Van der Haar on change, creativity & transformation

by Jessica Evans (@JessRobinEvans) “I’ve learned that the more things change, the more they stay the same,” says Odette van der Haar, former CEO at J Walter Thompson South Africa* and newly appointed managing director at Publicis Africa. “Transformation in the industry remains a challenge as some embrace it and some do not. Clients still abuse agencies during pitches. And, in a recession when brands should be investing in advertising and marketing of their products, they cut back.”

Transformation

Her in-depth involvement in the advertising industry has awarded her some authority when it comes to industry trends. For 10 years, she led a dedicated transformation effort, both legally and socially, at the Association for Communication and Advertising (ACA) of South Africa, where she oversaw the drafting of the Marketing, Advertising, and Communication (MAC) Charter, saw it written into law, and gave promising young people opportunities through the APEX Awards Bursary Initiative.

While she has moved away from the ACA in assuming leadership first at JWT in 2018 and now at Publicis in 2019, she says that more transformation is needed. It’s clear this is important to her, and her disappointment is almost tangible when she says transformation remains a challenge.

Van der Haar plans on continuing her support for new entrants into the industry in her new role at Publicis. “I will aim to plug into the initiatives of the ACA by representing the agency on the ACA board and committees. We will invest in talent [and] drive transformation of the agency to not only meet the minimum requirements of the MAC Charter but exceed them as far as possible,” she says.

Creativity

The ad industry is more than just business deals and campaigns to her; it’s a space for creativity and business to flourish together and where vast social change can happen. “Creativity remains the most-important ingredient for business success — by this I do not mean creating pretty pictures; I mean having a creative approach to doing business in order to deliver creative solutions to complex business problems. It is in being creative during these tough economic times where the best and biggest opportunities will be identified, leveraged and change the game for agencies and clients alike,” she says. Put simply, “creativity + agility = longevity”.

Seizing opportunities is a running theme for van der Haar. “The only constant in this life is change,” she says, “and the landscape of advertising and communications is changing so rapidly that we have no choice but to keep morphing our businesses.”

In a time where many businesses are opting out of advertising, she says your business moves will have big implications for your future. Her advice is for brands to invest in their marketing, adding that “consumers continue to opt for those brands where the balance of mental awareness and physical availability has been attained through clever and sustained marketing investment. Many brands will not survive this economic recession and consumers are favouring brands with purpose, ie brands that represent something meaningful. If marketing moguls and brand barons don’t grasp this, products, brands, companies (including ad agencies) will disappear or be left so far behind that they cannot catch up in the future.”

Advice

Looking back, this is the advice she would give her younger self is: “Education, education, education. Never stop learning. Never stop being curious, hunger for knowledge and get as many qualifications and certifications as possible. This will keep you relevant, knowledgeable, marketable and it will definitely stimulate your creative and strategic thinking so that you are always able to come up with creative solutions to business problems.”

*Now merged with Wunderman South Africa to form Wunderman Thompson South Africa.

See also

 

Jessica EvansJessica Evans (@JessRobinEvans) is a young writer fresh out of Rhodes University’s school of journalism and media studies. She is interested in branding, health, lifestyle, environmental journalism, technology and science communication. She spends her spare time running a science blog called bite-sizedsci.com where she aims to make everyday science more accessible. She is a contributing writer to MarkLives.com.

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#BigQEmployers: No bigger subject than issues of reputation

by MarkLives (@marklives) How successful have local ad agencies been in creating positive employer reputations? What do they consider best practice, how do they measure their reputations among employees and what impact has positive employer reputation had on their ability to attract star talent? Next in our panel to tackle this Big Q is Alistair King of King James Group SA, who decided to take a Q&A approach in responding.

Alistair King

Alistair King. Photo by Al Nicoll/2019 Loerie Awards.
Alistair King. Photo by Al Nicoll/2019 Loerie Awards.

Alistair King (@ALsparkles) is co-founder and chief creative officer of King James Group SA — South Africa’s longest-standing pure independent agency network of 22 years. He has been inducted into both the Creative Circle (2017) and Loeries (2019) Halls of Fame, and has been voted the MarkLives Agency Leaders’ Most-Admired Creative Leader in South Africa five times —in 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2012.

1. What do you think of when you think of reputation?

There’s no bigger subject to me than issues of reputation. From my very first job, I was always very conscious of how I wanted to be looked at and thought of as a copywriting creative, and that defined everything — my career ambitions, my work ethic, my strategy for self-development, my attitude to award shows. Earning genuine respect has pretty much guided my career. “Substance over hype” has always been my personal touchstone and it’s fair to say I’ve carried that ethos into King James. Co-founder and CEO James Barty and I do fight about stuff, but we’ve never fought about our ethos or about how we should conduct ourselves in business.

