During covid-19, businesses and people alike have been experiencing change unlike ever before. The great pandemic has revealed that huge organisations and states could transform in days. Calls for change are only intensifying as civic movements seize on the truism that, if industry can change for a disease, why not for social justice? Or climate change, or to save the world?
The #TransformersTransform2020 playbook investigates:
The rewards of change and digital maturity
Insights into the global gender gap, and what to do about it
Why capitalists are having a mea culpa moment
Research that shows why transformed businesses are more resilient and creative
How the MAC sector is performing on its transformation scorecard
How big consultants are threatening revenues in the marketing sector
What attributes are critical to getting #futurefit
The attitudes leaders need to embrace to transform.
From June until September 2020, MarkLives and HumanInsight produced a “Transformers Transform 2020” special series that was sponsored by the Association for Communication and Advertising (ACA). The objective of this independently managed, journalism-driven research project was to explore and map new paths for brands and marketers to transform, adapt and build resilience while the world adapts to covid-19 and its resultant social, political and economic toll. The archive of stories is available here, the video interviews on YouTube and Facebook, and the downloadable #TransformersTransform2020 playbook here.
Downloand the #TransformersTransform2020 playbook now!
This research-packed primer on transformation leans on learnings and insights from the writings of or interviews with:
Covid-19 has accelerated change, and the defining message is that everyone must get on board. Globally, business leaders now accept that transformation is a democratising project driven by people and processes to better the world for all. An act of hope and self-preservation in the face of overwhelming odds, transformation is now being understood as humanity’s opportunity for purposeful progress.
As an entrepreneur, Charlie Mathews (@CharlesLeeZA) has worked in growth teams with Naspers, Microsoft, and Tutuka.com (the global prepaid card company). Mathews has also successfully founded and exited two marketing companies. Published in Rolling Stone magazine, Guardian UK, and SA’s Greatest Entrepreneurs, edited by Moky Makura, Mathews wrote for Daily Maverick during the title’s legendary startup era. Today, Mathews is the founder and CEO of HumanInsight, a research, insights and learning company that helps brands better understand, and serve — humans.
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by Carey Finn (@carey_finn) When asked what they’re doing to prevent workplace harassment, creative agencies tend to point to carefully worded clauses in their policy books. This is clearly inadequate. To tackle harassment head on, broader structural changes with respect to culture, equality and access are needed —and urgently.
MarkLives has collected insights into global best practice on stamping out harassment in the agency workplace. The steps outlined here attempt to guide substantial change beyond contract clauses and paperwork in order to enable the cultural change we need to see happening inside the agency environment.
#1. HR needs overhaul
Deadra Rahaman, president of US-based agency Society Redefined, points out that, first and foremost, this means actually listening to and supporting women. “Too often, women are dismissed and not taken seriously when they bring issues to HR,” she says. “HR needs a complete overhaul. Adland seemed to escape accountability when #MeToo hit, and has been escaping diversity and equality for over 30 years now. Perhaps culture and equality [could be] its own department separate from HR, with a direct report to the CEO.”
Rahaman adds that offences need to be documented in better ways, suggesting the use of technology as part of the process. “I don’t have all the answers on what that looks like but I can see an app or a platform that not only includes sexual harassment violations but also a rating or grading system on other issues like racial or diversity and inclusion issues. This record can travel as talent moves from agency to agency.” It would certainly contain the practice of job-hopping when caught out — leaving one agency for another one/ a client — after harassment claims are lodged but before formal disciplinary action can be taken.
The need for change is immediate, emphasises Rahaman. “Due to the lack of diversity in the industry, when employees experience racism and microaggressions, there’s no place to go for support. We need to start having these uncomfortable conversations. We can no longer accept ‘we’re not there yet’ or ‘these things take time’. Change now is the only answer and action that is acceptable.”
#2. No more safe spaces for “brilliant jerks”
Amy Kean, UK-based director of brand and innovation for change consultancy &us, suggests taking a leaf from Netflix’s HR playbook and no longer tolerating “brilliant jerks”. These are staff members who may be excellent at their job but are also awful, arrogant, unhelpful and rude. “According to Netflix, teamwork is too important to let these guys (or gals) stick around,” says Kean. “Why is this relevant? Because most harassers are senior, stable and well-respected within a company, otherwise they wouldn’t risk harassing someone. They probably believe they are invincible.
“Years ago, high-profile sexual harassers within ad companies in places like the US and UK were sent overseas as punishment, the lives they’d ruined brushed under the carpet with a signed NDA. A sexual harasser is likely to be ‘brilliant’. The victim, more junior, and terrified. The process? Dense, humiliating, secretive, biased and heart-breaking.”
Kean would like to see agencies being “loud and proud” about a lack of tolerance towards this kind of behaviour. “We need to see more companies stating: you could be Einstein levels of genius, you could have made us billions, you could be the president, but we don’t care. You’ve broken the law and abused your position. Instead, there’s loopholes, exceptions, payoffs, twisted arms and blind eyes. Right now, adland values money more than the wellbeing of most of its workforce. Hopefully in the next few years, this will change.”
#3. Break those unspoken expectations
In South Africa, Mandisa Ngubane, Think Creative Africa group account director, urges agencies to tackle the issue of sexual harassment with the same vigour they possess when aiming for industry awards. Echoing Kean, Ngubane says that, if a person is found guilty of sexual harassment or predatory behaviour, they should be removed from the work environment. “They shouldn’t enjoy the protection of the agency just because they win awards or because they are good at their job,” she says.
Ngubane also calls for greater professionalism in the workplace. “From a culture perspective, the agency environment is a lot more relaxed than the traditional office space, and I think that can lead people to ‘forget’ that they are, in fact, in a professional environment,” she says. “I think there’s a problematic, unspoken expectation for women to not be ‘overly sensitive’ by accepting or playing along, so that they don’t get accused of killing the vibe ‘which is essential for creativity to flow’. There are ‘jokes’ that should not be permitted in the workplace; romantic relationships between people who are not at the same level of seniority should not be permitted or treated as just office gossip; and so on.”
