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Bye bye, Britannica

by Arthur Goldstuck The end of an era arrived last week as the much-revered Encyclopaedia Britannica ceased print publication.

It is the end of the beginning of the end. Encyclopaedia Britannica, arguably the most famous compendium of all human knowledge, will no longer be produced in printed form.

The obituary of the printed book, delivered last Wednesday, was upbeat: “After 244 years in print, the 32-volume Encyclopaedia Britannica will be discontinued, but the encyclopedia will live on and grow in the myriad digital forms which have been popular with millions for years.”

Those who shed a nostalgic tear for this all-in-one library are invariably the same people whose parents acquired a set from a travelling salesman knocking at their door. So costly was the investment, most families would buy only the one set. Ever. And never update it again. That made the Britannica a wonderful source of historic information, but practically useless for keeping up with human knowledge.

Don’t weep for its owners, though. They began the transition to digital editions at the dawn of the commercial Internet, producing a CD-Rom version in the 1990s – a few brief years after their sales peaked at 120 000 sets. Today, the print edition makes up less than 1% of the publisher’s income. The saddest statistic of all is that, for the 2010 edition – the last one in print – only 8000 sets were sold, and a further 4000 languish in warehouses.

But let’s put in perspective what we have lost in print: an encyclopaedia updated a couple of times a decade, costing more than R10 000 for the set, and containing around 70 000 articles. In short: expensive, dated and – compared to online resources – limited.

The online edition has more than 120 000 articles, costs less than R1000 for an annual subscription – the ad-supported version is free – and includes video, audio and links to related publications and material.

What’s to mourn? A business model that has not made sense for well over a decade?

Let’s look at the other extreme: Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, contains more than 3,5-million articles, and is updated daily. Following controversies about the accuracy of Wikipedia, Nature magazine conducted a study, and found more errors in a sample of Britannica articles than in a similar sample from Wikipedia.

The only real tears that are shed for the big set of books are by interior decorators who bought old sets cheap to make home and corporate libraries look established and serious.

Clearly, it is the symbolic meaning of this death that is more significant than the demise of a publishing tradition. Britannica first saw print in 1768, a year that in a way represents the democratisation of human knowledge. While only accessible to the wealthy, it gradually made its way into public libraries and ordinary homes, opening up all of history, science and nature to the masses – albeit from a British-centric perspective.

The beginning of the end of the first era of knowledge democracy came in 1989, when Compton’s published the first CD-ROM encyclopedia. They were followed by Grolier, fortuitously just as CD drives began arriving as a standard component of computers, turning Grolier into the digital equivalent of Britannica.

Microsoft saw the light, and climbed into the knowledge bed with Funk & Wagnalls to produce Encarta. By the mid-1990s, you could hardly buy a Microsoft product or a multimedia PC without Encarta being included in the bundle. Britannica had called it correctly when they refused to be Microsoft’s encyclopaedia partner, for fear of it killing print sales: Funk & Wagnalls dumped their print edition just a few years later.

The CD-ROM was, however, only a stopgap on the road to universal access to knowledge. The death knell of the printed encyclopaedia was really sounded on 23 January 1993, when the first Internet browser with a graphical user interface, NCSA Mosaic, was released. The team behind it put their expertise into Netscape Navigator, which spurred Microsoft to develop Internet Explorer, and which also became the ancestor of the Firefox browser.

Thanks to the browser, all knowledge was potentially a single click away, rather than via the equivalent of a home mortgage.

The browser killed the encyclopaedia, and for that we can be grateful.

* Arthur Goldstuck heads up World Wide Worx (www.worldwideworx.com) and is editor-in-chief of Gadget. Follow him on Twitter on @art2gee. Reprinted from Gadget.

Creating happiness part of the job at thirtyfour

by Herman Manson Often, when speaking to agency MDs and creative directors from many of the traditional flagships of South African advertising, the name of some specialist below-the-line agency would come up, and the conversation, flowing so easily around the currents of industry gossip but moments before, would grind to a halt.

“I’ve never seen any of their work.” And I would go, “But you have…”

Below-the-line and digital (which increasingly serves as a retail space itself) are increasingly going hand-in-hand and is where ever larger chunks of marketing budgets are flowing at a rapidly increasing pace.