2. What builds reputation and what destroys it?

Reputation is a bit of a stew, in my view. Its ingredients are many, but nothing builds reputation more than the work that ultimately ends up in mainstream media. That is what consumers admire. That is what marketers admire. That is what attracts great people to your agency. Good people are attracted to the most-creatively productive agencies — that is what ultimately defines you, so that is what I focus on above all else. I’ve always had faith that, if your work is consistently good, consistently effective and consistently hard to ignore, the smart marketers will notice and remember your name. An agency’s morale, and its reputation, collapses when its work is poor. Work that you aren’t proud of sucks the soul out of an agency.

3. What role does an agency’s culture play in building reputation?

When you walk through an agency, its culture is unmistakeable. It doesn’t come from the founders’ quotes on the walls, the awards on the shelves or the trendy interior decorating; it’s the buzz, or lack thereof, that bristles in the air and bounces down the corridors. An agency’s energy is either electric or flat-lining. It shows on the faces of every member of staff you walk past. All the enthusiastic tweets, all the celebratory PR, all the joyous corporate-culture videos created for pitches can’t change the fact that an agency’s soul is either genuine or hugely contrived, and that’s is based on thousands of small, almost-indiscernible actions and gestures that start with the leadership of the company. It’s those actions that are observed, absorbed, picked up and carried into the work by the rest of the team. Those actions turn into bold, innovative ideas that quickly become conversations at braais with colleagues from other agencies. They become praise and recommendation at marketing dinner parties. They become the foundations of your reputation, whether you intended it or not. And when you add that to a creative product that is ground-breaking and moves a client’s bottom line, you have a winning formula reputationally.

4. How have you built King James’s culture?

James and I have never attempted to define our culture. We obviously lead and guide it based on our principles and our expectations of the kind of agency we want to have, but we’ve always let it evolve naturally and incrementally as people come and people go. Many of our rituals have subsequently been created by our people while they were with us and we embrace that. We’ve made a few small decisions that have set the tone for our culture. One decision was to not put anything on our walls that wasn’t about our agency, our people and the work we do. Our art is from our people. If they get published as a writer, it goes on the walls. We feature the hilarious things they’ve said and we showcase a lot of memorabilia from shoots, renderings and storyboards from the work we are most proud of. We are fortunate to have never had to adopt anyone else’s culture, so we celebrate our own. We generally approach everything with a sense of humour — and we try our best not to peddle or drink our own Kool-Aid.

5. What do you admire in other agencies?

It’s all about the work for me. If I see an agency that is happy, motivated and proud of the work they do, that impresses and inspires me. Good work takes time, it takes a real fighting spirit and it takes a hugely motivated staff that often has to invest a great deal of personal and emotional energy to get great work made for real. There are so many ways that an agency can fudge its reputation these days — I try to look beyond the social media, past the often-questionable creative award wins and simply look at what’s behind it all.

See also

 

MarkLives logoLaunched in 2016, “The Big Q” is a regular column on MarkLives in which we ask key advertising and marketing industry execs for their thoughts on relevant issues facing the industry. If you’d like to be part of our pool of panellists, please contact editor Herman Manson via email (2mark at marklives dot com) or Twitter (@marklives). Suggestions for questions are also welcomed.

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SA TV Ratings: SABC 1 — primetime top 20 for Aug 2019

by MarkLives (@marklives) The hottest primetime shows on SABC 1 in South Africa revealed: TV ratings for August 2019.

SABC 1 logoSABC 1, August 2019

Top 20 Programmes All Adults 15+
August 2019 Prime Time 5.30pm—10pm
Adults 15+ years U:35830 S:8422

Source: BRCSA August 2019

Day

Date

From

To

Station

Programme title

Genre

AR

Viewers

Share
Thur 15/08/2019 2032 2102 S1 Uzalo Dram 28.31 10 143 270 68.7
Thur 15/08/2019 2000 2032 S1 Generations the Legacy Soap 25.79 9 238 716 66.2
Wed 07/08/2019 1831 1859 S1 Skeem Saam Dram 20.4 7 307 652 58.2
Wed 21/08/2019 1930 1959 S1 Makoti Movi 12.74 4 563 292 32.8
Wed 21/08/2019 1859 1928 S1 Zulu News News 12.31 4 411 489 32.8
Thur 15/08/2019 1900 1929 S1 Xhosa News News 12.2 4 369 636 32.6
Tue 13/08/2019 1800 1829 S1 Nyan Nyan -R Real 10.36 3 713 145 34.9
Tue 27/08/2019 1800 1830 S1 Nyan Nyan Real 9.97 3 570 981 35.8
Sun 04/08/2019 1929 1959 S1 Ngempela Dram 9.92 3 555 065 30.5
Fri 09/08/2019 1930 1959 S1 Live Amp Musi 9.91 3 550 532 28.5
Wed 07/08/2019 1803 1830 S1 Emasisweni Real 9.57 3 430 840 33.3
Wed 14/08/2019 2100 2159 S1 Khumbul’ Ekhaya Maga 9.33 3 342 985 29.6
Thur 15/08/2019 1930 1959 S1 Throwback Thursday Musi 9.28 3 325 947 24.3
Mon 26/08/2019 1934 2001 S1 City Ses’la -R Sitc 8.81 3 158 098 24.3
Tue 20/08/2019 1930 1959 S1 Selimathunzi Vari 8.74 3 131 281 23.3
Mon 19/08/2019 1800 1829 S1 Now or Never Docu 8.6 3 082 882 29.8
Sat 24/08/2019 1800 1900 S1 Friends Like These Vari 8.42 3 015 532 31.1
Thur 01/08/2019 1800 1830 S1 Instapreneurs Real 8.22 2 945 692 29.5
Sun 04/08/2019 2000 2058 S1 Woza Nazo Show Spor 8.1 2 901 487 26.1
Mon 05/08/2019 1930 1959 S1 Streaks Vari 7.85 2 811 650 21.9

