by Kim Penstone Creating empathy for a man such as Robert Mugabe is no easy feat. But that was the task put to Dean Blumberg by agency Black River FC and client Nando’s.
Category archives: Marketing
NoMU steals foodie hearts
by Herman Manson (@marklives) Paul Raphaely promises hot chocolate on a rather dreary morning at the NoMU offices in an industrial park somewhere near Cape Town International. It’s good stuff too, but the offices and factory floor are pretty spotless, which is disappointing after another editor promised me these guys could spend all day licking chocolate dust off their office desks, as she fully intended to do should they ever make her an impossible to say no to offer of employment.
The business is just starting to put a tough couple years behind it, says Raphaely, with the Great Recession and market instability in the US and Europe seeing exports collapse from 86% of its business 2010 to 14% today. It had lost 16 export markets after huge initial success in getting its products on international shelves in what Raphaely describes as ‘a helluva shock.’ At one stage NoMU was exporting to 38 international markets.
NoMU is owner managed by Raphaely and his business partner and wife Tracy Foulkes. Foulkes had run her own catering business back in 2000 and had started to develop products for a deli she wanted to open. Raphaely, then a brand manager at Seagram SA for Captain Morgan Dark Rum and Glen Grant Whisky, left his job to assist then girlfriend Foulkes in her new business.
NoMU of course sounds like ‘No-Moo’ – something Raphaely hoped would appeal to then vegetarian Foulkes as a brand name, and it evolved to ‘NoMOO’ and then ‘NoMU.’ Geddit? No meat = no cow = ‘No-Moo’(it’s their story and they are sticking to it).
TheRoom promises strategic insight on digital
A new event concept has arrived in South Africa through the efforts of Nicola Staines, a Brit with over 12 years experience in the online and marketing industries. Staines, who worked on brands such as Microsoft, Vanguard Rental, Disney and O2, is launching TheRoom into the South African market based on the successful Econsultancy Digital Cream events.
Designed to facilitate face-to-face communication between high-level executives, allowing them to interact with their peers and discuss issues and share learning relevant to their sector, TheRoom gets to picks the delegates, while sponsors pick up the tab.
The first event takes place January 29 at Waterkloof (WC) while the second takes place January 31 at Turbine Hall in Gauteng.
New Durban agency launched by three ex-TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris staffers doing well
by Herman Manson. A new Durban based agency, Conversation LAB, launched August 1 after three TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris staffers broke away to go it alone, has successfully been picking up significant new business.
Triumph Of The Anti-Language
by Bob Hoffman (@adcontrarian) There is a talk I give to groups from time to time called “The Golden Age Of Bullsh*t.”
The talk has a few basic themes. One of which is that we are living in an age in which business bullsh*t artists have invented an anti-language. Its objective is to confuse rather than clarify. This is the opposite of what language is supposed to do.
Yesterday I received an email from from Oracle. The headline said:
Architecting Business Continuity Essentials for Enterprise Applications
Eager to find out how my enterprise applications could be architected for business continuity I read on.
I learned that I could…
Facilitate capacity planning and performance tuning. And effectively consolidate and virtualize enterprise application environments.
All I can say is, if you’ve never virtualized your enterprise application environment, dude it’s awesome.
Louise Marsland & MarkLives launches TREND.
MarkLives and well respected marketing and media commentator and editor Louise Marsland have teamed up to launch an exciting new market intelligence resource to the advertising, media and marketing communications industry in Southern Africa.
TREND. brings together the research savvy of Marsland with MarkLives’ cool and sexy take on the modern advertising world. TREND. launched this morning at trendlives.info and will focus on trend forecasting, in-depth reports, insight and analysis relevant to the broader marketing industry.
The site will serve as a central curated resource for local and international marketing and media research as well as create its own unique in-depth reports that sources and charts influential modern trends marketers and their agencies need to note.
As with MarkLives, TREND. will will offer its content free of charge, and will be supported by site and report sponsors. Ornico, Quirk, Machine Agency, 60layersofcake Cape Town and John Brown Media are the founding landing page sponsors for the site.
The first in-depth Dissect report to be published on TREND. focuses on socialising the enterprise. Compiled by Marsland and sponsored by Quirk, the report, which runs to over 11 000 words, sets forth the effects of a socialised consumer base on the modern enterprise. Content is broken in readily digestible pieces for the busy executive.