Andrew Sutcliffe, founder and MD of thirtyfour, explains that BTL is about an “idea born in the retail space to drive sales and build brand equity.” Ideas born in the retail space is the important bit there – ideas which are then implemented across a 360-degree media strategy.

What’s not to love about driving sales and building brand equity in one go? Many marketing departments have been asking that same question, and quite a number of significant recent account wins have been handed to agencies based on their BTL credentials (and even been lost where agencies perfectly adept at BTL showcased their ATL credentials instead).

Where the money goes, adland follows (eventually), and agencies across the board are investing heavily in becoming digitally adept, while also building BTL capabilities. Watch this space for some interesting developments on that front in the near future – but back to thirtyfour.

The rocky economy has played a part in shifting budget to BTL specialists, focused as they are on sales, and more, selling stuff in measurable ways. What used to be a tactical tool has evolved into a strategic one and is no longer relegated to the ‘kiddy table’ in advertising’s unofficial hierarchy, as Sutcliffe puts it.

Sutcliffe had founded an agency called Ignition in the UK which he later sold to Omnicom. Ignition Claydon Heeley, as it was then called, would later still merge with the UK arm of its sister Omnicom agency Alcone Marketing, with Sutcliffe as joint CEO. At the time of the merger, the combined agency had, according to BrandRepublic, billings of around £25m and clients included Scottish Courage and Wimpy.

By 2006, Sutcliffe – who was born in Kenya and had longed to return to the continent – had landed in South Africa. At the time, the local market was still lagging Europe and US in marketing best practice by 2-3 years. With the 2010 FIFA World Cup only a couple of years away, he saw a gap and launched thirtyfour, a reference to 34 Degrees South, the line of latitude running through Cape Town.

His first client would only knock on his door six months later.

The main agency, thirtyfour, would be joined by specialist units 34Sport, launched three years ago, to optimise sport sponsorships in the retail environment; 34Women, launched two years ago and focused on the female market; and 34 one2one, which soft-launched a couple of weeks ago and focuses on integrating digital, social, CRM and events.

Altogether, the agency has nine clients representing 57 brands. This includes all the BTL work for Coca-Cola’s brands (Coke, Fanta, Sprite etc), SABMiller, which was its first client, and where it works on Carling Black Label, Hansa Pilsener and Castle Lager, as well as Redd’s, McDonalds, Kimberly-Clark, Clover, Foodcorp, Johnson + Johnson, Capitec and Beam-e.

Core pillars of the thirtyfour service includes retail and shopper marketing, direct and data, digital and social media, sponsorships and experiential.

Sutcliffe and his team are still celebrating the huge success of their campaign for Coca-Cola’s recent 125-year celebrations (held last year), which included cash and airtime prizes and a daily game show on e.tv. Sutcliffe attributes its success to the marriage of BTL mechanics with ATL awareness.

Coke subsequently indicated that the campaign had set the bar for everything it does locally in the promotional space moving forward.

For SABMiller’s Castle Lager, it created a hugely successful campaign around the 2007 Rugby World Cup, an event Castle could claim no association with due to a sponsorship by Heineken. But Castle was still an official sponsor of the Boks.

Fans would buy a beer and receive a game card, then watch the game, and if your player (as per the game card) scored in a specific match, you won cash, potentially to the tune of millions. A “scrum pack” containing eight beers was also launched. The campaign achieved a 30% redemption rate and lifted sales for Castle by a staggering 264%.

More recently, for a campaign for Hansa Pilsener, it created the Hansa’s Legends in the Making music tour which invited local music legends such as Malaika, Liquideep, Teargas and HHP to expose new talent (including Futuresound, Ntando and Zuluboy) on a nationwide concert tour with rapper Pharrell Williams and his band N*E*R*D.
No tickets were on sale; fans had to buy a Hansa to enter and win tickets, or enter and win on air in a radio campaign.

The resulting album reached platinum status and the campaign contributed to Hansa being voted by consumers as the top beer brand for 2011. Some 40 000 people also attended the concert tour.

Success on such a scale has brought thirtyfour more business; the staff count has jumped 110% year on year to 62 people; and agency revenue has grown to R37 million in 2011, up 145% from 2010 (projections for 2012 so far puts revenues at R45 million and staff at 80-85). The agency has been classified a Level 1 B-BBEE contributor.