 

Broadcast Research Council of South AfricaThe Broadcast Research Council of South Africa (BRCSA) is a non-profit, industry body that was incorporated in 2015 to cater to the audience research needs of the radio and television industry in South Africa. In 2016, it changed its policy about giving away TAMS and now only monthly reports, highlighting the top 20 or 30 primetime shows on several popular channels, are available.

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Masterclass Notes: Trends from #AdForumSummit London

by Johanna McDowell (@jomcdowell) Here are seven observations that stood out at the recent AdForum Worldwide Summit in London, 22–25 September 2019, attended by more than 50 global pitch consultants:

1. The rise (or not) of management consultancies

In recent years, there’s has been much talk in the industry, locally and globally, about the rise of management consultancies entering the marketing space and starting to take over traditional and digital creative agency work. Is this true? And is it really happening?

The answer is mixed. Yes — in some countries where Scopen and AgencyScope are active, keeping in mind that AgencyScope studies the marketing and advertising industry in 12 countries, including South Africa — it does seem like the management consultancies are starting to make inroads. I’ve seen this in countries such as Brazil and China, and less so in the UK but definitely making advances.

[Full disclosure: Scopen Africa was launched in South Africa in 2016 in partnership with the Independent Agency Search & Selection Company (IAS). IAS now owns 26% of Scopen Africa (Grupo Consultores Africa). The IAS, in association with the AAR Group (UK), was founded in SA in 2006.]

Some of the management consultancies such as Accenture have gone a step further and bought creative agencies such as Droga5, Shackleton and Karmarama in order to enhance their marketing offerings. Many of the management consultancies also have digital offerings already in house.

2. Skills shortage

The biggest skills needed right now, based on what I’m seeing in SA and some learnings last month in London, are skills working with data. This is applicable for both agencies and marketers. These aren’t traditional skills to learn and what was heard in London is that agencies ( and marketers ) are directly sourcing people from universities with the ideal mathematical and logic qualifications. Training subsequently happens within the work environment.

3. Digital marketing growth

Growth in digital marketing is about 45–60% globally, albeit off a small base, and I believe that this is going to continue to grow exponentially over the next 10 years. The amount of staff in agencies, I think, isn’t going to grow much at all, and agency size in terms of numbers of people will become less of a benchmark. Traditional agency growth is more in the area of 4% globally.

4. In-house agencies

With ‘in-housing of agencies’ becoming more and more popular, we might start seeing three different types of structures:

  1. Agencies as they are now but possibly not as large — the numbers are not going to grow as they did previously. Data and machine learning might mean that there’s less need for as many staff.
  2. Agencies that are built in-house for clients by their agencies — staffed and run by agencies — and those staff will remain on the agency’s payroll
  3. In-house agencies where the staff are employed by the client company — and with some external assistance from a traditional agency

5. Data control

Marketers want to keep control of their own data and this could be another reason for more ‘in-housing of agencies’. Some marketers who’ve allowed their agencies to have access to and control their data are now taking back control of that data.

6. Buyouts

The days of the holding groups buying up owner-operated agencies at inflated prices and five-year earnouts are over. Future ‘purchases’ will be more likely to have a shares component, rather than cash, and agency founders will not only be required to stay on board but will be encouraged to be part of the growth and stability, as well as keeping an entrepreneurial flair in the business.

7. Leadership

Marketers are looking for strong leadership in agencies and they know that agency founders and CEOs of their own agencies are often the strongest leaders. Startups with big names (lots of experience) will become more common in SA eg in the UK, Electric Blue (John Hegarty), Uncommon (top three at Grey London), and the founders of Adam & Eve who’re starting yet another agency in 2020.

See also

 

Johanna McDowellJohanna McDowell (@jomcdowell) is MD of the Independent Agency Search and Selection Company (IAS), which is partnered with the AAR Group in the UK. Johanna is one of the few experts driving this mediation and advisory service in SA and globally. She also runs the IAS Marketers Masterclass, a programme consisting of masterclasses held in Cape Town and in Johannesburg. Twice a year she attends AdForum Worldwide Summits.

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Q5: Changing the words we use about Africa, with Mimi Kalinda [interview]

by Carey Finn (@carey_finn) Mimi Kalinda (@MKalinda) is group CEO and co-founder of the Africa Communications Media Group (ACG). Passionate about African markets and the narratives in and around them, she shares insights about the power of the stories we tell.

