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Springleap – design crowd with marketing muscle

How do you turn a T-shirt company into a powerful marketing play? You provide access to your pool of 17 000 designers to brands needing beautiful and relevant content (through design) and utilise your social media skills and significant global crowd source loving fan base of course.

That’s just what Eran Eyal and his team at Springleap.com has been doing and so far the results have been positive.

The Springleap team has been proving their concept using the best possible case study – themselves – having grown Facebook their fan base 6000 to 193 000 in less than a year (it’s now closing in on the 200k mark). Eyal says at one stage he was testing 600 different Facebook ads to figure out best practice and what achieves the most success.

At its core sits 17 000 designers who submit designs to Springleap.com – these designs are then voted on by its community and as many friends as the designers can pull through their own networks to the site. The winners receive a cash prize and royalties from the resulting product, usually a T-shirt. Sales are handled by Springleap. Eyal looked at this talent pool and their social pull and realised it could be a powerful asset to activate design and brand fans.

Weekly Top 10: Fastest rising search terms from South Africans on Google

With the help of Google Insights for Research we are publishing the top 10 searched for phrases (minus the sexy stuff of course) by South Africans on Google over the previous seven days. Kaizer Chiefs manager Bobby Motaung and the Mbombela Stadium fraud case was of obvious interest to South Africans. Also in the news were the Lonmin strike and shooting of mine workers by police and ongoing student protests at Tshwane University of Technology (TUT). (For past data click here)

E-retail: Local brand activity marks a shift in how clothes are sold online

by Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee). The arrival of a Mr Price shopping cart on both Web and mobile sites, and new initiatives by Edcon and eBucks, mark a shift in how clothes are sold online.

For much of the past decade, online clothing retail in South Africa has seemed like the toddler party that the big kids avoided. Start-ups, newcomers and unknowns dominated, while the established brands either stayed away or made only a grudging appearance.

Edgars had a web site with a shopping cart, but it was more of an apology than a serious online store. The likes of Stuttafords, Truworths, Jet, Foschini and Mr Price were entirely absent from e-commerce.

Recently, in one week, three major brands have come to the party, and getting dressed will never be the same again.

The biggest splash was made by the chain that is increasingly positioning itself as cool and go-ahead: Mr Price. Even their new web site address reflects that image: MrP.co.za. It claims 18 000 items in its catalogue, and allows customers to choose by size, colour, brand and … trend. Delivery choice is wide, from home to Post Office to nearest store.

Payment option is even wider, including credit card, COD, gift vouchers and account. More important, returns are allowed within 30 days, via store, Post Office or courier.

Probably the single most important option in all of the MrP bouquet, however, is it’s mobile site. It uses a web development standard called HTML 5, which allows the site to look the same on any phone browser, regardless of model. But the real killer app, so to speak, is not the mere fact that it can be used on a phone: it is that it looks great on a phone. It appears inviting, and that is the first step in convincing potential customers to become paying customers.

Digital spend jumps from 1-2% to 10-15% of SA media budgets

by Herman Manson (@marklives) The online media planning space is moving at a hectic pace – where else can you can lose two big spending clients close together and still plan for 100% growth over the next two years? Lighthouse Digital, the media agency launched only three years ago, has grown from 4 to 26 people, and has been doubling its revenue every year since then.

Aaron Van Schaik, Managing Director at Lighthouse Digital, estimates the value of SA’s digital advertising spend at around R1.2 billion – Aaron Van Schaikbetween 40-50% of that is spent on search. Google doesn’t release its figures for the South African market making it difficult to be sure of exact actual spend. But growth has been rapid with spend jumping from 1-2% of media budgets a year ago to between 10-15% today*.

Van Schaik attributes this growth to marketers realising the value digital media represents as well as directives form international parent companies asking local operations to shift budgets online.

Weekly Top 10: Fastest rising search terms from South Africans on Google

With the help of Google Insights for Research we are publishing the top 10 searched for phrases (minus the sexy stuff of course) by South Africans on Google over the previous seven days. A look at the fastest rising searches show the weather was top of mind for most South Africans as snow and heavy rain blanketed the country. The Olympics featured with searches for Caster Semenya and Usain Bolt quickly gathering pace.

Brands require domain strategy for new gTLD names

Mike Silber, a Director at ICANN, says brands who have not participated in the current round of applications have been pressing to get clarity on further opportunities to apply for new gTLDs.

New generic top level domains hold dangers for brands, democratisation of Internet

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body responsible for the Internet’s naming system, is working its way through nearly two thousand applications for New Generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) names.

Demystifying the CTR vs. CPA debate

MarkLives asked Michelle Pearman, a media planner at Digivox, to discuss what determines a successful online media campaign. Here Pearman tries to demystify several metrics used for measuring the success of your online campaign and weighs which one brings you closer to meeting your marketing objectives.

Have a question about digital marketing? Email or Tweet it to us and we will go looking for answers!

In a world of measurable marketing initiatives, what exactly constitutes a successful campaign? You design a great ad. People click on it. Objective met? Unlikely.

CTR (Click-Through-Rate) has been considered the benchmark for many years surrounded by debates on what constitutes a good CTR. Is this a discussion worth having?

If the objective is to sell tickets to an event, wouldn’t you care more about how many tickets you sold, and what the return on investment on your marketing buck is?

IOL deal helped transform Primedia Online as turnover jumps 38%

by Herman Manson (@marklives) Primedia Online is evolving from an online publisher with a sales capacity into a major online sales house following its partnership with Independent Newspapers to take over the sales function of its online properties held in IOL at the start of the year.

The company absorbed the online sales team of IOL and its impact on revenues and the company has been significant says Primedia Online CEO Tanja Lategan.

Lategan has been spending the past year consolidating the business after taking over from Nikki Cockcroft. Sales and traffic staff have been moved into a single space – Lategan says although they have traditionally been seen as two teams their goals are closely aligned in terms of delivering returns to clients. Incentives have been aligned for both teams as has work schedules (same incentive means same overtime when required). Turnover has jumped 38%.

South African mobile media market to hit a R1 billion this year

M&C Saatchi Mobile, the full service mobile agency that is part of the M&C Saatchi network, has launched in South Africa in co-operation with M&C Saatchi Abel. M&C Saatchi Mobile will operate from Cape Town and Johannesburg as part of a network of offices stretching from London, New York and LA to Paris.

The SA operations will be lead by Zeyad Davids – Managing Partner, Digital at M&C Saatchi Abel.

Zeyad Davids, Managing Director, M&C Saatchi Mobile South Africa, Tracy Burger, Mobile Business Consultant and James Hilton, Global CEO M&C Saatchi Mobile

Davids says the mobile media market in South Africa will be worth a R1 billion a year by the end of 2012 with annual growth of between 40-50% annually through to 2016.