A client service office has been set up Johannesburg, where around 87% of thirtyfour business resides, servicing clients such as Coca-Cola, but the heart of the business very much resides in the spacious, beautifully designed Longkloof Studio, Cape-Town-based offices of the agency .

Sutcliffe says the agency is committed to creating a professional environment that ensures it stays “the people with the best people”. Ongoing training opportunities, a decent work environment, monthly ‘share-and tell’ sessions with staff to provide feedback on the state of the business, a ‘happiness measurement’ tool that has staff score the agency in various categories, and job swops with agencies in Europe are some of the steps implemented to ensure the business lives up to its promises to employees.

And, if you’ve been there for five years, you are rewarded with a five-week sabbatical.

Its client list, impressive track record and growth forecasts mean thirtyfour is gaining in profile among clients and rivals. Strongly positioned in a sector that many formerly ATL-focused agencies are only now giving its due attention, expect increased competition but also better name recognition as BTL and digital shifts in client and industry minds from ‘less important’ to, frankly, ‘all important.

Originally published on Bizcommunity.com Marketing & Media | South Africa – click to see more comments.

Listen before you jump into social, says Diane Charton

by Herman Manson Acceleration Media is an old hand at the digital media game. It was launched as a specialist online media company more than 12 years ago, at a point in time when everybody was talking about the potential of online media but when advertisers were not nearly as invested in the medium as they are today.

It brought DoubleClick’s ad serving technology to the country and built the initial business around servicing this technology, both in South Africa and abroad. The media-planning and -buying business itself would grow slowly.

Its international expansion on the technology-servicing side meant that, in 2006, the founding partners decided to split the company in two, with Acceleration eMarketing, which still operates independently from the UK, and Acceleration Media, the media solutions-focused local business, which was bought out in a joint venture between Kagiso Media and Lagardère Active Radio International (LARI), a division of French holding company and media firm Lagardère.

But before the sale to Kagiso and LARI, they appointed Diane Charton (@DiCharton) as MD to make their media asset attractive to buyers. Charton had a degree in civil engineering before studying for a BComm, had been active on the marketing side at the engineering firms she was working for and then joined United Stations, which sold advertising space on radio stations. Finally, she joined the Old Shanghai Firecracker Factory under Gail Curtis and from there made the leap to Acceleration Media.

The new owners, Kagiso and LARI (the two companies are also both shareholders in the Jacaranda 94.2 and RadMark businesses), took control of Acceleration Media in 2008. Kagiso brought with it its BEE credentials, while Lagardère offered access to international best practice.

Charton has been diversifying the business away from online media buying and planning, which still rests at the core of its offering, towards search engine marketing, online reputation management (ORM) and social media. The team has grown from four when she joined to over 30, with offices in Cape Town and Johannesburg (managed by CEO Tony Sousa). Its client list includes Brand South Africa, South African Tourism, MWeb, Wesbank, Sanlam and MiWay, among others.

According to Kagiso, Acceleration Media delivered revenue growth of 21.3% with a solid increase in operating pro?t for the 2011 financial year.

Charton says Acceleration Media’s access to data through DoubleClick’s DART solution, its ability to interpret that data and then evaluate it against strategy, is a key differentiator for the business in an increasingly competitive market. The importance of data in marketing will keep increasing, says Charton, and requires a head shift for traditional marketers on the importance of interpreting data results more thoroughly.

This is at least partly why ORM is growing so quickly. Locally, Acceleration Media are the authorised resellers of Radian6, a social media monitoring tool. Growth in ORM is also being driven by the increased social media awareness by company executives who recognise the need to listen to what customers are saying online about their brands (and those of competitors).

Charton encourages clients to use social media monitoring tools to listen first before they attempt to chart a strategy of engaging with these platforms. While they are listening, she says, they will also gather valuable data they can push through to their product development teams.

Marketers implementing campaigns this year that are similar to the ones they implemented only 12 months ago need to be beware, says Charton; the market has been changing at an incredible pace, and if you haven’t mined the data from past campaigns to improve your offer by now, you are missing opportunities.