Power harassment is another issue that needs to be addressed, says Ngubane. “Most advertising contracts have a clause stating that the nature of our industry demands that we sometimes work late; however, it seems working late and being on-call 24/7 has become an expectation, rather than an anomaly,” she says. “Just because you can WhatsApp an employee at 7pm does not mean you should; just because people [were] in lockdown does not mean it should [have been] standard procedure to work 12-hour days even on weekends. Employee mental wellness should be taken seriously.”
#4. Policy only as good as people implementing it
Angela Madlala, Ogilvy South Africa chief people officer, notes that any policy is only as good as the people implementing it. “It is critical that the right values are represented at a leadership level; we need to ensure our agency’s leaders embody the values of inclusivity and are pro-justice and trustworthy,” she says. “Employees also need to have confidence that concerns will be investigated and addressed quickly and efficiently.”
Adland, as a whole, needs to take a strong stance against harassment of all kinds, adds Madlala. “If a culture is committed to one of inclusivity, then any form of harassment or disrespect needs to be deemed as unacceptable —that includes sexual harassment, bullying or leveraging of power to influence,” she says. “As an industry, adland needs to be unequivocal in denouncing these behaviours and having more candid conversations about these topics.”
Let’s put an end to the boys’ clubs
Christina Knight, Sweden-based creative director of The Amazing Society, believes that tackling harassment requires a culture that is built on openness and trust, where all employees feel safe enough to speak up and speak out. “To obtain that type of culture, management on all levels needs to regularly and publicly address these issues with everyone at the agency present in the room, just as naturally as we talk about other ‘policies’, for example around [data protection], travel or parental leave,” she says. “And they need to be addressed and communicated before there is a possible occurrence of harassment.”
Knight adds that there needs to be absolute clarity on who to turn to, confidentially, if harassment does occur: “A plan of action needs to be set up immediately, to signal to the individual(s) in question as well as to the entire agency, that this constitutes intolerable behaviour and there will be repercussions.”
Furthermore, strong leadership is needed to change work environments and cultures, she says. “Generally, agencies are ‘boys’ clubs’ where certain behaviors and attitudes, traditionally labelled as male, have not only been tolerated but also admired and applauded,” she says, reflecting Ngubane’s sentiment. “This encourages a competitive, exclusive and aggressive culture, commonly difficult to combine with family life and kids, as hours tend to be long and irregular. In other words, agency cultures have not been very accommodating or welcoming to women and mothers, nor to people who do not wish to adhere to behaviours and attitudes characterised as typically ‘male’.
“To change agency cultures, leadership needs to change, to be diverse, inclusive and representative of the people who work at the agency. And the people working at the agency, in turn, need to mirror society itself.”
Carey Finn (@carey_finn) is a writer and editor with over decade and a half of industry experience, having covered everything from ethical sushi in Japan to the technicalities of roofing, agriculture, medical stuff and more. She’s also taught English and journalism, and dabbled in various other communications ventures along the way, including risk reporting. She is a contributing writer to MarkLives.com.
In 2018, MarkLives shone a #SPOTLIGHT on health and wellness in the ad and marketing industries. We continue in 2020 (and beyond), tackling workplace harassment in its various forms.
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by Herman Manson (@MarkLives)In spite of paper pledges to zero tolerance of sexual abuse and harassment in our industry, there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that suggests senior (mostly male) talent continues to enjoy protection from management.
The most-convenient way to resolve sexual harassment claims, it seems, if finally forced to do so by mulitple charges from several sources, is not in supporting those suffering the abuse or encouraging formal legal processes but to conveniently agree to mutual separation with the culprit, thus exporting said executive to a new, unsuspecting environment.
Appointing women MDs doesn’t seem to discourage this practice: they’re either not in the room; are overruled; or, at worst, they’re complicit. So, too, are the many decent male execs who wouldn’t normally tolerate such behaviour. But for all the hints at enforced silence — nobody will speak up until you do.
When these executives finally leave (in disgust), or are forced out (because they tried making waves), they are forced to sign non-disclosure agreements ensuring news of the underhanded events at their former agencies remains under wraps.
“It will hurt our careers”
You would think the tide for change, wrought by the global #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, would prove too powerful to be beaten back. You would be wrong. While investigating allegations against one industry executive, we interviewed a half-dozen executives at agencies owned by the same global network. Not a single executive didn’t know about the allegations, or thought them to be untrue. Yet not a single one would speak to us on the record, or escalate their own concerns through internal channels. The refrain — “it will hurt our career” — still echoes.
While we continue to seek the evidence that will ensure the story referenced above will be able to withstand the inevitable legal threats that would follow publication (and, trust us, we won’t stop looking), we, as an industry, need to acknowledge that things aren’t OK, and they won’t be any time soon, at least not while we pay lip service to addressing sexual harassment in our agencies and our networks.
As a start, we tasked journalist Carey Finn with offering a practical guide to addressing broader structural changes concerning culture, equality and access, and which we hope will encourage not only internal discussions on change but also critical questions on how current processes enable culprits to continue to move around unhindered inside our industry. One reference in her piece has stuck with me in particular: “[P]olicy is only as good as the people implementing it.”
It’s time to prove what you believe in. Don’t wait for South African adland’s Harvey Weinstein moment to act. We’ll all have your measure well before then.
Herman Manson (@MarkLives) is the founder and editor of MarkLives.com.
In 2018, MarkLives shone a #SPOTLIGHT on health and wellness in the ad and marketing industries. We continue in 2020 (and beyond), tackling workplace harassment in its various forms.
We’re moving from web to email, so sign up now to ensure you receive our content.
by Herman Manson (@MarkLives)Sometimes change is scary, but usually it’s exactly what we need. On Thursday, 20 August 2020, we announced a fundamental shift in our business and publishing format that we believe will put our platform on a sustainable and viable footing while adding value to our industry, commercial supporters and to you, our readers.
Over the last two years, I’ve been thinking about our publishing model a lot and wondering how we could become more efficient at what we do. We’re a small team and our daily content schedule has become personally taxing. We’ve been unable to find ways to grow quickly enough to support a larger team without doing less of what we love and more of what we don’t.
