by Louise Marsland. Durex makes a social statement; trusty old Weet-Bix undergoes a youthful makeover; Nike launches a designer collection; and an international design competition for designers with baggage.
Category archives: Media
Media24’s Afrikaans newspapers announce paywall, digital first strategy
by Herman Manson. Soon readers of the three Media24 Afrikaans language daily newspapers Die Burger, Beeld and Volksblad, will have to pay for the privilege to read news in their home language.
Smile 90.4fm aims to shake up Cape Town radio market
by Gill Moodie. Last week Smile 90.4 fm – Cape Town’s new FM radio station – started broadcasting.
Media laughs on April Fools
by Herman Manson (@marklives) April 1, a day in which the mainstream media plays tricks on readers by publishing/broadcasting stories that ranges from the plausible but untrue to the improbable, and disguises fiction as news, is always an interesting alternative measure of media zeitgeist. Of course, post WMD and the Iraq war and Rupert Murdoch’s incarnation of The Galactic Empire, the more cynical amongst us could be excused for feeling many news days offer little more than Ground Hog Day meeting April Fools.
So what are on the media’s radar this year? Oscar Pistorius and North Korea, increasingly desperate measures by the treasury to dig into your pocket as the political class empty out the cookie jar and technology and its impact on language/habits/life all made an appearance. Julius Malema, deposed from his soapbox and stripped of his assets, was less fun to make fun off, although Times Live gave it a shot.
Here are some April Fools highlights from around the web.
The Ad Contrarian on in the murky world of online “ghost publishers”
by Bob Hoffman (@adcontrarian), San Francisco Bay I have to admit that I get a great deal of deliciously perverse pleasure from reading reports that online ad hustlers are picking the pockets of marketing morons and their clueless but oh-so-fashionable agencies.
Apparently there’s a lot of hanky-panky going on in the “murky” world of online ad exchanges. An article in Adweek last week had this to say…
“Indeed, while the Web has never been short of tricksters…a new breed of cheat is fast becoming a plague in the exchange world: the ghost publisher…very little of these sites’ audiences are real people. Yet big name advertisers are spending millions trying to reach engaged users on these properties.”
Inflation Watch figures show the march of DStv in ad wars
by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) The big story of the recently released Inflation Watch figures from Ibis Media Data Services for 2012 is the march of Naspers’ pay-TV giant DStv.
The media inflation figures – that measure the cost of reaching consumers by buying adverts in the media – go out to Ibis’ subscribers, which are mostly in the advertising and marketing industries. The data includes media delivery (performance in terms of print circulation, radio listenership and TV viewership) and value (the “Media Inflation Watch” or “MIW”, that is, performance versus the ad rates).
The recent figures compare those of 2012 to that of the previous year, 2011.
Bearing in mind that new weighting measures were introduced to RAMS and TAMS (that measure radio and television audiences) in the third quarter of 2011 so that the only real trend measure for these sectors is the Rate Index rather than the performance-linked MIW, Ibis said that television ad rates were up by 1.82% .
The growing digital footprint of Huisgenoot, YOU and Drum
by Herman Manson (@marklives) In the world of print publishing the three sister magazines of Huisgenoot, YOU and Drum make for a formidable powerhouse – they are the three biggest circulating consumer magazines in the country.
Until recently that offline brand and circulation power hasn’t been effectively utilised online, but it’s changing, and quickly, according to Wilmer Müller, Head of Digital at Huisgenoot, YOU and Drum.
The three brands started rolling out digital strategies at the beginning of 2010 and soon found success on Facebook, especially in the case of Huisgenoot, whose community of Afrikaans speaking readers were looking for a safe online space in which to engage with one another in their home language. . Growth has been organic says Müller and on Facebook the number of Huisgenoot fans currently stands at over 205 000.
The Facebook presence of Drum is growing at the same breakneck pace as that of Huisgenoot in 2010, but Twitter has really been its success story, as the channel is well suited for breaking news on black celebrity culture – a key point of interest to Drum readers.
Talking of Twitter, Huisgenoot hasn’t seen as much success here as on Facebook. Müller suggests that this is due to slower take-up amongst Afrikaans speakers – English seems to be the default language South Africans use on Twitter. The Oscar Pistorius story, first broken on Twitter by Beeld, has changed this, and Huisgenoot has seen a substantial take-up of its various social media platforms, including Twitter, over the past two months. This was mostly tied to the Pistorius story, says Müller.
YOU has been tougher to grow digitally since it competes with a wider range of English language sites, many of them international, but its numbers are far from insubstantial.
The boring BIC pen turns into a cover model
MarkLives.com runs a regular slot featuring the best local and international magazine covers every week. We recognise well thought out, powerful and interesting (and hopefully all three in one) magazine covers and celebrate the mix of pragmatism, creativity and personal taste that created each of them.
Highbury Safika on Ramsay, SA Sports Illustrated and more
by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) Highbury Safika Media is a publisher that flies largely under the radar.
Sure, we’ve all heard about controversial rugby writer Mark Keohane – who resigned from Highbury last year – and of it’s most high-profile consumer magazine, SA Rugby, but although it’s a similar-sized company to Associated Media and RamsayMedia we don’t know too much about it. This is probably because a lot of what it does is custom publishing such as for the Foschini Group.
However, the Cape Town-based company was in the news recently when MarkLives revealed that Highbury and Ramsay – the publishers of Car, Getaway and Popular Mechanics – were in merger talks last month.
This month Highbury CEO Kevin Ferguson told Grubstreet the talks were off (and he confirmed it again this week after Ramsay said the talks were still on the table).
He also told Grubstreet why the company was happy to have a low profile, why it’s taken so long to launch a website for SA Rugby and why he thinks Media24’s Sports Illustrated could have avoided shutting up shop.
Tim du Plessis on how the JSE rule change is hitting Sake24 hard
We’re only just more than two months into the year and we are already seeing the effects of the change to the JSE rule governing the publishing of financial notices.
BDFM’s Business Day completed a round of voluntary retrenchments in January in which 32 people took packages from editorial, sales and marketing while Tim du Plessis, head of Media24’s Afrikaans newspapers, told Grubstreet recently that Sake24 has reduced its editorial positions from 33 budgeted jobs to 24, effective from April 1, through a combination of retrenchment and scrapping of vacancies and transferrals.
“We’re adjusting as it’s a small team but, you know, business news in Afrikaans is important to quite a lot of our readers,” Du Plessis said. “Readers in Jo’burg and Cape Town don’t pick up Beeld and Die Burger to read business news in the same way that people don’t pick up Business Day to read sports news. But it’s important. They want it there and it’s got to be well presented.”