Take the rapid growth of online video in the local market as an example. Did you know South Africans post 39 000 video clips on YouTube every month (data as of October 2011)? Thrive on change – it’s the mantra for the digital world.

Charton has set her sights on Kenya and Nigeria for expansion into the broader African market and says that, while global players such as Facebook and Twitter feature strongly, local brands are also emerging, indicating an increasingly sophisticated market in these countries. Mobile is obviously a key access device in these regions and Charton already sees quick growth in the uptake of digital apps.

Another key focus lies on effectively marrying online and offline data for clients (so taking digital data and marrying it to internal company databases, for example). This is something that needs to be handled professionally and with care for privacy and security, and Acceleration Media follows international best practice in this regard, says Charton.

Charton predicts several security and privacy breaches in the future, which will force government to tighten legislation on both counts.

But criticism should be welcomed, says Charton, as business can no longer dictate the conversation, and listening is a new skill that many corporates across various industries need to learn very quickly.

Originally published on Bizcommunity.com Marketing & Media | South Africa – click to see more comments.

Marketing insight: Why no number for the “new iPad”

by Arthur Goldstuck The new iPad has two remarkable features: a dazzling Retina Display, and a complete lack of version number. We explores what this means.

The announcement of the new iPad on last week Wednesday was the most anticipated gadget event of the year, and will probably be overshadowed only by the new iPhone when it is announced later this year.

Curiously, for a device and announcement that attracted such a frenzy of hype, the new iPad is not designed to elicit gasps of awe. Even the name is a muted echo of the previous versions: “The new iPad”. Doesn’t quite have the ring of the expected “iPad HD” or “iPad 3”, does it?

The naming – or lack thereof – makes sense, though.

When the successor to the iPhone 4 was announced late last year, the market was expecting an iPhone 5, with whiz-bang new features and nothing less than a halo to reveal the last will and testament of Steve Jobs. Instead, Apple announced the 4S, with only incremental improvements. The collective groan of disappointment was heard across the globe.

Apple isn’t going to fall for that one again. Expect the next iPhone to be, simply, the new iPhone.

Of course, that also means that future versions of Apple’s two market-leading products will also be less exciting, less hype-laden and more like business as usual.

With this week’s unveiling, a far more startling feature than the name, was its size – startling, at least, for those expecting continual evolution and revolution. The new iPad is heavier and thicker than its predecessor, even if only by a fraction of a millimeter and a few grams.

Within that reversal of the size trend, however, lurks the real leap ahead for the iPad: the greater bulk accommodates a Retina Display. That refers to a screen containing the theoretical maximum amount of detail the human retina can perceive. In practice, it means the same sharp and dazzling display as that of the iPhone 4 and 4S, which are marketed as having Retina Display screens.

Along with the screen comes high-definition video capabilities that turn the iPad into one of the most advanced video and imaging device in the world, outside of cameras themselves.

Of course, the converted will once again be lining up round the block at every Apple store in the ten countries where the new iPad will be released on 16 March. That is always bad news for the competition, which has never been able to generate an equivalent frenzy around rival tablets.

But there is good news for these rivals, as well as for consumers around the world: Apple did not raise the bar too high. Bear in mind that Apple doesn’t manufacture it’s own screens – the iPhone screens were made by LG, a rival smartphone manufacturer. The processor powering the iPad is made by Samsung, its most bitter rival in the tablet market. It’s “only” in the overall design and integration of parts that Apple has been so far ahead of its rivals.

But the new iPad reveals that Apple is no longer as unreachably far ahead as it was with the launch of the first iPad in 2010. Indeed, when the next generation of tablets from the likes of Samsung, Asus, Motorola and Lenovo are announced, they may well be better than the iPad at many of its core functions.

The proviso for their success is that the devices are priced at the same level as iPads, or lower. With the release of the new iPad, the price of the iPad 2 – a superb tablet in its own right – is being cut by $100 with immediate effect. There can be few gadgets that offer better value for money.

Equally important is the fact that, by the end of the year, a wide range of high-quality tablets will be available at reasonable prices. The new version of the Android operating system, 4.0 or Ice Cream Sandwich, will begin appearing on tablets, along with the first tablets running on the Windows 8 operating system designed specifically for these devices.

That all adds up to true choice, and we can expect market share to start spreading out across the rival makers by the end of the year. For now, though, the iPad is still the first stop for the tablet shopper .