State of digital publishing
Digital publishers are at the mercy of many outside factors and players, and have actively contributed to the general decline in their fortunes by embracing rules imposed on them by these players, rather than working at resetting the status quo.
For example, we all rely on algorithms set by social media and search platforms which often change without consultation or consideration of the impact such changes have on directing people to our sites. The increasing toxicity of social media platforms has impacted greatly on topics publishers are willing to engage. Frankly, they impact the mental well-being of all of us and, personally, I’m less and less willing to engage with this (even as it means waving goodbye to another chunk of traffic).
The very fact that so many publishers and newsrooms equate site traffic growth with a viable commercial strategy, or read this as a signal of success with readers, shows we’ve not adapted our thinking or strategies since the mid-1990s, when the commercial internet started taking off. Digital publishers have been actively pursuing traffic as their measure for success (even installing traffic counters on screens in newsrooms), giving rise to click-bait content and a general decline in editorial standards, while fighting a losing game with ever-declining CPM rates that have simply seen increases in traffic offset by declines in the rates chargeable to advertisers.
Our thinking needs to shift
Add to the above that media organisations in South Africa have seen anything between 30% and 100% of ad revenue disappear since March 2020 and it’s clear, as it’s been for a while now, that our thinking needs to shift, and our strategies need to be questioned and renewed.
How do we become less reliant on web traffic as a measure of success? Can we decrease our engagement with social media channels increasingly open to information warfare and manipulation? Can we survive the shrinking ad economy? Are there more-efficient means of delivering our content? Can we do all this and up our investment in journalism, and can we do all this and retain commercial viability while adding benefit to our community and our commercial partners?
I believe we can achieve all of the above and more. We can do it by being smarter, nimbler and different. It requires adjustments by our team, but also by our readers and sponsors. I believe all our stakeholders are willing to make these, provided we can show that we can add value to our product. That we can be more; that, for us, change is an investment in our future, rather than something that’s forced upon us by circumstances (or at least that we won’t be defined by those).
From daily site to weekly newsletter
Email has become increasingly popular and viable as a publishing platform. The success of newsletters on platforms like Substack proves the business case and the value newsletters bring to readers and publishers.
This means that you, our readers, will receive an in-depth, content-filled newsletter every week directly to your inbox — you’ll no need longer need to click to the website. Each edition will consist of a weekly feature article, written by a journalist, focusing on issues affecting agencies and marketers; an interview with interesting people active in marketing, media or advertising; several opinion pieces; and an easy-to-read digest of appointments and general news.
We’ll continue to publish exclusive breaking news as it happens — premium subscribers will receive breaking news whenever it occurs in addition to our weekly mailer.
Revenue model changes
Our revenue model is changing alongside our content delivery and frequency changes.
#1. Individual
Our weekly newsletter and breaking-news product will be made available on a paid-for basis to individual subscribers. We’re asking readers to help fund our investment in journalism through a monthly subscription fee of R50 (or R550 per annum). If you find value in our service, we believe this is a reasonable and affordable contribution and it’s our intention to reinvest subscription fees into our content. Those current newsletter subscribers and website readers who choose to wait out the changes and see how we fare will receive at least one full newsletter every month without needing to pay. For the moment, you’ll continue to receive our content free of charge as our paid-for product will, in all likelihood, only become available in mid-October.
#2. Sponsorships
MarkLives will retain its 10 sponsorship slots on the site (which will carry our newsletter archive and subscriber dashboards) and in the newsletter — each of these sponsors have all made a long-term commitment to journalism in our industry. As part of every package, each sponsor will receive subsidised free subscriptions for their staff and clients; both are capped but chances are, if you work for or with one of our sponsors, your subscription fee is already taken care of — you’ll receive an opt-in email asking you to confirm your intention to take up their offer once we roll out our new service.
#3. Group discounts for agencies & marketers
We’re also offering agencies and marketing departments an opportunity to take advantage of our extremely attractive group discount rates to sponsor subscriptions for their own staff and clients (please contact us for details).
#4. Tertiary education
We are also calling on advertising and marketing schools to connect with us as it’s our intention to offer your students free subscriptions to our new weekly. We realise how important access to information is while studying towards a career in our industry and we want to ensure all students can continue to access our content without cost. We’ll work with schools, rather than individual students, to streamline this process but, if you think your school should take up our offer, please let your lecturer know.
We’ll still maintain a slimmed-down website with some content available freely and the rest behind a paywall which will be open to all subscribers to our paid-for weekly product.
Never been prouder
I’ve never been prouder of MarkLives and the remarkable people who write and who produce for us. With our reorientation towards more hard news, we’ve had to say goodbye to many of our regular columnists. This has been one of the hardest decisions we’ve had to make; we’ve walked roads with some of them that stretch back many years. It’s made me realise, once again, that change isn’t something to be flippant about and it’s not an easy decision to make, even if it’s a necessary one — it impacts widely and that impact may be personal.
There are also no guarantees. But I’m OK with that. It’s time to go back to our roots and reclaim ownership of how we measure what we’ve built, and where the future might take it.
Thank you
Herman
Team MarkLives Herman Manson • Founder & editor • @MarkLives Simone Puterman • Ed-at-large, production & newsletter editor • @SimoneAtLarge
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This editorial was originally published on 20 August 2020.
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by Siwe Lawrence (@Siwe_Lawrence) About three weeks ago I was watching the 2013 movie, Jobs, with my husband as part of our doccie/biopic Sunday tradition. The movie starred Ashton Kutcher as the visionary and my personal favourite design thinker, Steve Jobs, and Josh Gad as his long-standing business partner, Steve Wozniak. The biopic was fascinating for me, because I hadn’t realised just how much Jobs was beyond the invention and making of things.
Most of Jobs’ quote-ables in the movie point towards the greater idea of purpose and our place in the world. At the same time, we live in a world of careers and ambitions that clothe themselves with the cloak of purpose, and so this really becomes an interesting tension.