Q5: You know this continent inside out. Which markets would you identify as key, going into 2020?
Mimi Kalinda: Oh, if only it were that simple! Africa is not homogenous and, as such, different markets offer different value-adds. The whole continent is bursting with opportunity and it is time that we deflect from thinking certain markets have more to offer than others. It also depends on the industry. I recently spent some time in Equatorial Guinea and was impressed at infrastructure development and innovation in the health sector. If one wants to take a traditionalist approach, Kenya, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire are markets to keep an eye on. Much has already been said about Rwanda — and for good reason — especially if investors are interested in the tech and MICE [meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions] industries.

Q5: You’re a fan of narratives. In your opinion, what are the most-powerful and -problematic narratives running through those key African markets?
MK: As I mentioned earlier, I do not subscribe to the notion of “key” markets and that is why our company ACG has a footprint across the continent. However, I will say that problematic narratives are rife and one of the narratives we’re all concerned about now is the one about xenophobia and Afrophobia. These are sometimes very simplistic, and without local, regional and global context. We need to be careful to give them their due intellectual consideration, because the issues that surround these narratives have very real consequences on people’s lives. The other narrative, which is thankfully changing, is the one about the lack of excellence when it comes to African products, services and leadership. We’re seeing a critical mass of Africans (particularly young people) who are proving that — that the narrative is not only outdated and untrue but utterly ridiculous as well.

Q5: You say that a country’s image and branding can impact its GDP. Can you give us examples of African countries or regions whose branding efforts are bearing fruit?
MK: At the risk of sounding biased [as I’m half-Rwandan and half DRC], Rwanda comes to mind. Just in 2016, Rwanda was ranked 42nd and second-best country in Africa to do business in the Mara Foundation’s Ashish J. Thakkar Global Entrepreneurship Index report. Rwanda has a very public and painful past which adversely affected the nation’s economic prospects. The Rwandan government and people made a deliberate decision that they would not allow a single story to be told about the country. Through much effort, including communications and storytelling, they were able to raise the reputation equity of Rwanda, making it one of the most-desirable destinations on the continent to do business today. I think Rwanda is a great example of how image and branding (supporting concrete action, of course) can impact tourism, investment and ultimately, GDP.

Q5: You’ve expressed concerns about the use of the word “empowerment” when it comes to women in adland. What language (and stories) do you think we should be using instead?
MK: Empowerment denotes a situation where one is already at a disadvantage and, when you think of it that way, it’s actually a disempowering concept. I think we should use words like “mentor”, “teach” and “inform” because, really, that’s what is at the core of any “empowerment” exercise.

Q5: How can young women in the advertising, marketing and communications industry rise to become role models for future generations?
MK: Just like young women in any other industry: operate with integrity, honesty and a great work ethic.

  • Find out more about Kalinda on LinkedIn.

See also

 

Carey FinnCarey Finn (@carey_finn) is a writer and editor with a 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. As a contributing writer to MarkLives.com, her regular column “Q5” hones in on strategic insights, analysis and data through punchy interviews with inspiring professionals in diversive fields.

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An Accountant in Adland: The greatest storyline ever told [S2 E1]

by Siwe Thusi (@Siwe_Thusi) “Laaaaa la lalala la lalalaaa…. Laaaaa la lala la lalaaaa…” OK, if you didn’t pick up my attempt to sound out the theme song of Game of Thrones (GoT), it’s either I’m really bad at it or your post-traumatic stress is alive and well. But bear with me for about 800 words, give or take.

I love series. In most of the stories told today by the writers at Netflix or Showmax, art imitates life, and we all know that ilife yi’moooooooovie mfwethu.

Even though I have watched a few more series after GoT, I realised recently that nothing has gripped me quite as much as GoT did. I must confess, though, that I only started season one in February 2019; I was part of that group who jumped on the train with a two-month binge-watching strategy. A lot was packed into such a short space of time but rather that than the pain of a nine-year tease.

DISCLAIMER: Before you continue, what you’re about to read is packed with spoilers if you haven’t watch GOT — so be warned. Right, let’s continue.

The beauty of a plot twist

My life has had a lot of plot twists (if you’ve ever had the course of your life change dramatically, you’ve had at least one, too). A plot twist is really just the storytelling equivalent of an insight manifesting itself. It’s the reveal of something you didn’t see coming, that thing that was bubbling under the surface all this time.

Then there is dramatic irony. Dramatic irony is unfair because it gives us, as viewers, more context than the characters themselves. Much like real life does.

One of the first memorable plot twists in the storyline was the Red Wedding. Preceding that was the fact that the Starks were actually winning the war. No one was expecting the bloodbath that happened. What was very prevalent in GoT, especially in the earlier seasons, was don’t back anyone. The biggest takeout that the writers got right was twofold: “don’t believe in/back anyone” and “don’t have any expectations”.

This is interesting, because screenwriters/series writers usually want you to fall in love with a certain character or dark horse. For the first time in my recollection, a team of writers was set on intentionally doing the opposite.