* Arthur Goldstuck heads up World Wide Worx (www.worldwideworx.com) and is editor-in-chief of Gadget. Follow him on Twitter on @art2gee. Reprinted from Gadget.

Loerie Awards launches 2012 campaign

The latest Loerie call for entries work just broke with the theme “Viva African Creativity. Viva!” It was created by The Jupiter Drawing Room Johannesburg.

“Viva! highlights the importance of everyone coming together to do great work – marketers, architects, writers, designers, strategists, account managers, directors, photographers, illustrators and many more,” explains the launch release. “Together they create work that will form part of our region’s Creative Revolution.”

Revolutionary or a beret short? Let us know – we have a poll running on our Facebook page.

(Entries for the 2012 Loeries should be completed and submitted online at www.theloerieawards.co.za by 31 May 2012.)

Magazine covers we love (this week)!

MarkLives.com runs a regular slot featuring the best local and international magazine covers every week. We recognise well thought out, powerful and interesting (and hopefully all three in one) magazine covers and celebrate the mix of pragmatism, creativity and personal taste that created each of them. By media bloggerMediaSlutZA.

INTERNATIONAL
Wallpaper*, April 2012

Celebrating “Global Design 2012” Wallpaper* pulled out all the stops when they created room sets painted in a three-dimensional studio and using products from the territories (Germany, USA, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, Belgium and Scandinavia) featured in “Global Design 2012” to createimages representing those self same territories. The end-result is eight different covers that play a little with the mind. At first glance it looks like just another image, but on closer inspection you notice all the detail that went into these shoots … genius. They’re also selling them as posters, so for more information on those, click here.

CoverJunkie is saying that these Wallpaper covers by Noma Bar might just be their favourite covers of the year.

VICE, The Fashion Issue

I love the quirkiness off this cover with just one line “The Fashion Issue 2012”. Clean and striking Vice didn’t forget a regular dose of shock/horror/awe, all done tongue-firmly-in-cheek, and the dog is actually just too cool for words!

Factice, March 2012

If we stay on the ‘fashion front’ then I might just as well include this cover as one of my favourites. I know the guy is wearing a pink net with a crown but it all comes together in a rather beautiful colour-palette.

LOCAL
Finweek, 22 March 2012

A simple, but very effective concept that works very well with the main coverline “SA’S SUPER RICH”. Finweek’s covers are just getting smarter and better with every issue.

O, The Oprah Magazine, April 2012

This issue of Oprah Winfrey’s Magazine “O” will hit the shelves from next week but I got a glimpse of it recently and thought that it was great to see the brand take some risks. This is a gate-fold cover, and when opened, it features 9 (yes, NINE) Oprah’s dancing around on the cover. It might be a bit much but it’s definitely a keeper for any Oprah fan.

– The (for now anonymous) blogger behind MediaSlutZA knows way too much for his own good about media in South Africa. Magazines in particular. His mission is to show when South African magazines might fail, but most importantly, succeed. If you’re looking for a library about South African magazines and news, your one-stop pitstop is MediaSlutZA. #MagazinesForTheWin

– Find a cover we should know about? Tweet us @marklives and @mediaslutza

Pasting for BOZZA

by Samora Chapman Shani Judes, a Cape Town based art agent/curator has recently been slipping through borders. Traversing the entire country, pasting portraits all over Azania’s most renowned townships. If Shani were a street artist, I reckon she’d be king. But the nationwide campaign wasn’t a quest to get her name up. It was a guerrilla ad campaign for a new creative platform called BOZZA, a cellphone app that enables artists to create a profile, showcase their work and network with other creatives.

The ad campaign involved shooting portraits of regular people, then printing them out on massive pieces of paper and pasting them on every available surface in the ‘kasi. So the images were plastered across the township, and the portraits became the faces of the brand itself.

The Durban leg of the campaign focused on Umlazi, and Andrew McGibbon was commissioned to shoot the portraits. He shot over 100 portraits of members of the Umlazi community, from school children and young entrepreneurs, to wizened old ndodas.