Purpose separates
“When you grow up, you tend to get told the world is the way that it is, and your life is just to live your life inside the world and try not to bash into the walls too much. But that’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is that everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that are no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use. To shake off this erroneous notion that life is just there, and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it. Change it, improve it. Make your mark upon it. And once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.” —Steve Jobs
Jobs wasn’t the most-pleasant guy to hang around with; was pretty socially awkward, actually. Yet he was always thinking outside of him, having the lit-est out-of-body experience with himself constantly because, to see the world and your place in it differently, you have to distance yourself from it quite considerably.
I grew up very Catholic so I could argue that my lens on purpose has always been from a spiritual point of view. As human beings, we’re primed to find a place in this world for our larger-than-life spirits. This means doing the rigour of why we’re here. Many answers often cling to what we do every day: our jobs. Those then become our careers, which are a collection of all the opportunities given to us to progress and make money.
That’s fundamentally different from purpose, which Lexico defines as “the reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists”.
I believe that there’s a real danger in thinking that a career is synonymous with purpose. People often make that mistake and that’s why they become slaves to titles, as opposed to what they’re supposed to be doing outside of themselves. In strategy we call it the intent; in accounting it comes as the ability to account for things; the kids call it “for the culture, bro”; and Simon Sinek calls it the why.
Purpose allows us to shape opportunities
The why becomes especially exciting because, if we can establish our personal whys, our paths can be led by a north star. When it comes to our careers, purpose allows us to shape the opportunities that we pick. A recent article by Forbes also expands purpose to that which allows us to choose what battles to fight, which doesn’t allow ourselves to be limited, and which diminishes fear and increases the courage to towards the clarity and intention needed for the tasks that we have to do on the daily.
When I think about the people whom I’m usually drawn to as personal mentors, in life and my career, I think what I am drawn to, more than anything, is the clarity with which they live their lives with. The details of where they are going next is not necessarily known but the intention of what they aim to do is clear and consistent.
When Jobs designed the iPod, he said, “It’s a tool for the heart. And when you can touch someone’s heart. That’s limitless. If I do say so myself, it’s insanely cool. It’s a music player. It’s a thousand songs in your pocket. I’d like to introduce you to the iPod.”
For him, his aim was to always show up consistently for humans through evolving whatever they need as users of things. Jobs also said, “You’ve got to have an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right…” and that really sits with me. Whether I look back to when I was in accounting or at the briefs/pieces of work that I’m particularly drawn to in adland, or even at the motivations in my personal life, I notice that things keep netting out to the same why.
With that said, I only recently was able to articulate what I believe my purpose is: I want to solve problems and do work that makes humans see each other better — work that ‘heroes’ accountability and actually changes laws, work that addresses toxicities, disparity in societies and systemic ills such as racism, and work that addresses so many more day-to-day pain points in the human experience.
When I do work with that as a lead, that’s where I feel the most success and accomplishment. I’m not leading with the titles I want but I start recognising the titles as the tool I need to execute a consistent purpose. Purpose is also cross-disciplinary and it allows you to find yourself anywhere and in any industry. For example, I’m in advertising now but I could find myself at the United Nations, or a culture company, or even Apple for that matter, without having done a political science or design-thinking degree. Solving problems at a societal level as a leading thought is pervasive and expansive, and is the thing that can get me to take up space, as opposed to always thinking about a “career”.
Purpose leads you back home
I often think back to the cultural nuance of parents, or anyone from a home in black culture, saying: “Uma umhlaba usuk’shayile, buyela ekhaya [When the world becomes too hard for you, come back home].)” Obviously, when I think about my mom saying that to me in the early years of my career, she would literally mean that I should come back to my home, or my hometown of Empangeni, for a breather. But, in the context of careering towards your purpose, it can definitely mean coming back to self, which could be argued is your inner home. Figuring out your purpose isn’t easy and the purpose-lightbulb also only went on for me recently. But, as human beings, we’re innately patterned and, therefore, we will always be chasing the same purpose in a different form, whether we’ve awakened to that “ahaa” yet or not.
“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. The only thing you can’t do is ignore them.” —Steve Jobs
Here’s to the purposeful ones. The thinkers, the doers, the self-aware. The ones craving something bigger, in a career-driven world. They know that purpose is not fond of rules and that it has no respect for the status quo. That you can mask it, try live your life without it, fight with your career about it. The only thing you can’t do is ignore it.
So, as you finish reading this column finale and as you navigate your life, lead with a purpose that will inform what shape your career takes and infuse the magic touch that can only be yours. Purpose has led me into spaces I could have never imagined, and continues to do so. And that’s insanely cool.
Yours in insight, culture, advertising (for now) and purpose
Siwe
Siwelile Lawrence (née Thusi) (@Siwe_Lawrence) is a qualified South African chartered-accountant-turned-senior-strategist at M&C Saatchi Abel; she’s also a working photographer and writer. Since mid-2015, she’s been in strategic planning, working on some of South Africa’s big brands in different categories and industries in the ATL and digital spaces. Siwe contributes the regular column, “An Accountant in Adland“ — exploring the fluidity of the disciplines and other themes like film and music that influence our lives — to MarkLives.com.
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by Wendy Shepherd (@thewordshepherd) Right now, it’s a shocking time for employment. If you’re lucky enough to have a job, you not only need to give some fucks about it but the right sort if you’re going to keep it.
At 46, I’m blissfully aware that I give progressively less-general ones with each passing decade. While this is a truly delightful place to find myself, it’s also interesting to note that it doesn’t apply to my work ethic. It used to, though, back in my reckless twenties, and it took another decade of embarrassing public lessons to unlearn those habits and make new ones.
The emotional bank account
You need to keep one. This is not a place to bank your resentments; it’s a place in your colleague’s mind where they owe you a solid.
We all keep an emotional bank account of our colleagues’ various debits and credits. You build credit by going out of your way to be a mensch, keeping your mouth shut instead of throwing someone under a bus, having backs in the corporate jungle and resisting the urge to massage your ego in company. Account managers are particularly bad at keeping up their emotional bank accounts. Every time you diss a creative, you get a debit in their mind. This is why it’s not your work they happily do until 2am. And that’s just one example.
Keeping your emotional bank account stacked up with credits is the secret to negotiating the invisible undercurrents that exist in every corporation on Earth. This effect is amplified with work friends, so don’t be thinking you don’t need one because you’re buddies with your MD.