Something that stood out about the writers and their writing is that women are in the fore, unlike your Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, which were both very male-dominated. A Game of Thrones, the first book in the series, A Song of Ice and Fire, was first published in 1996 by George RR Martin, a man. He must have been thinking differently even way back then. It was reincarnated as the TV series Game of Thrones in 2011, by David Benioff and DB Weiss, a team of male writers. I think craft-wise, the biggest plot twist was that the whole story was carried by women. They all wrote from the leading thought of: How do you take the femininity of a woman and make it rise above everything?

  • Daenerys Targaryen/Khaleesi had a soft heart that had to become hardened over time in some aspects but remained soft because of the ability to love unconditionally.
  • Sansa Stark was soft and presented as weak when we met her but became Little Finger’s understudy: a mentally strong and alliance-strategic woman with a deep love for her family name.
  • Cersei also had a soft heart, believe it or not. Because it was always held captive by her children.
  • Arya Stark also endured seeing her father executed to being held prisoner. She was the only one clever enough in the art of battle to outwit the Night King. John Snow was not. He wasn’t a face-to-face fighter like Arya was. He had honour, valor and all those things that became his barrier to success. Arya had get-it-done as her only strategy. A female destroyed the night king. Not killed, destroyed. Because, by destroying him, she also obliterated an entire army.

To watch the journey of Daenerys/Khaleesi evolve into her father, the Mad King, was a plot twist that became painful, because you were hoping that she wouldn’t become like her father. Again, expectation. Similarly, she became who she became because of an unconditional love for someone.

The expression of love in GoT is what drives people to do crazy things to the brink of insanity or to uphold your family name.

Other plot twists: John Snow was the only person to die and rise again. Theon Greyjoy (my favourite) was the catalyst needed for the Night King’s distraction and demise. Tyrion Lannister was the master of alliance. Bran Stark was the rightful heir to the throne at the end, and no one ever saw that coming. In fact, the whole 44.2m-strong viewer jury is still out when it comes to Bran. *rolls eyes*

Plot twists are ultimately insights that change the course of storylines.

A plot twist needs names

What was also quite striking about GoT was surnames — personal branding. The character surnames were what connected and divided the Seven Kingdoms. If you were a Lannister, if you were a Greyjoy, a Stark… you were expected to act in a certain way and stand for your name.

It’s much like the Trump surname is something bad now but the plot twist here is that Trump was a good surname once. A surname seen as aspirant in black hoods wanting “Trump money”. And a surname that hung out with rappers. How did the affinity to the Trump name change? It was changed by its context and everything that’s happened in between.

For me, strategy is storytelling.

In a piece by Martin Weigel, he suggests that, without conflict, friction, tension, danger, there’s no such thing as (or need for) strategy. Further, he references the words of the military historian, Prof Lawrence Freedman: “Strategy only comes into being when there is a sense of actual or imminent instability, a changing context that induces a sense of conflict… Strategy therefore starts with an existing state of affairs and only gains meaning by an awareness of how, for better or worse, it could be different.”

This is embodied in a state of “jeopardy” that exists in all storylines.

At its core, a storyline is this:

Reflection (where we are today), ambition (the tomorrow we could have), jeopardy (the challenge we must overcome), hope (the insight that gives us a way through) and finally solution (the idea that unlocks the way through).

What GoT brilliantly did was to also make us understand the user journey, and how characters developed over a nine-year period. That’s a total of 115 hours/6900 minutes/414 000 seconds of average viewing time (the accountant brain has just had a Tourette’s moment).

The really interesting thing about thinking about life in this way is that it allows room for our own individual reflections to occur:

  • What scene am I in right now?
  • What’s my next plot twist?
  • Do I recognise dramatic irony in my own life?

And whose movie or series am I in, anyway?

 

Siwe ThusiSiwelile Thusi (@Siwe_Thusi) is a qualified South African chartered-accountant-turned-creative-strategist who’s just joined M&C Saatchi Abel from FCB Joburg. She is 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. She contributes the monthly column “An Accountant in Adland” — exploring where, when and how the two ‘disciplines’ overlap… and why they should! — to MarkLives.com.

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#BigQNarratives: SA adland can’t champion what it doesn’t understand

by MarkLives (@marklives) Is adland embracing an African narrative? Are South African advertising agencies and brands embracing an authentically African narrative and aesthetic or do they continue to imitate American and European work? What can agencies, and brands, do to shift the paradigm towards embracing a unique creative identity that speaks to our African roots? Next in our panel to tackle this question is Avatar‘s Veli Ngubane.

Veli Ngubane

Veli NgubaneVeli Ngubane (@TheNduna) entered the world of advertising with a passion after completing his BSocSci (law, politics and economics) at UCT and a post-graduate marketing diploma at Red & Yellow, where he’s currently advisory board chairman. He also sits on the IAB’s Transformation & Education Council, is a DMA board member and Loeries, APEX, Pendoring, Bookmarks and AdFocus. He is the group MD of AVATAR and co-founder of M&N Brands, which is building an African network of agencies to rival the global giants.

