by Herman Manson (@marklives) Who is the most admired ad agency, creative director, or agency boss in the country? MarkLives asked South Africa’s ad agency MDs and CEOs to nominate their peers whom they most admired during the course of 2012.
Category archives: Marketing
Shelf Life with Louise Marsland: Lancôme gets animated with designer Alber Elbaz
Louise Marsland’s (@Louise_Marsland) pick of new product, packaging and design launches.
Sustainable packaging trends, Lancôme gets animated with designer Alber Elbaz and CID goes to the wall for Wiesenhof, while we discover some eco-friendly kids toys.
Mercedes-Benz and the knee-jerk, out-of-date, pointless strategy of pandering to young people
by Bob Hoffman (@adcontrarian), San Francisco Bay Earlier this week I wrote about teaser ads and why I hate them. As an example, I used a new Mercedes-Benz teaser campaign.
But there’s a lot more wrong with Mercedes’ strategy than just tossing money away on teasers. According to an article appearing this week in Marketing Daily, their new campaign…
“…is clearly intended for a younger, if daring driver — one who wants entrance to the premium segment…
‘The CLA lets us open Mercedes-Benz to a totally new audience,’ says (their VP Marketing) ‘It’s our new gateway car; it’s a very seductive design, very sporty and aggressive, and it’s for a younger audience…’
He adds that the automaker is reaching out to 30- to-40-year-olds…”
We’ve all read a version of this same blather every year forever. Every car manufacturer, every year, introduces some new products and makes a big hoo-ha about how their new models are more youthful and more aimed at attracting a younger buyer.
The question is this: Why?
Data mapping puts paid to marketing in the dark
by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) I went to a very interesting presentation of research last week by World Wide Worx’s Arthur Goldstuck and the MapIT MD, Etienne Louw, into data mapping and how many SA companies are doing it and for what reasons (mostly vehicle tracking).
So it was slightly out of my field of coverage but Arthur’s research is always interesting so off I went.
It struck me during the presentation that there is the germ of something very interesting going on in marketing today – and more companies should be using it.
Just as millions of online publishers throughout the world – like me – can study Google analytics (in real time, nog al) and see exactly how many people are hitting one’s site, which pages they are reading, what devices they are using and where they are coming from (e.g. Twitter or Facebook or Google searches), so can marketers, media planners and advertisers use digital mapping to analyse exactly how many people – and of which LSM profiles – are seeing their ads in print campaigns.
Louw told us (munching breakfast with a crew of amiable geeks in a function room at the Nellie in Cape Town) that MapIT – which is owned by Times Media Group and TomTom – did an analysis recently for a company of an ad campaign in a knock-and-drop newspaper. What MapIT did was overlay the newspaper’s delivery area with census and LSM stats (as I understood it).
Agency Leaders: 2012’s most-admired ad agency in Joburg
by Herman Manson (@marklives) Yesterday, we kicked off our poll results in Cape Town and today it is the turn of Johannesburg ad execs to tell us whom they most admired on the Jozi ad scene in 2012. Results for our overall national poll runs on Jan 23. We sent nomination forms to 54 agency CEOs or MDs from ad agencies in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban. We received 34 responses.
Shelf Life with Louise Marsland
Louise Marsland’s (@Louise_Marsland) pick of new product, packaging and design launches.
Zoom Advertising does some navel gazing and decides to go proudly-ZA; McNab’s foodbars redesign to keep in touch with their African roots – and spices; a host of new product launches left over from 2012; and our first packaging fail for the new year…
Is “The Like’s” 15 Minutes Up?
by Bob Hoffman (@adcontrarian), San Francisco Bay The half-life of online marketing miracles is notoriously short.
Is it possible that “the like” is about to join the podcast, the widget, and the QR code in the Museum Of Make-Believe Marketing Miracles?
It sure seems that way. There has been a whole lot of chatter lately about the dubious value of likes. While this chatter is about 2 years overdue, I guess it’s better than never.
First, Business Insider had a piece recently about Facebook’s new Giraffe Search. It was called, “Graph Search Is Really A Plan To Rescue The Like.”
They said that Facebook introduced Giraffe Searchbecause “recently it (the like) has fallen out of favor with advertisers.”
Next a blogger, engineer, and entrepreneur named Steve Cheney called the like a “con.” He went on to say that in the case of almost half the Facebook likes “there is no true affinity between the like and the object” and, in fact, most likes were bought by bribes.
Green Sky Thinking: A quick guide to 10 trends in sustainability
by Colwyn Elder (@colwynelder) It’s that time again; time for old year round-ups and wrap-ups followed by new year forecasts and resolutions. Following are 10 trends in sustainability that we can expect to be guided by throughout 2013.
Pitch consultant and proud of it!
by John Little. I write this in response to an article published on January 8, under the hand of Odette van der Haar, ACA CEO: “The rise of ‘independent pitch consultants’ and how to deal with them”.
FNB’s You can help – the ad campaign with democratic tendencies
A social contract exists between civil society and business that demands of business to engage with communities on issues relevant to them. Conveniently, business often ignores this contract, preferring to stay close to the politically connected, avoiding ‘hard’ issues and offering little more than sport sponsorships as their part of the bargain.
Faced with the abusive vitriol aimed at even the mildest critics of government performance it’s hard to blame corporate SA from shrugging off its responsibility to actively and publicly engage with civil society on issues of national importance including government performance.
Those too young to vote are already eyeing the difficult and real issues they will inherit from their elders. They need to be heard, now, even if what they have to say to the generation in charge is not what that generation wants to hear.
There is power here. It belongs not to the ruling party, or to big business, but to the emerging political activism of a generation born free. Their day is coming. FNB simply acknowledges this.