I joined the pasting crew, lugging around litres of wallpaper glue, using my giraffe reach to slap up posters on any surface I could find. The process of putting up the posters was somewhat haphazard and guerrilla, bordering slightly on illegal. Verbal permission was granted for many of the posters pasted on shops and containers, but we pasted entire bridges, taxi ranks and municipal walls; coming at times, into direct competition with faded ANC election posters. Like a great violent clash of artistic, commercial and state forces!

The reaction from locals was mixed. One day when we were pasting a schoolgirl walked past and said proudly: “Hey that’s my sister! I’ll tell her that her picture is here.” Another old man who runs a tailoring business out of his combi said of his portrait pasted near Max’s Lifestyle tavern (the epicentre of Umlazi), “Yes I am very proud! But my wife, she said they must take it down. I think she is jealous.”

I was continuously on edge, ready to kick down like a killer on the run. If we had been doing street art in broad daylight, or pasting in the squeaky clean upper class ‘burbs of Musgrave or Morningside, there’s no way in hell we would have gotten away with it. “I’ve got a kid,” I kept moaning like a pussy. “I can’t be going to jail for this shit!”

The campaign drew a fine line between promoting ordinary people, and exploiting them for a commercial endeavour that would not necessarily benefit them in any way. But it also promoted an artistic and very transgressive approach to advertising.

We caught up with Shani Judes to find out a bit more about her experience…

Mahala: Can you explain what you do as an art agent/curator/project manager? (I’m not sure how you define your job, ‘cause you’re quite an anomaly!)

Shani Judes: I’m exactly what you said! Connector, curator, art facilitator… I try get artists good paying work and I coordinate large out door art projects.

Are you an artist yourself and how did you get into pasting?

We are all artists – my art is project management. I got into pasting by watching JR and other wheat paste artists for years and last year JR sent a team to Cape Town to do some portrait pasting. I was the project manager here on the ground, which is where I learnt how to do large-scale pastes. After that, I wanted to do something where lots of creatives could get involved so I curated a project called PASTE. I got 18 artists to design work around the theme of ‘Khayelitsha culture’ and we pasted these large scale in Khayelitsha and the city centre, hoping to create some type of artistic exchange and inclusion.

Explain the concept behind the Bozza campaign…

The idea was inspired by the Inside Out Project [a global participatory art project initiated by street artist JR… black and white photographic portraits pasted in the public domain; transforming messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic work]. Bozza came to me with a couple of ideas and together we decided to pursue this concept as I fully believe in its effects. The fact that it includes community really appeals to me and to Bozza as the client.

Bozza is a mobile app where one can gain access to local content. It’s going to be revolutionary in the townships of South Africa. As an art curator, I can now easily find artists, musicians, poets from our townships – which has previously been incredibly difficult – so I think Bozza is going to help creatives to connect to the people they usually couldn’t gain access to.

Describe the different locations… how was the vibe different in each township? Did you encounter any heavy situations, since a lot of the places you went to are generally perceived as being dangerous?

We started off with Umlazi in Durban, headed to Jo’burg to Soweto and Alex, then Bloemfontein, PE and Cape Town. All were incredibly different. Umlazi is an awesome township with loads of very cool young creatives. Soweto’s not a township at all. It’s full-on housing, malls, universities, incredible parks and community centres. With all the housing and infrastructure comes security walls like in the suburbs, so there was a real lack of community in Soweto. I didn’t hear people singing, or see the usual African culture… so westernisation is totally stripping people of their culture. Bloem and PE were uneventful and I don’t really have much to say about them!

Cape Town?

Cape Town was rad – we were in Gugs and it was funnily enough the only place we ran into a safety issue. We were by Nyanga Station which boarders the Cape Flats. My team were all facing a wall pasting and I was standing a couple of feet back when suddenly I felt my camera being lifted. So I grabbed it and turned around to find a guy from the flats trying to rob me. Here we are adding some cool art to the community and getting robbed at the same time. It really made me aware of the desperation that’s out there… and the conflict on the border between the ‘forgotten’ coloured community and the black community. The Inside Out project last year with JR focused on this racism between the black and the coloured community in Hout Bay – with BEE coming into action the coloured community can’t find work in and around the harbour ,and all the kids go to school together and don’t talk to one another because their parents are harbouring hatred and racism. South Africa has been so focused on uplifting the black community… but the coloured community gets totally forgotten about. Even when you are doing something positive in a community, there still is that desperation and you got to watch your back always.