This isn’t an article about xenophobia, as this is a complex economic and social issue; however, it’s necessary to briefly explore it as I start discussing African creativity in contrast to the ad industries obsession with imitating North American and European work. South African agencies and brands continue to imitate and celebrate international work as they have no exposure to, and many don’t have the desire to, explore Africa in an authentic way because of historical factors.

Africa is not a country and therein lies the complexity of developing work, as a creative has to be immersed in the diverse countries and regions in order to develop culturally relevant work. SA creatives suffer from translating the insights from a ‘tourist’ perspective and mindset. It’s the equivalent of frequenting Vilakazi Street and thinking that you have insights into Soweto and the black township market in its entirety.

Is it xenophobia or Afrophobia?

Xenophobia is defined as the ‘dislike of or the prejudice against people from other countries’, yet the recent spate of violence has been an attack solely on fellow Africans and not an attack of Americans or Europeans, so it’s more about ‘Afrophobia’ than it is about disliking people from other countries. If we, as a society, have been conditioned to dislike, prejudice and look down on the rest of the continent through years of colonial, social, economic and apartheid conditioning in how we relate to the rest of Africa, then how do we, in the next breath, look to the rest of the continent for creative inspiration, if we don’t start ridding ourselves of prejudice and ignorance?

Adland has to accept that we’re part of the continent of Africa, and become inquisitive about learning the cultures, aesthetics, languages and business rhythms of the continent in order to immerse ourselves in a new way of working. It starts with breaking the conditioned and uneducated perceptions of Africa and its people before we’re able to start championing African creativity.

It’s time to tell the African story

SA agencies and the people that run these agencies have been excluded from the African story because the apartheid system instilled nationalist values that positioned the rest of the continent as enemies, inferior and backward to America and Europe. This position was entrenched by our limited education system. In my history class, I learnt more of what had happened in Nazi Germany than the great history of our own continent. In my language subject options, I didn’t have the option to learn another African language such as Kiswahili or Amharic.

African stories and histories need to be a vital part of the school curriculum, including African languages that are spoken elsewhere. To tell and celebrate Africa, we need to equip ourselves with the knowledge of our continent as a base to own and narrate the future.

I recently visited some ‘African’ museums in Italy focusing on the artifacts and historic mathematical innovation from advanced African civilisation. Besides being shocked and defeated by how much rich history was stolen from African, I was inspired to learn more about the continent as a source of innovation and creative inspiration. So, it’s definitely time to tell the African story — not the one told by the colonisers who stole the narrative but the one that talks of the greatness and significance of the history and the continent.

Transformation and diversity in the advertising industry

An untransformed industry that lacks diversity can’t champion African creativity. The foreign ownership and English-speaking, middle-aged-white-male-run dominance of a majority of our SA ad agencies make it difficult for those agencies to embrace and celebrate our cultures in the different countries on the continent, and the lack of diversity impacts on the flavour of the work as the untransformed creative departments mostly have international references and knowledge of creativity. Even if there are local hires, the culture of these agencies doesn’t allow them to fully celebrate African creativity as there’s already a template of what great creativity looks like, based on international reference.

I know most people who undervalue the negative impact of an untransformed ad industry are tired of hearing about transformation and diversity in the industry but their importance can’t be discounted, especially if we still have adverts such as “Inkukhu”.

We advocate all the time for black creatives to start their own agencies. It’s no longer enough to have black faces on your credentials video; it’s about giving them enough power to narrate an authentic African story with real insight.

Part of the solution is more African startups that collaborate in creating a creative ecosystem on the continent. We need more African brands that are created by and for the African continent, and more transformed mindsets in the internationally owned brands. We need to up the diversity and continue to promote transformation in order to lay a strong foundation in championing African creativity and exporting it to the rest of the world.

Africa’s time is now!

All over the continent, from Nairobi, Kampala, Kigali, Maputo, Lagos, Addis Ababa, Gaborone, Accra to Dakar, I’ve been lucky to witness the explosive growth of African creativity. The youngest continent with the oldest history is finally taking its rightful seat at owning the story and creative potential of the continent. SA agencies will be left behind in this revolution if they carry on excluding themselves from the continent or participate in the current form of exporting their ignorance and prejudice to African countries which, over the years, has damaged the reputation of SA agencies in the rest of Africa. There needs to be an effort to learn the languages, aesthetics and cultures of Africa.

As a first step, SA agencies need to start exposing their creatives to the rest of the continent as a source of inspiration in championing African creativity. SA agencies and brands need to partner and collaborate with more local creatives and agencies across the continent to achieve success and benefit from its future growth in the creative economy.

See also

 

MarkLives logoLaunched in 2016, “The Big Q” is a regular column on MarkLives in which we ask key advertising and marketing industry execs for their thoughts on relevant issues facing the industry. If you’d like to be part of our pool of panellists, please contact editor Herman Manson via email (2mark at marklives dot com) or Twitter (@marklives). Suggestions for questions are also welcomed.