Social media is not about a suite of social networks and tools writes Marsland. “It is now about the social enterprise, the brand that integrates social across all platforms of engagement. It is about living social.”
Clueless professors on Pepsi Refresh. What the hell are they teaching?
by Bob Hoffman (@adcontrarian) There was a piece in Ad Age last week featuring the astoundingly clueless opinions of marketing and business professors on the subject of the Pepsi Refresh project.
The amazing thing is that these people weren’t from Southwest Arkansas State. These guys were from Harvard, Columbia, Dartmouth, Penn and Notre Dame.
It makes it clear why so many young people in advertising are confused about what they’re supposed to be doing. And just how out of touch these experts are.
Before we take a look at the comments, let’s review the facts:
In 2010, Pepsi diverted scores of millions of dollars from traditional advertising (including their Super Bowl sponsorship and their traditional TV advertising) into a massive social media project.
After one year of this, they had lost 5% of their business.
Their sales dropped by an estimated half a billion dollars.
They fell from their traditional 2nd place in the soft drink category to 3rd place.
Their sales erosion increased widely compared to the previous year
Their beverage ceo was so upset he said he was going to “blow up the place.”
To this day, they are still suffering from this debacle
Many of the key players are now gone from Pepsi
After burning astronomical amounts of money on this, Pepsi finally killed it in March.
If that doesn’t describe a complete marketing disaster, I don’t know what does. So what do the academics have to say about Refresh?
Crowdsourced recruitment hits adland as Hiring Bounty teams up with MarkLives
Agencies and marketing departments now have access to innovative crowd sourcing recruitment platform Hiring Bounty through its partnership agreement with MarkLives.com Careers.
Hiring Bounty taps into networks of friends to bypass recruitment agents and crowd-source candidates for positions in the marketing and technology industries. The sites gives a cut of the recruitment ‘bounty’ set by employers to those recommending successful candidates as well as the candidates themselves.
It incentivises friends who already know the skill sets of one another as well as important considerations such as culture fit and personality to recommend friends for jobs. It also incentivises candidates to throw their hat into the ring, since there is a cash pay-out for both themselves and their friends, should theirs be the successful application.
The service has already successfully landed hard to find candidates for companies such as Woolworths, Urbian and World Wide Creative.
MarkLives was the first to report the news of the recruitment start-up in June, and is pleased to be associated with a category disruptor. Here Greg Schneider, MD of Hiring Bounty, describes the business model and some of the success it’s achieved since its launch.
Google Is Blackmail
by Bob Hoffman (@adcontrarian) The way I see it, Google is a brilliantly executed extortion racket.
The key concept to understand is that Google makes its money through misdirection.
They get nothing for directing you to the most accurate search result. They get paid to artfully direct you away from the most accurate search result.
Natural (free) search takes you to the most likely thing you’re searching for, according to their algorithms. Paid search takes you to the person who was willing to pay the most for the term you are searching. It is misdirection.
They are very clever about this. If the misdirection is too obvious or egregious, you’ll lose confidence in them and search elsewhere. They walk a fine line, and are careful about just how much misdirection is acceptable.
With BDLive Business Day hopes to save its bacon
by Herman Manson (@marklives) Business Day recently shifted gear to relaunch as a ‘digital first’ news product rather than just the printed newspaper it’s been bargaining on to keep the brand afloat. It’s a strategy that’s long overdue and hopes to mimic some of the digital success achieved by the Financial Times (Pearson, owner of FT, also has a stake in BDFM which publishes Business Day).
The print product really had no choice but to reinvent itself as it and other business publications face the loss of revenue from financial notices by JSE listed companies – these notices, described by critics as a forced ‘subsidy’ for print business media, is set to fall away after changes to regulations by the JSE. The industry is expected to lose a significant percentage of the estimated R200m currently spent on these notices annually.
Advertising revenue has also started shifting towards digital environments in line with developments in other economies.
Bronwen Auret, GM: BDFM Digital, agrees that those in the business of business news face challenges but she is also excited about the opportunities the new digital centric model will afford the company.
Newspapers are the least sexy media right now, say Aurent, and where to from (for now still) profitable print have been a predicament for most newspaper proprietors given the high cost of bandwidth and slower Internet uptake by the South African market.
With the uptick in usage of online and mobile thanks to more competitive pricing and competition by mobile data providers the market is shifting and the introduction of apps has made South Africans more familiar and comfortable with ecommerce.