Was this a purely commercial pursuit or do you reckon it had value as an artistic endeavour?

It’s a mix – it had its commercial value due to the fact that Bozza is new and is trying to get users, but Bozza is something for the artistic community. The project got over 20 people (both from the communities and professionals) good paying work. It brought many people together that wouldn’t have necessarily ever worked together, it taught the ambassadors how to paste, it taught me as the project manager an enormous amount about the different townships and how different people react to different projects.

Were the ‘models’ paid or was involvement voluntary? How did the photographers manage to recruit so many willing faces… did they have to explain the concept of the campaign?

The people who were photographed didn’t get paid; they had the choice to do it. The idea was to get community leaders, people who run shops, musicians and so on. Together the photographers and the ambassadors got people involved. It really was just about creating some beauty in our townships… the portraits were fun, really well shot beautiful images.

A lot of the posters in Umlazi were torn down and scratched out. Why do you think some people reacted so negatively and did anything similar happen in the other locations?

Some were torn down in Umlazi due to property owner permission. In two cases we thought the person we were talking to was the owner of the container, but it turned out they weren’t and they didn’t actually have the right to allow us to paste. The next day, the posters were torn down. So that was something on our side that could have been avoided. In Alex we had some issues with them being torn down and as far as I understand it was a political issue. Also the kids in the townships play this game to see who can pull down the most posters – so it was really a mix of things.

How were you received? Did you have any issues of language or cultural barriers?

People were generally great and welcoming. I did have difficulties with communication at times… I can’t speak Zulu or any of our other languages so it was difficult in Durban and Jo’burg. At least in Cape Town I can say a couple of words in Xhosa or Afrikaans. But I had great ambassadors from each area.

Are you still pasting? Any interesting projects currently under way?

I did a solo show for an artist in Cape Town in December and then an awesome PASTE. with the Butterfly Art Project. We had 70 children do body maps and then we pasted them in the township, so the kids got to put their art up outside in the community.

Reprinted from Mahala. Updated with an edited version as per Mahala.co.za 2012/03/21 at 8:14 am

Angry Birds and the battle for consumer hearts

by Arthur Goldstuck Most of the 67 000 delegates to the recently held Mobile World Congress in Barcelona were there to make business decisions about their future investments in smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices and applications.

But when the 2012 Global Mobile Awards were announced, few were surprised to see, among the honorees, two names that have become the mobile app equivalent of celebrities.

Angry Birds Rio, the game that inspired the movie of almost the same name (Rio), was named Best Mobile App for consumers. WhatsApp, the big new contendor for the instant messaging crown, got the gong for Best Overall Mobile App. One traditional name did elbow its way into the consumer awards, with Google Maps for Android named Best Consumer Mobile Service.

The difference between Google and the other two winners, however, is that the latter had to pull themselves up by their own virtual bootstraps. Both are success stories on different levels, and offer many lessons for start-ups in the high-tech places.

Take Angry Birds. It has been downloaded more than 500-million times, and brought in $100-million revenue in 2011 for its creator, Rovio. How does it do so well for a game that everyone is downloading for free?

It follows the classic freemium model, where a basic version of the game is free, and the premium version has a modest price tag. The price is low enough to be compelling to fans of the game, but high enough to add up to serious income when downloads go through the roof.

The second secret is that Rovio keeps building on the experience, by producing sequels that advance the internal story of these annoyed avians, and adds both interest and complexity. The games first became popular via phones running Apple’s iOS or the Android operating system. But now Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons and Angry Birds Rio are also available for Windows Phone, the Blackberry PlayBook tablet and some Nokia handsets, meaning an ever-wider market. This compares to the typical phone-based game being made only for Apple and Android devices in the USA.

The consequence of this ever-expanding user base is that Rovio’s 2011 revenue was a tenfold increase over its income for 2010, when it was also limited to those two device categories.

Of course, the true basis of Angry Birds’ success is just how compelling the games themselves become, but then that’s no secret.

WhatsApp borrows partly from the same kind of thinking that is apparent at Rovio, as well as from its main rival, BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). BBM’s popularity is based not only on the low cost of high-end smartphones and unlimited data on the BlackBerry Internet Service, but also on sheer usability. Aside from being easy to use, BBM is also fun, with a range of emoticons, or smileys, that add enormously to the meaning and enjoyment of instant messages.