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Clicks ’n Tricks: Crafting a winning digital marketing award entry

by Charlie Stewart (@CStewart_ZA) Having recently returned from another year of judging a very mixed bag of Assegai entries, I thought it’d be useful to offer some pointers as to what constitutes a winning award submission. Hopefully, this will help some of you pick up more silverware and, in the process, provide some relief to the judges’ tension headaches.

The local award season’s in full swing. With the Loeries having come and gone, we’re now at the sharp point of the year where performance takes over from creativity and the quality of our industry’s output is validated against the hard currency of results. This is the time that the Assegais and The Bookmarks take centre-stage.

Effing great news

In a real boost for results-oriented marketing, we can also look forward to our very own South African Effies from next year, following the ACA’s decision to shutter the APEX awards and align itself with the world’s preeminent industry awards.

Aside from my own musings, this column also draws on some great guidance from the pugnacious marketing professor, Mark Ritson, and insights from the IAB’s recent podcast series, Work That Wins.

1. Fit for purpose

First up, make sure your entry’s fit for purpose. If you’re going to spend time and agency cash putting a submission together, do it properly. Most awards follow a fairly standard format and ask for insights into your strategy, your creativity and your results. It’s really not a tough recipe to follow yet, in my experience, it’s one that only about 20% of entries manage to nail.

In a supporting feature to his regular Marketing Week column, Ritson has spent the past couple of months unpacking the Effies, which is now in its 50th year. He’s reviewed a staggering 9 000 entries to distill the attributes of an effective campaign. It comes down to doing the basics well — expressing the problem marketing’s looking to solve before outlining the strategic insight that’ll tackle the challenge and progressing into the tactics and creativity that’ll deliver the desired results. With most awards applying a broadly even weighting to the three key considerations, he advocates taking a balanced approach where you aim to demonstrate real competency in each area, instead of trying to shoot the lights out in one.

2. Work that wins in digital

His guidance is echoed in an excellent podcast series that the local IAB is currently curating.

The first episode, Work That Wins in Digital, featured Clare Trafankowska, head of digital for Carat South Africa and DentsuX, and Ernst van der Merwe, integrated creative director at Ogilvy Johannesburg. In the initial segment they tackle performance campaigns which, because they often rely on smart insights rather than conventional creative, must show meaningful innovation to win.

3. Beyond housekeeping

And innovation doesn’t mean using a tool such as Google My Business to deliver results. Optimising a retailer’s physical stores to appear in location-based search results is standard housekeeping and is not award-worthy. Innovation, they stress, comes from applying critical strategic thinking to business challenges.

As an example, one SEO campaign removed a client’s phone number from search results. This encouraged customers to visit its online self-service portal and saved the organisation millions in call-centre support costs.

4. Show me the money

As well as showing a novel insight or use of tech, entries — particularly in performance categories — need quantifiable business metrics. It’s infuriating to judge submissions that speak of growth in traffic, clickthrough rates or even leads, as these mean little if there isn’t a direct correlation with revenue generation. This, after all, is the single purpose of most marketing interventions.

5. Seeing is believing

Please, please make it visual. Ideally, put together a video that distills the campaign’s key points. At a minimum, incorporate design elements into your entry. While judges try as hard as they can to really analyse every piece they look at, if you’re reviewing 50+ submissions a day, work that’s easy to digest stands out.

6. Involve the client

I know agencies often obfuscate over this point but I like seeing some client involvement in entries. Judges have to take work at face value and there have been many times when unsubstantiated claims have set my bull-o-meter oscillating. Incorporating a brief testimonial — and I mean no more than a few words — from the marketing director provides credibility and delivers an assurance that the work submitted (probably) aired.

7. Bring out the pedant

Every team has one, and proofreading award entries is a great way for the pedant in your midst to shine. While I’ve never knowingly marked a submission down because it’s full of typos, it does create a subconscious perception that the agency’s not that invested in the campaign.

8. Customise to the category

Lastly, avoid my pet peeve. If you’re going to submit the same campaign to multiple categories (in the era of integrated marketing, there’s often good reason to do so), then tailor each entry to the specific criteria of the category you’re putting it into.

~•~•~

Follow these tips and you might get a little closer to some metal. But, if you plan to submit your work, remember that awards are intended to inspire us by recognising excellence, not mediocrity. At this year’s Bookmarks, only 18% of entries made the cut.

 

Charlie StewartCharlie 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. A Scot by birth, he moved to South Africa in the early 2000s in his quest to support a winning rugby team — a search he’s reluctantly forsaken. 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 monthly “Clicks ‘n Tricks” column, which looks at how brands are using digital channels to engage their customers, to MarkLives.

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#AgencyFocus: Swipe iX tranforms businesses through digitising ideas

by Sabrina Forbes. Swipe iX is a specialist software development agency, based in Cape Town, that offers full-stack web and mobile development, DevOps and systems architecture, user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design, technology consulting, and emerging technologies. Co-founders Leo Redelinghuys (@leored) and Deon Heunis (@deonheunis) were previously at Media24’s innovation unit, Touchlab, but five years ago decided to forge their own path with a handful of developers.