Definitely gossip
At some point, gossip became something only the wrong sort of people do, and we’re assured it’s absolutely guaranteed to get us into trouble. The people who say that are gossip amateurs. You need to know what’s going on. Most people don’t.
The secret to pouring the tea is to make sure you have a tight triangle of trust — no more than three people you can gossip with freely who won’t spill it. Choose people who’re where secrets go to die, and start slow. If they happen to be people with the inside line on management, you’re winning hard. Outside of the triangle, you make nothing but positive or neutral comments. Inside the triangle, you dish. I absolutely guarantee this will be 50 times more informative than your weekly one-on-one.
Gossip is also a striking bonus for your mental health because there’s nothing like a good information purge to galvanise your will to live. There might even be science behind that. I only have personal experience to go by.
That’s just my face
I was working for Y&R Gitam back in 2003 and wrestling an Absa concept to the ground with my partner. He was a patient fellow, with the mattress-like uber forbearance that makes an art director great. Our creative director was a taciturn man who’d lost all his fucks a long time ago. After nearly 70 scamps of various bombed concepts, he suddenly peered at me and asked, “Why are you looking at me like I’m a [severely rude word]?”
It was that exact moment when I realised I have an unfortunate resting face, on which every fleeting emotion (rage, in this case) is etched with perfect legibility. So, I got two of my friends to teach me poker. Nowadays, while I still look like a well-contained psychopath, nobody can tell what I’m thinking or feeling, and there’s a healthy element of fear as to what that might be.
If you want to survive in a world that is unflinchingly capitalist despite your best Facebook rants, you need to be in charge of your face. Bluffing is by far the most-significantly useful personal change you can make.
Go where no one has gone before
I called my father Spock. This is why.
My dad was a corporate heavyweight and spent a lot of time chairing meetings with other heavyweights. One of these was a large decision-makers meeting that included a strident younger man who decided that my father’s 45 years in marketing weren’t enough to understand the finer points of psychographic targeting. He proceeded to unpack this in various tones of condescension for about 10 minutes. Throughout this diatribe, my father sat calmly, faintly smiling, with his hands carefully steepled. He let the young man dig his hole with every sign of attentive listening. When he’d finally finished speaking, the whole table drew a collective breath and looked at Dad. My father smiled more broadly and simply said, “Fascinating.” And the meeting moved on.
Learning to say less, never lose your cool and resist putting anyone down is, without a doubt, a ninja skill.
~•~•~
Anyone may be on time, fill in their timesheets, lay down boundaries, learn to listen and dress for the job they want. That’s only the beginning. If you want to keep your job in a climate of cut-throat redundancy, you have to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, and know when to run. Play the game, or the game will play you.
Wendy Shepherd (@thewordshepherd) is a pharma copywriter and true-crime fanatic. She contributes the regular MarkLives.com column, “Herding Words”, which takes a sometimes irreverent look at copywriting, adland and the human universe in general. Other BHAGS occupy the rest.
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by Jason Stewart (@HaveYouHeard_SA) Our relationship with our homes is changing again, shifting from ‘making our homes nice’ to making them the centre of everything we do. This has important implications for brands.
A dry and warm place to sleep and prepare food — somewhere safe and familiar — has always been one of humankind’s most-basic needs. In addition, the conceptual difference between ‘home’ and ‘house’ is long understood. Over the past few decades, however, the home has climbed the ladder of importance for status and identity.
New lifestyle
It’s became the place to put your mark on, to make a representation of who you are, to showcase your status level to others. Then it became a refuge, a place where, if you don’t exactly hide away from the increasing stressors of the world, that where you rejuvenate and ‘cocoon’. Most recently, it’s become the centre of our lives. This is (no surprise here) being spurred on by the convergence of one of the most-important macro trends — technology — together with the new lifestyle forced upon us by the covid-19 pandemic.
And this convergence is impacting everything; from where our home is to the environment within it and to what we do, to who lives in the home with us, to how we spend money from it, in it and on it as the convenience of technology allows us to stay inside our homes for longer and to spend more money from within.
Ecommerce (eg Takealot) and new services (eg Checkers Sixty60) allow us to shop from within. Entertainment may be streamed in via Netflix (which added 10m new subscribers in first quarter of 2020 — the most ever), YouTube or Twitch. Exercise may be shared via Paleton or YouTube.
Alexa and other voice assistants are entering our homes, too, listening to all we say and activating according to instruction. Zoom and other software have, for some time now, allowed us to work without leaving home, but the novel coronavirus has made it culturally acceptable.
Comfort and safety
While tech has made most things in the home easier, cheaper, more convenient and more pleasurable, covid-19 has impacted our homes in other ways, most notably causing us to seek out more comfort and safety. For example, hard lockdown provided people with time to work on and think about their homes, and prompted a boom of home-cooking, gardening and gaming while ignoring the other mandatories of home-schooling, cleaning, and so on.
Our normal rituals and habits have been changing as well, as the lines separating work and play are further blurring and leading to new habits such as playing music loudly after my ‘work day’ finishes, rather than slumping into a couch for calm disconnection.
With mental health being knocked and anxiety levels rising, nature is becoming the fast go-to for calming our emotions: not only in bringing plants into the house, or starting small gardens, but in colour tone as well. Home is our safe refuge where we don’t even need to wear a mask
While Zoom has brought the world into your home, the view you offer this new audience is certainly becoming more curated as it’s part of the story you tell others about your fuller life and the status you gain from it.
Status purchases have also been shifting to comfort, security and convenience. Fashion is moving from looking good to feeling good at home. Those expensive sneakers are no longer as important as a new duvet set.
Negatives
Yet there are negatives, too. Downsizing and minimalism aren’t just reasonable approaches to simplifying life; they’re an unfortunate necessity as people can no longer afford their homes. This has led to an increase in multi-generational homes, where kids are staying longer and parents or grandparents are coming back. Multi-generational homes have different purchasing behaviour and decision-making processes. More heritage is involved in the decision and more value is sought as product needs to be stretched. Finally, in some instances, stress levels increase when the family size doesn’t allow for privacy or individual space, which is often the case in South Africa.
