the fence’. But, I remain true to one view: When clients treat agencies like vendors, or agencies treat clients like they are not experts, the relationship or the work it produces is never optimal.

Pistorius the ultimate litmus test for declining circulation (ABC Q1 2013 figures)

by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) That SA newspaper circulation is in decline is common cause these days but the latest set of figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations of SA (ABC) figures – for the first quarter of 2013 – really rubs it in.

Consider that we had the biggest, most compelling news event to hit SA in many years – the arrest of Paralympian superstar Oscar Pistorius for the murder of his girlfriend model Reeva Steenkamp in that quarter – and it had little effect on the circulation figures!

While SA web traffic was off the charts in February, our newspapers could not capitalise in terms of sales.

Even Beeld, which is more of a Pretoria newspaper than a Jo’burg one, did not make merry on sales in this quarter despite it serving up the best consistent coverage of the story that happened in its backyard (the murder occurred in Pistorius’ home in Pretoria) with many excellent breaks and exclusives.

Beeld was at 65 645 total circulation in the first quarter of this year compared with 72 599 in the corresponding period a year earlier. Q1 in 2013 was also down on previous quarter – Q4 2012 – which was 66 132.

Maybe the editorial, marketing and distribution departments at Beeld did not co-ordinate on Pistorius – and it would be interesting to know what their returns were in Q1 2013 – and, if so, this is really a publishing failure rather than an editorial one.

When you’ve got big breaks on a big story, you’ve got to make a lot of noise about it – increase the postering and the print run, get the trucks out there early and also get your social-media manager (and you should have one by now: its 2013) piqueing interest. And then you have to keep the exclusive offline for a few hours while you push the papers on the streets.

ABC Analysis Q1 2013: Newspaper circulation decline continues

The ABC has released circulation statistics for the period January 2013 – March 2013. Here are a couple of numbers that stood out in terms of newspaper circulations.

Daily newspapers

Beeld declined to 67,700 from 75,019 in the previous corresponding period. Pretoria News fell to 18,775 from 21,406. Sowetan held steady at 98,258 (compared to 98,128). The Star fell to 106,484 from 124,641.

The Cape Argus fell to 33,247 from 35,493, The Cape Times fell to 35,616 from 39,519. Die Burger (Eastern & Western Cape editions combined) rose sligtly to 62,237 from 61,980.

Daily News fell to 32,002 from 34,173. Isolezwe declined slightly to 116,186 from 117,266. The Witness fell to 19,001 from 20,222 and The Mercury fell to 31,025 from 32,098.

Business Day fell to 33,690 from 35,897. The Citizen fell to 63,854 from 68,632. The Times declined slightly to 142,117 from 142,111.

On the tabloid front the Daily Sun fell from 375,185 to 296,489 (it stood at 322,324 in Q4 2012). Son fell to 92,213 from 104,696

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