Swipe iX work examplesFirst challenge

Soccer Laduma, one of the biggest soccer publications with a mobisite that’s often in the top 10 most-visited sites in South Africa, became their first client, following them from the Naspers stable. With 90% of its mobile traffic coming from users using low-end devices, this was the first challenge the Swipe iX team faced: catering to a client on a very mobile-focused display.

Soon after inception, the agency started working with Primedia on Eyewitness News (EWN), on all the mobisites. To date (at the time of the interview), the agency has never lost a retainer client, although it’s turned away potential business.

Two years into the business, Hendri Lategan (@00hendri) —ex-Creative Spark, OnNet, and Lima Bean — joined. A year prior, he too had gone the entrepreneur route with longtime friend, Kyle Hauptfleisch, and launched Barbarossa Media. When the opportunity presented itself to become CEO at Swipe iX, he decided to merge the two and have the content marketing business as an addon service. However, it wasn’t long until they realised that this would detract from the core of what Swipe iX is all about — web, mobile, and system development — and cut it; according to Lategan, very often in this industry there’s a siren call to become a full-service agency and it’s easy to get entangled.

Hendri Lategan
Hendri Lategan, Swipe iX CEO. Supplied.

Focus

Lategan’s focus the past three years has been improving the agency’s scoping and planning methods to not just understand a client’s business but its customers and to create products to better serve them, which, in turn, can potentially upsell existing clients to bring in more revenue. He believes there is so much opportunity here that’s being missed.

An example of this is work done for the DStv mobisite, which expanded into development on the full portfolio and original production, and then into the development of the underlying technology of voting systems for shows such as Idols and The Voice. It’s the unglamourous side of development, he says, but highlights providing solutions vs merely creating platforms. Strategically, he prefers to work in partnership with clients, testing and focusing together on constantly improving products instead of coming in like a hot rash, developing, and vanishing without a trace. He sees the value in moving up the value chain and having a seat at the table.

“We’re not just developers in the basement anymore,” says Lategan. “DStv was a great example of that. Previously, they had all 13 of these channel sites (Big Brother, Mzansi [Magic], M-Net, Africa Magic etc) as different WordPress installs with their own CMS, flavours, code bases, and infastructure. We took that entire ecosystem and we merged it into a centralised CMS platform and, from there, you can develop all the functionality and widget formats once and then roll it out to the different sites almost instantaneously. You can spit out an entirely new site in a couple of days. It also reduced the client’s cost of having to maintain all these different platforms and now all the journalists work from one central platform.”

Dev is often seen as a grudge purchase, he says, and he’s had people admit that they’ve simply viewed their dev team as the mystifying ones who sit in the corner, holding all the cards. This has given developers and development companies a bad reputation.

Systems-oriented

As Swipe iX has evolved, it’s found itself much more systems-oriented. A partnership with a Swedish internet of things (IoT) company, MOST, which has hardware devices on shipping containers for measuring shocks, luminosity, and heat, has introduced it to a whole new world of data. A dashboard has been created that handles the data in a far more consumable style, with plans of adding in machine-learning capability to extract best-route patterns and higher risk areas etc.

For Lategan, this feeds into his future vision of making use of data to improve experiences: “People don’t see data like a design tool but it actually is. It does help you make better sense of how to design the interface of products in a much more-effective way, how to make better use of what you’re getting out of it, understanding the user better, better discovery, and better recommendations. It gets you to a point where you can actually identify the user’s behavioural statistics in such a way that you can actually serve them the content they want in a unique way but still in a public-facing environment.”

Fast prototyping and getting minimal viable products (MVPs) out quickly is something Swipe pride itself on and cloud innovation partnerships, such as the one it has with Amazon Web Services (AWS), enables this. AWS has a library of easily plugged-in cloud-based solutions, eg machine-learning components that can be used for natural voice processing or facial recognition. Processes like these allow Swipe iX to process client data more effectively.

“We are able to, through the cloud innovation unit that we’ve established, go to businesses and ask them what [their main challenges are]. They’re always sitting on a big list of these things, stuff like customer engagement, loyalty or queue lengths — or even something as innocuous as improving the access control of their building[s],” says Lategan, adding that, by plugging into the opportunities within AWS, the agency has been able to build rapid, functional prototypes within a matter of weeks.

Swipe iX logo
swipeix.com
Ramify Profile

  • Office locations: Cape Town
  • Revenue band: R20–30m
  • Staff count: 30–40
  • Key clients: MultiChoice, Media24, Shoprite, Primedia, Capitec, Discovery Channel
  • Services: Fullstack web & mobile development, UX & UI design, product strategy & digital transformation, cloud architecture, DevOps

Updated at 9.51am on 14 October 2019.

 

Sabrina Forbes“#Agency/BrandFocus” is an ongoing weekly series updating the market on ad agency performance, including business performance, innovation, initiatives, the work, awards and people.

Sabrina Forbes (IG) is an experienced writer covering the food, health, lifestyle, beverage, marketing and media industries. She runs her own full-stack web/app development and digital-first content creation company. For more, go to moonwrench.com. She is a contributing writer to MarkLives.com.

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