Staycations are also becoming more popular. Fears regarding travel and financial issues mean people are spending more on home entertainment such as trampolines, braais and portable pools, wi-fi, entertainment subscriptions, baking equipment, etc. The societal downside of this trend is that it ultimately leads to more individualism and separation of community, resulting in more tribalism, with less real-world experiences and engagement with others, and more online sub-cultures and small networks of closed groups.
As home consumption is going to be more and more prevalent, finding ways for your brand to fit in into new rituals, occasions and purchase behavior is going to be central to future brand communication and engagement.
Jason Stewart is co-founder of HaveYouHeard (@HaveYouHeard_SA), a full-service agency. Zeitgeist of Now, his new column on MarkLives, is inspired by the agency’s proprietary tool developed to understand the invisible but powerful forces that influence people, products, culture and societies. If we appreciate these, he argues, we become more-effective marketers.
This MarkLives #CoronavirusSA special section contains coverage of how the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, and its resultant disease, covid-19, is affecting the advertising, marketing and related industries in South Africa and other parts of Africa, and how we are responding. Updates may be sent to us via our contact form or the email address published on our Contact Us page. Opinion pieces/guest columns must be exclusive.
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by Leigh Tayler (@LeighAnneTayler) WTF aren’t there more CMOs, brand managers and marketers like Fernando Machado, Burger King global chief marketing officer, in the world or, more specifically, in South Africa?
Inspiring, to say the least
Recently I attended the 2020 Nedbank IMC Conference, where Machado was the keynote speaker. I’m sure most who read this won’t be surprised to hear that he was inspiring, to say the least. Another speaker whose presentation was excellent, Alistair King of King James Group Africa, summed it up as “not the absence of bravery but rather the presence of a myriad of other forces.”
This is where I think I was most inspired by Machado; he never once disregarded the myriad of factors that marketers have to consider when trying to sell their brands. He’s not some pink unicorn that flouts the rules and has no master, galloping across the universe pooping fairy dust and gold Cannes Lions (maybe a little bit). He’s chosen to find ways to work the system to the benefit of all involved, including his bosses, who don’t care about the “creative effectiveness” debate. Patrick Collister, another speaker at the event, said it best, “Fernando works for some tough hombres — venture capitalists — and they only care about the numbers.”
Machado himself said his salary and bonus aren’t based on awards; he must show hard numbers. But he believes in the power of creativity to deliver tangible business results and create a competitive advantage for his business.
What does this CMO know that many of us don’t?
#1. Stretch & Learn
When you start embracing creativity, you don’t have to jump in head first; just dip in your toes. Experiment, take 10% of your budget and try. Machado says, “Who cares if you bin a failed experiment every now and then? You didn’t lose anything if you learned something from it.”
Use what you learn from your experiment to inform your CRM, product development, technology and future experiments. Creativity and innovation are iterative; it’s an organic and learning process; and it’s very rarely perfect the first time.
According to Machado, before it executed Whopper Detour, it’d run a straightforward promotion to get consumers to download the app: “Download and get X% off your first Whopper order”. This campaign was almost identical to every other competitors’ app-download promo and results proved to be as average as the promo. Thus, it went with the Whopper Detour and the results speak for themselves.
#2. Ducks generally don’t excel at selling
“If it looks like an ad, talks like an ad and walks like an ad, then it probably is not a very good ad”, says Machado. We know most people don’t get excited about watching ads, otherwise they wouldn’t spend so much time and effort trying to avoid them. Heck, we in the industry don’t even get that excited to watch the majority of ads, and it’s our vocation.
Instead of trying to make ads, do epic stuff (his plaque on his desk says “do epic shit”, by the way) and then turn that epic stuff into ads. Excite consumers, dare them, even sometimes confuse them. Whopper Detour definitely confused consumers by asking them to drive to the competitor and order a Whopper but they did it and they loved the adventure.
Another keen insight I took from him is related to pre-testing and research. He says when you test your concept in research and you get a slightly better-than-average result (a result most of us would be happy with), what do you think that result will translate to in a real-world situation? What chance does that piece of communication stand in reality? In real life, your ad isn’t being focused on to the same degree as within a focus group.
So, if your ad isn’t shooting the lights out in research, it’s probably not going to even register for consumers in the real world among a sea of advertising and the rush of life.
He proved this point when he shared that, before “Mouldy Whopper”, a traditional intrinsic campaign was tested that highlighted the new ingredients and removal of artificial ingredients; it tested well but not as a remarkable piece of work. So he chucked that piece of work and told his agency partners to try again. And they did, by breaking all the rules of food marketing on its hero product.
#3. Be first
If you don’t know who Marcel Duchamp was, I strongly recommend Googling him. He was an artist during the mid-20th century, quite satirical, and his work confused most people, especially when he exhibited, among other things, an upside-down urinal titled “Fountain”. Machado said of this, “If you are the first person to bring an upside-down urinal to a museum, you are probably an artist; if you are the second, then you are probably the plumber.”
King echoed this sentiment: “Ideas float on the ether and, the moment you have an idea, you can be sure someone somewhere on Earth is having the same brainwave.”. His point is that, if you have a great idea, don’t kill it by wasting time and spinning your wheels. As another great brand would say, “Just do it!”
Machado urged the attendees in the “room” (it was a virtual conference) to “just start”. That’s the point here; you can’t know until you try. You can’t prove creativity works for your business unless you give it the chance to work. Plus, when you do take the leap, make sure you brace for impact — ’cause you might belly-flop or you might nail it. Either way, you’ll have learnt something.
#4.Marketing is logic and magic
Marketing is unlike most business disciplines, where there’s only ever one tried-and-tested formula that never fails and never changes. Marketing is organic and ever-evolving as it’s linked to consumers, and consumers and their world are organic and everchanging.
Therefore, marketing is partly about trying to predict an outcome using models and research and statistical analysis but, when it comes to communication, it’s as much, if not even more, about believing in your instinct and listening to your gut. Just because a model tells you a piece of communication is going to work doesn’t mean it will break records. The inverse is also true; just because a model say it won’t deliver doesn’t mean it won’t. Magic requires belief, faith.
