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The Gate Keeper: Chapter 21 (In which retirement is stage managed )

by Andrew Miller TBW Smith Jones Wallace Broadbent and Ndimande is an agency in crisis. Their ‘basket of boutique services’ strategy has bombed. Only a massive new project can keep the doors open – all eyes are now on the corporate tent at Mangaung. Far in the background, an emergency replacement executive PA with decades of experience makes important decisions. Interns rise, board members take unexpected steps and things begin to change…

The PR consultant is summoned, a charm offensive is planned and a deposit invoice is issued…

Jupiter Cape Town collapses management structure

by Herman Manson. The Jupiter Drawing Room Cape Town has collapsed their separate ‘leadership’ and ‘management teams’ into a single unit.

The Gate Keeper: Chapter 20 (In which careers are addressed)

The intern’s place in the Mangaung corporate tent is debated, while the chairman of the board launches a hand grenade in no particular direction…

The embedded Agency

by Herman Manson (@marklives) The founders of ad agency Derrick, Livio Tronchin (ex-Jupiter Drawing Room Cape Town), Mark Stead (former CD at KingJames RSVP) and Myles Hoppé (former brand manager at the company behind the Joule), late last year packed up their office and moved in with the launch team of money management service 22seven.

The brainchild of Christo Davel, best known for his work on 20Twenty, the ground-breaking online bank that folded alongside Saambou, the Derrick team had been commissioned to move into the new start-up for a two week stint that made them feel like part of the start-up (and worked them just as hard!) rather than an agency apart.

22seven needed things to happen fast, in real time, and the procedures and processes in place at ad agencies was going to be a hindrance. So it all got tossed out the window. And while it was an exciting ride it did highlight vulnerabilities on both sides of the client/agency divide.

The Gate Keeper: Chapter 19 (In which the road opens)

The great Mangaung survival strategty is presented, and Mama E notices the chair of the board’s smile…

The ugly truth about advertising (as told by David Nobay)

by Herman Manson (@marklives) After all the rah rah of the last couple of weeks around the annual advertising backslap it was nice of David Nobay, Creative Chairman at Droga5 in Sydney, to sit us all down and share some of the harder truths of advertising.

He had five of them in fact.
1. Not all clients want great work.
2. There are too many of us.
3. We lost our exotic
4. We’ve forgotten how to sell
5. We reward mediocrity

Chris Moerdyk eat your heart out. As everybody grabbed for their iPhones to check in on Twitter and see which ECD would be first to denounce Nobay an ‘enemy of the creative industry’ the man himself happily droned on in the presentation that made the seminar worth its 500 bucks.

That would be the grandly named International Seminar of Creativity hosted by the Loerie Awards in Cape Town City Hall as part of Creative Week.

Nobay, noting an arrogance in the trade when it comes to ‘creativity’ and ‘advertising,’ or at least what creative types in advertising consider creative work, says clients often have practical reasons for not implementing your potentially Loerie winning idea.

This is also the problem with award shows said Nobay – they oversimplify what is considered ‘creative.’ Awarding winning work has become a matter of looking at a piece of work and having an immediate reaction to it before moving to the next piece.

“We are in this business to make money,” Nobay told his stunned audience, “Or we would all have become artists.” Great work, according to Nobay, is really a moving target, isn’t really tangible and lots of clients are running businesses in maintenance mode, while ‘award winning creative’ has become all about the new.

The Gate Keeper: Chapter 18 (In which lunch is shared)

Things begin to change as the TBWSJWBN hierachy is suddenly and decisively subverted…

Creativity isn’t an advertising ghetto

by Herman Manson (@marklives) It all started well before the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival became the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. It was probably inevitable – advertising has spent the past two decades evolving at such a rapid pace that what we thought of as ‘ads’ then certainly won’t hold ground today. The ad industry solved it by replacing the word ‘advertising’ with the word ‘creativity.’

With ads no longer du jour industry award shows are positioning themselves as being about ‘creativity’ that’s lead by ‘creatives’ producing great ‘creative thinking’ and big ideas. Marketing, advertising and creativity have been nicely bundled together and not only changed our lingo but also excluded a lot of stakeholders in the process.

Yet communication today is about a lot more than a Creative Director’s definition of creativity. It’s very much about speed, authenticity, information, accessibility and a host of other factors.

Neil Parker,writing in Fast Company, notes that it’s “a truism that making a brand succeed today requires a bazaar-like variety of skills, that go way beyond strategizing, copywriting and art directing. You need product development, coding, social, customer service design, internal culture transformation and a raft of other crafts… Which means the industry has a problem in its structure, not just its name.”

In the forest of the internet, is your opinion heard if you don’t put a name to it?

by Anton Crone (@antoncrone) In the forest of the internet, is your opinion heard if you don’t put a name to it? I’ve wondered about this after a spate of opinion pieces regarding the relevance of the Loerie Awards on Bizcommunity and Marklives. These are two valuable forums where industry folk put their names and faces to often staunch opinions, yet they are often challenged by faceless people who hide behind pseudonyms.

I regularly visit 10and5, arguably the most popular showcase for South African advertising and design. Here, people willingly, and bravely, attach their names to the work displayed then wait for the onslaught of opinion, mostly from people who hide behind pseudonyms.

In a forum on 10and5 a short while ago, after a particularly scathing attack, I challenged the convention of using pseudonyms. Some supported this, others not, and the prevailing sentiments were that anonymity ensures a negative opinion does not reflect badly on that person thereby ruining their chances of getting ahead in the industry; that more traffic is driven to the website if people are able to comment anonymously and that the more freedom there is to comment the better we can gauge general opinion.

Are you a Loerie Fash Ho?

by Louise Marsland (@louise_marsland) One of the things about the creative industry is the fact that if you say ‘black tie’ on an invitation, the only people who will pitch in full evening dress are the clients.

Everyone else will try out do each other in subverting the dress code and making a creative fashion statement.

People attend Loeries for the work, the awards, the parties and also to be seen rocking a statement outfit or being as ‘anti-establishment’ as possible by going against the grain.

I remember the first time The Loerie Awards, which had become a six-hour ordeal interspersed with M-Net continuity announcers, went to two awards evenings the first time at Sun City to try get the length of the evening down by splitting the awards into two nights.

In protest, one top creative, can’t remember who, went shirtless the first night, only wearing trousers and shoes and socks, and the next night pitched in his underpants with a shirt, tie and jacket on.