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Media Future: Tablet war erupts with choice

A quality low-end tablet from ASUS and the imminent arrival of Sony’s flagship Tablet Z brings compelling new choices to the market, writes Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee).

The war for the South African tablet market took a new turn last week with the unveiling of two major new contendors.

On Wednesday night, Taipei-based ASUS made their biggest foray yet into this market, unveiling not only a compelling new tablet, but also announcing distribution and marketing partnerships that signal its intentions as loudly as do its devices.

To start with, it officially launched the ASUS Fonepad, a 7” tablet designed to be used as much for apps as for making voice and video calls. Yes, you do look silly holding a 7” tablet to your ear, but ASUS has spotted a trend that silly-watchers missed: younger users are increasingly using their tablets for communication, and that communication is increasingly visual.

It means not only that they are more open to video calls than the older generation, but also that they like to look at their device and continue playing with it while making voice calls. And because music is such an integral element of the way a younger user engages with a tablet, headphones are standard gear.

The Sell: Shopper data — a ‘blockbuster’ debate between Minority Report and Zero Dark Thirty

by Mimi Nicklin (@miminicklin) I don’t know about you but I find it very irritating every time I read a newspaper article or report that quotes the Tom Cruise film, Minority Report, as a reference to how ‘psychic’ we are becoming when it comes to shopper data analysis.

Native Advertising: Traditional Advertising Online

Mashable recently asked the question, “Is Native Advertising Just Another Term For Good Advertising?” The answer is no, not quite.

From what I can tell, native advertising is a horrible and misleading term that is being used to describe something that may actually turn out to be a good idea — the application of traditional advertising principles to online advertising. Let me explain.

Online advertising was supposed to be interactive. It was supposed to rescue us from having to force people into looking at our ads. Consumers were going to want to interact with us, they were going to want to have conversations with marketers, they were going to want to have relationships with brands.

It was all fantasies and delusions based on naive interpretations of consumer behavior by people who had a whole lot of ideological commitment to the web, and very little experience with real world marketing.

Now we’ve learned that, for the most part, consumers want no part of interacting with online advertising. What we are calling “native advertising” is a recent reaction to this realization and to the very disappointing history of online advertising, particularly banner advertising.

Nobody seems quite sure what they mean by native advertising. But I think I know what they mean. They don’t know it yet, but they mean using traditional advertising strategy on the web.

Your obsession with pandering to 18-34 year-olds is decades out of date

by Bob Hoffman (@adcontrarian), San Francisco Bay One of the enduring absurdities of the marketing and advertising industries is the old wives’ tale that “people over 50 want to be like young people.”

Ask any brain-dead CMO of a car company why the people who inhabit his commercials are all young, when 18-24 year-olds buy 1% of all new cars, and you’ll get some version of that idiocy.

It’s what passes for “strategic thinking” in the Golden Age of Marketing Brilliance.

Yeah, I was having coffee with Jerry Seinfeld, Meryl Streep and Barack Obama the other day and they were telling me how much they aspire to be like the morons in Taco Bell and Coors Light commercials.

Online Advertisers Getting Hosed

by Bob Hoffman (@adcontrarian), San Francisco Bay Here at Ad Contrarian Worldwide Headquarters, one of our axioms is that there is no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he’s missing a trend.

We’re starting to think that the same can be said of the entire advertising industry.

Our industry has been desperately trying to convince itself that the web is a fabulous advertising medium. We share each others’ anecdotes about the handful of meager successes (amid the thousands of failures.) We go to conferences and listen to case histories that are two standard deviations from normal and try to convince ourselves that they are typical.

But we can’t erase the facts. And the facts are dismaying.

Click-through rates are abysmal. The odds of breaking through on YouTube are in the million-to-one range. Facebook is a big fat turd that seems to have a new ad scheme every week. QR codes are a cruel joke. Content and social media are sounding more like religion, and less like business.

And now we’re starting to get a peek at massive advertising frauds being perpetrated on the web.

Fake followers are the greatest invention since inflatable girlfriends

by Bob Hoffman. Apparently, the market for fake Twitter followers is exploding.

News24′s leap into Kenya and Nigeria

by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) Type in www.news24.co.ke to your browser or www.news24.com.ng and you get a site that looks familiar to the South African eye: it has the colour palette and lay-out of our biggest news portal, News24, but look a bit closer and you see the content is different: about Kenya and Nigeria respectively.

These two sites are, in fact, News24’s great big leap into Africa although they have started modestly and without much fanfare so that they can learn about the two markets that are so different to South Africa’s.

You might also have noticed an isiZulu News24 (that you can go to from the English-language portal) and you get the picture: News24 – which so dominates the breaking-news scene in SA – is on the march, which is interesting considering that Iqbal Surve, Independent Newspaper’s proprietor-in-waiting, has also mentioned Africa and the vernacular markets as key growth areas.

Grubstreet spoke to News24 editor-in-chief Jannie Momberg, who is overseeing the move.

Media Future: Samsung’s long shadow over Apple

Lurking behind Apple’s share-price woes is the manner in which the Samsung Galaxy S4 further eclipses the iPhone 5, writes Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee).

This past week, when Apple reported its first drop in profit growth in a decade, much was made of the fact that the market was punishing it unduly harshly. Descending from a $700 high in September 2012 to a bumpy ride along a $400 floor in April 2013, it is hard to believe it’s the same Apple.

Yet, the company reported record iPad sales, up to 19,5-million in the second quarter of last year, from 11,8-million for the equivalent period last year. iPhone sales were also not too shabby, up from 35,1-million to 37,4-million. Analysts were unanimous that Apple was being punished because its pace of innovation had slowed, and there were no killer products on the horizon to follow in the market-shfting footsteps of the iPod, iPhone and iPad.

There is a more fundamental force at work, however, and that is called competition. When Steve Jobs presided over the launch of the iPhone 4 in 2010, Apple was so far ahead of other manufacturers, its fans could not even countenance the idea of anyone catching up.

Just two years later, when it launched the iPhone 5, it was fighting a rearguard action against the new front-runner. Samsung had released its groundbreaking Galaxy S3 in May 2012, giving it a six-month head start over the new iPhone. And even then, Apple produced a device that did not match up to the S3.

Media Future: The coming to SA of the Big 4 flagship phones

Four major new phones are about to be released in South Africa. Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee) highlights the key differentiators in the devices from Samsung, Sony, HTC and BlackBerry.

By the end of this month, South Africans will have the most dazzling choice of high-end flagship phones yet seen in this country. The launch of the Samsung Galaxy S4 on April 25 will be the most high-profile, but it won’t be the only game in town.

And there will be very few surprises. The phones in question have all been officially announced, and their features trumpeted at length.

The big new contendors, along with the S4, are the Sony Xperia Z, the HTC One and the BlackBerry Q10. Time spent with prototypes or release versions of each of these does not, unfortunately, translate into being spoilt for choice; rather, it raises the bar on the confusion factor.