Marketers need to balance their logic with the magic of creativity, which is much more instinctual and organic. When logic dominates at the expense of magic, that’s a recipe for boring work that doesn’t add significant value to the business.
Machado’s logic is sound: “Creativity is not expensive; putting media behind a bad ad is expensive. Great work adds value to the media and ultimately the business.”
#5. Get proof
Another thing Machado emphasised which seems obvious, and yet many of us fail to diligently follow through on, is to collect irrefutable proof of success. All too often we skimp on the tangible and realistic measures at the brief stage, opting for either vague or convoluted objectives. Even more often, we fail to painstakingly vet our work post-campaign to determine whether our work worked against those original measures. This proof is critical to gaining buy-in to the power of creativity in creating a business advantage.
The key point here isn’t just to measure everything and anything, just in case, but to measure that which actually counts, and measure it painstakingly to ensure we gain proof that the use of creativity is delivering against very clear and focused business objectives.
Let’s also be clear that awards aren’t a metric of success or effectiveness of creative work. We need to sometimes treat our clients’ businesses as tough hombre venture capitalists who don’t care about creativity, or shiny gold statues, just the numbers.
As Jerry Maguire shouted on the phone, “Show me the money!”
~•~•~
So, I challenge all the marketers out there to tear a page from Machado’s book and believe in the power of creativity to provide your business a competitive advantage. Follow his lead: start small and build up your resilience and comfort but start; embrace both logic and magic and listen to your gut; aim for breakthrough, not thorough; and, even if it didn’t work completely, use the learnings to inform your next experiment.
I also challenge us in adland to always, always measure our work and get proof to build a logical argument for the power of creativity, to equip our marketers with evidence in their fight for creativity. Ensure there are clear and realistic objectives on the brief and measure the effectiveness of the campaign against those agreed metrics.
Leigh Tayler (@LeighAnneTayler) is the strategy director at Joe Public United. During her career of more than 12 years, she’s worked in just about every imaginable category and has fostered a well-rounded and instinctual approach to strategic thinking that she applies at every level, from big brand concepts to last-mile moments of truth. Leigh contributes the new monthly column, “WTF?!”, which highlights the things one might hear within an agency or be asked of in briefs, to MarkLives.com.
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by Charlie Mathews (@CharlesLeeZA) The world is changing in ways we’ve yet to comprehend. Everything is going to transform. Change has become the only constant. In this type of environment, the only answer is to become adaptable enough to process change to your benefit — to become future-fit.
“Transformers Transform 2020” is a special series produced by MarkLives and HumanInsight and sponsored by the Association for Communication and Advertising (ACA), running Jun–Sep 2020. Together with Lebogang Tshetlo, we’ll be profiling remarkable local #Transformers every other Friday until September, featuring Tshetlo’s photography. The objective of this an independently managed, journalism-driven research project is to explore and map new paths for brands and marketers to transform, adapt and build resilience while the world adapts to covid-19 and its resultant social, political and economic toll.
Five distinct phases
Crawford Del Prete, International Data Corporation (IDC) president, predicts that post-covid-19 recovery will go through five distinct phases. The global market intelligence firm predicts that the winners will be brave pioneers, powered by technology, that can accelerate opportunity to market.
Source: IDC
As the diagram above shows, the IDC anticipates that one key business imperative will rule the C-suite agenda during each stage as businesses move forward to survive and thrive. But South Africa will be different: we were already in recession when the pandemic hit, and this country’s capacity to respond had been denuded by corruption, factionalism and weak state‑leadership.
The latest financial data from Bloomberg shows that the national lockdown has resulted in a “record economic contraction,” deepening SA’s recession. “We, therefore, expect a weak recovery,” says Boingotlo Gasealahwe, Bloomberg economist for Africa. “What matters now is the strength and pace of recovery,” he adds. This means the role of business and leadership will need to radically change if this country is to survive its struggle with weak government, rampant unemployment, poverty, vice and an ever-deepening recession.
Transformation icon and activist
Source: LinkedIn
“Brands must get political because, right now, there is no safe space for us to sit and idly watch. If you’re on the sidelines, then you’re part of the problem,” Bozoma Saint John, Netflix CMO, said in a prescient address to the C2 creativity festival in Montréal, Canada, last year. A celebrated transformation icon and activist, Saint John told the creativity festival that transformation was inevitable, not optional.
“It is actually unfair to our human race to continue to tell stories from one perspective. We must diversify,” said Saint John, who’s had transformational roles at Endeavor, Apple, and PepsiCo. She was also brought in to repair Uber’s reputation after a series of humiliating gender crises.
The biggest change brands, marketing businesses and entrepreneurs will face in the coming months is the changing nature of their relationships with their employees and customers. This will mean addressing the marketing sector’s laggardly response to empowerment and gender at the same time as grappling with a recession and stepping into the breach left by a dysfunctional government.
Leadership primer
Accenture has created a leadership primer that shows one way of doing so. The downloadable pdf, Human Resilience — What your people need now (1.5MB), advises: “Responsible Leadership has taken on an even deeper meaning, as our workforces and our customers find themselves in an unfamiliar, fast-moving global environment. COVID-19 has changed the way we live and work already, with far-reaching impact. Leading with compassion and caring for our workforces and communities is more essential than ever.”
Accenture maintains that, to build trust now and into the future, employers will need to step up to the plate and knit together cohesion and continuity with leadership teams that are “focused on compassion and the care of its people.”
“Distilled to one essential message: Your workforce is looking to trust you. And it will trust if it believes leadership cares for each individual, their community and humanity as a whole. But beyond caring, leaders must show they have a plan. You don’t have to know everything, but you do need to be transparent about what is driving decisions,” Accenture advises.
Help drive survival
Ultimately, entrepreneurs and businesses can help drive survival for the more marginalised, particularly through collaboration and participation. Beyond that, entrepreneurs, innovators, responsible brands and inventive enterprises offer the best hope for the future. With restrictions now lifted on most sectors, we need to both save our country and reimagine ourselves, our industry and the future.
There is purpose and meaning in being brave enough to want to rebuild ourselves, and we should fight anyone who dares take this hope away from us. Here we can look to Saint James, who is a great believer in purpose, meaning and making a difference.
