Category archives: Featured

Brand reinvention: Nintendo is about to lurch out of the tomb once more with Wii U GamePad

Nintendo is doing its own zombie act: coming back from the dead with the new Wii U, writes Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee)

Are you prepared for the Zombie apocalypse? It’s a concept that has long been viral on the Internet, inspiring numerous guidebooks on how to prepare for both the day and night of the living dead. You can even explore a version of Google Maps adapted to show the level of likely zombie infestation across the globe, and highlighting resources like pharmacies, hardware stores and police stations, where you would find handy resources to help survive the undead onslaught. Medicine, guns, axes and baseball bats will be high on your shopping list.

Sadly, preparing for the apocalypse only by reading a map is like learning to drive using a mapbook. You also need on-the-job training.

Enter an unlikely ally: Nintendo. It is the old-timer of the gaming console industry, and rapidly falling behind Sony and Microsoft. These global giants have brought the industry back to life, respectively, with a new version of the PlayStation Portable, called the Vita, and an add-on to the Xbox, the Kinect.

Owenkessel GM Sizwe Salimane – sharp as a Ginsu knife*

by Herman Manson. Owenkessel has appointed Sizwe Salimane as its new GM, just a year after appointing Donovan Bryan as its executive creative director.

Salimane knew Bryan from their time together at Grey where Bryan was Creative Director and Salimane Strategic Planning Manager and lists his presence at Owenkessel. Salimane says Bryan’s presence at Owenkessel was a major contributing factor to his decision to move to the agency from FNB where he was the marketing manager for FNB EasyPlan – an affordable paperless bank offering.

As GM Salimane is responsible for ensuring processes are put in place to facilitate business growth, protecting both shareholders and clients, and ensuring internal efficiencies. Salimane says he aims to improve briefing processes and the traffic system inside the agency.

Kate Wilson of Women’s Health: “I’m not building a magazine brand”

by Herman Manson (@marklives) While her rivals are seeing circulation declines Kate Wilson, editor of Women’s Health SA, just saw the title’s total paid circulation rise 8.4% year-on-year to reach 78 791. Women’s Health has now overtaken both Cosmopolitan and Glamour’s total paid circulation figures.

But Wilson isn’t building a magazine brand, she says, instead she is building a multi-platform content brand. In fact the Women’s Health SA launched a website in the country before the physical magazine arrived and has built various digital content modules into the Women’s Health brand strategy. Extensions like DVD and booklet cover mounts often draw from other aspects of the business (so a booklet might contain extracts from a book you get to order from the publisher). Next year will see events drawn into the mix.

Of course the brand could also draw on the visibility of sibling Men’s Health which Wilson says helps double the facings of for her magazine.

But ultimately it is the service journalism in the health and wellness field particularly that has near universal appeal. Wilson says she won’t apologise for the ‘layer of superficiality’ in women (or anybody else) wanting to look their best. For Wilson looking your best translates into feeling your best and health, nutrition and weight-loss are all issues we have some control over in a time of great economic uncertainty.

Women’s Health also encourages its resident experts and columnists to maintain media visibility and this network keeps reinforcing the Women’s Health brand where-ever they go.

Smartphones surge by 40,9% at Vodacom

Vodacom issued a trading statement yesterday morning that shows smartphones active on the network surging by 40,9% in South Africa in the last quarter, even as local revenue growth remains flat, writes Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee)..

Smartphones active on the Vodacom network in South Africa surged by 40,9% in the quarter ended 30 June 2012, according to a trading vodacom pontestatement issued by the Group yesterday morning.

Highlights of the Vodacom Group Limited trading statement for the quarter ended 30 June 2012 included:

– Group service revenue growth up 8.7% (5.7%*)

Magazine covers (from Russia) with love

MarkLives.com runs a regular slot featuring the best local and international magazine covers every week. We recognise well thought out, powerful and interesting (and hopefully all three in one) magazine covers and celebrate the mix of pragmatism, creativity and personal taste that created each of them.

Brand reinvention: Kodak gets its next moment

Kodak may be dead as a camera and film company, but it is coming back to life in the “post-capture” world of printing, writes Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee).

The Kodak moment is back. When the company that invented popular photography filed for bankruptcy protection five months ago, it provoked a tut-tut that was heard around the world. The company had been undone by the advent of digital photography – a technology it pioneered, but never managed to turn to its own advantage.

The “portable all-electronic still camera”, invented by Steve Sasson in 1975, was awarded US patent number 4,131,919, but that wasn’t enough to convince Kodak executives. As Sasson would write many years later, they could not understand why people would ever want to view their pictures on a TV.

#MandelaStory tracks life of Madiba through social media channels

A viral video tracking the life path of Nelson Mandela through modern communication channels such as Facebook and Twitter was developed by Prezence Digital.

In the #MandelaStory the producers wonder “Would our nation’s father, Nelson Mandela have spent 27 years in prison if he had access to the same technology, social media platforms, instant sharing apps and global monitoring tools as we do today? Watch the video to find out.”

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