“I want to be significant. I want to do things that are more significant, and so the purpose of my life has changed to be more focused on that,” Forbes quotes her as saying. “How am I going to be significant, in our conversations, in our movement towards women’s empowerment? How am I going to be significant in the conversation and movement towards diversity and inclusion?”
Local sector
A powerful question to answer from a South Africa poised between despair and hope, and in an industry that doesn’t have many options. When it comes to transformation, the local sector would do well to take Saint John’s advice and become fearless.
“Change. That’s the biggest lesson. Not to be afraid of it… I have now become fearless of change and it, therefore, makes me that much stronger. I also don’t make five-year plans, because I want to keep myself open to change and be able to be nimble,” the mega-CMO says in the Forbes interview.
No stranger to transformation, in 2014 Saint John’s life altered forever after her partner was diagnosed with terminal cancer. In a touching interview with Daughters of Africa, the careerist CMO says her partner’s passing, after a battle with cancer, “gave her the ‘gift of urgency’ and ‘the grace’ to be more determined to execute tasks,”, and advised, “Never settle for the things that you think are impossible to attain… and never take no for an answer. Do it right now.”
Change is coming, whether you like it or not. You will transform or be transformed. Technology will aid you but our common fate will depend on our ability to care about social justice, embrace diversity, become more adaptable, destroy hierarchies, reorganise, digitise, digitalise and collaborate unlike ever before.
As an entrepreneur, Charlie Mathews (@CharlesLeeZA) has worked in growth teams with Naspers, Microsoft, and Tutuka.com (the global prepaid card company). Mathews has also successfully founded and exited two marketing companies. Published in Rolling Stone magazine, Guardian UK, and SA’s Greatest Entrepreneurs, edited by Moky Makura, Mathews wrote for Daily Maverick during the title’s legendary startup era. Today, Mathews is the founder and CEO of HumanInsight, a research, insights and learning company that helps brands better understand, and serve — humans.
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by Charlie Stewart (@CStewart_ZA) Instead of empowering a powerful — and, frankly, very believable — salesforce of friends, family and colleagues to do more of our work for us, as per recent research, we marketers continue to think we’re the only people who should be trusted to handle the complex process of customer acquisition.
Encouraged by the white heat of technology (or perhaps because we were too lazy to do the work we felt machines could do for us), we spawned a programmatic advertising technology (adtech) industry to help us in this quest. But it’s an industry that’s coming under increasing scrutiny.
Earlier this year, the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA) commissioned PwC to investigate the proportion of programmatic media spend that makes its way through the sausage machine to achieve its ultimate purpose.
Half my advertising is wasted
It appears that John Wanamaker’s famous words of over a century ago are as true today as they were then. The research found that just 51 cents out of every rand reaches a publisher and gets turned into an ad that you or I might see.
The rest is sucked up in desk fees, kickbacks and fraud.
It’s also common knowledge that the money that does reach publishers isn’t particularly effective. Display ads (which is where programmatic was supposed to be a tour de force) achieve an average click through rate of less than 0.5%; while they might help in building brand awareness, they’re not doing much for customer acquisition.
Some parts perform
This isn’t to say that the digital ad ecosystem is broken. Some parts — including those that receive the lion’s share of adspend — continue to perform exceptionally well. Search is, rightly, the foundational cornerstone of all online advertising programmes. While social media advertising might be toxic right now, its proven efficacy will see brands flock back in the fullness of time, too.
But programmatic still accounts for a sizable chunk of ad spend, perhaps as much as US$147bn next year. If the ISBA calculations are applied to that figure, it suggests that over US$70bn worth of spend is disappearing into a hole. That’s more than twice our own government’s R500bn covid-19 stimulus plan.
What’s particularly irksome is that the ISBA report isn’t news, although it does provide some hard evidence to support what people such as Dr Augustine Fou and the adcontrarian Bob Hoffman have been telling us for years. With their repeated reminders of the failings in the system, they’ve been busy playing the modern day role of the little child in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of The Emperor’s New Clothes.
Industry is reacting
To give it some dues, the industry is reacting. Through its brand safety initiative, the IAB has been trying to bring transparency to the programmatic process and agencies such as Omnicom have launched new programmatic platforms that strip out some of the inefficiency.
Yet it feels as if we’re trying to fix something that’s inherently broken. Perhaps it’s time to give up on the naked failings of programmatic and double down on delighting our customers by providing them with great experiences. Research studies ad nauseum have found that it’s far cheaper to retain (and please) an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one.
If your current clientele not only buy more but become active evangelists for your business, by focusing our energies on activating them, we can perhaps restore some of the confidence in our trade that the programmatic debacle has eroded.
Charlie Stewart (@CStewart_ZA) is CEO of Rogerwilco, a multi-award-winning independent digital agency best known for its expertise with Drupal, SEO and content marketing. Together with Mark Eardley, he co-authored Business to Business Marketing: A Step by Step Guide, (Penguin Random House, 2016) and may be found on LinkedIn. Charlie contributes the regular column, “Clicks ‘n Tricks”, which looks at how brands are using digital channels to engage their customers, to MarkLives.com.
From June until September 2020, MarkLives and HumanInsight produced a “Transformers Transform 2020” special series that was sponsored by the Association for Communication and Advertising (ACA). The objective of this independently managed, journalism-driven research project was to explore and map new paths for brands and marketers to transform, adapt and build resilience while the world adapts to covid-19 and its resultant social, political and economic toll. The archive of stories is available here, the video interviews on YouTube and Facebook, and the downloadable #TransformersTransform2020 playbook here.
As an entrepreneur, Charlie Mathews (@CharlesLeeZA) has worked in growth teams with Naspers, Microsoft, and Tutuka.com (the global prepaid card company). Mathews has also successfully founded and exited two marketing companies. Published in Rolling Stone magazine, Guardian UK, and SA’s Greatest Entrepreneurs, edited by Moky Makura, Mathews wrote for Daily Maverick during the title’s legendary startup era. Today, Mathews is the founder and CEO of HumanInsight, a research, insights and learning company that helps brands better understand, and serve — humans.