WhatsApp draws on this same appeal, with its own equivalent smileys, along with a wide range of themed emoticons. The real power of WhatsApp lies in the fact that it can be downloaded and used on any smartphone brand in the world, including older Nokia phones using the Symbian operating system: the most popular phone operating system in Africa.

WhatsApp also has a South African connection: it’s main outside investor is Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, where a senior partner happens to be Roelof Botha, grandson of former South African foreign minister Pik Botha, and once the youngest actuary ever in South African history.

WhatsApp won’t reveal download or revenue figures, but Sequoia’s $8-million investment in the company before it was two years old suggested its potential. In South Africa, it is fast becoming an alternative to BBM and MXit.

MXit remains the big daddy here, with around 10-million users in South Africa. However, the instant messaging scene has become fiercely competitive, with 2GO and ZING also arriving as strong SA alternatives. 2GO has picked up 5-million local users in the past six months, and is building a huge customer base in Nigeria, the biggest mobile market in Africa.

WhatsApp wants some of that, too, and we can expect a titanic battle for the consumer heart in 2012.

* Arthur Goldstuck heads up World Wide Worx (www.worldwideworx.com) and is editor-in-chief of Gadget. Follow him on Twitter on @art2gee. Reprinted from Gadget.

Mind the gap? Not anymore.

by Charl Thom, MD, FoxP2 Over the last number of years Cape Town has come to the fore as the “Creative Capital” of South Africa’s advertising industry thanks to the consistently high ranking of a number of Cape Town agencies at local and international award shows.

The Loeries, arguably the most level playing field to measure the creative strength of South African agencies has over the last few years been dominated by Cape Town based outfits more often than not. At the 2011 Loerie Awards agencies from the Mother City occupied 3 of the top 5 spots.

Industry journalists and brand managers have taken note of this, and we are often asked why Cape Town agencies seem to perform consistently well as an incubator for outstanding creative work. To me it’s simple: we are all a product of our environment (as my business partner Andrew Whitehouse* always puts it) and Cape Town is an environment that offers immense creative inspiration. It’s one of the most beautiful and diverse places on earth, and in my view, it’s the most “international” African city, which offers inspiration and influence on a global level.

Of course as business becomes more and more accustomed to operating via a digital connections, so distance and location becomes less and less of an issue, also when it comes to choosing ad agencies.

Sharon Keith, an ex-client of mine, and currently owner of her own strategic consultancy, used to run the marketing for a number of high profile brands at Coca Cola’s US head office in Atlanta. Whilst with Coca Cola in Atlanta her closest agency was a two-hour flight away. She was comfortable working across the distance, and we did some very successful campaigns together.

Crispin Porter & Bogusky, a Miami based agency in the US, decided to open an office in Boulder, Colorado when Chief Creative Officer Alex Bogusky made a lifestyle decision to move out there. Very few, if any of their clients were based anywhere near Colorado, yet they are easily one of the most successful agencies in the world today. Their Boulder location and reputation allows them to attract some of the best creative talent from around the world, which ensures the quality of their work is consistently ground breaking.

Closer to home, Unilever originally based itself in Durban in order to be close to the harbour, as they needed to access raw materials that were shipped in for their manufacturing processes, while their agencies are based across the country.

They pioneered and mastered this way of working long before Internet and e-mail, and managed to successfully build some of South Africa’s strongest brands through relationships that existed over telephone, fax and the occasional visit to Durban.

With Internet access becoming both more effective and cost efficient in South Africa it’s rapidly becoming irrelevant where an agency is based. I consider FoxP2 to be an independent South African agency, with local and international clients based in Johannesburg, Durban, Cape Town, London and New York.

A couple of years ago already we completed a television campaign for an international alcohol brand which was conceptualised in Cape Town for a client based in London. The commercial was shot in Prague and finally aired on Canadian television networks.

All this means only one thing for Cape Town – as the issue of distance fades and as its creative reputation continues to grow it’s gaining in competitive advantage. Where once geography counted against it, it opposite is true today, and business is better than ever.

Reprinted from the blog of Charl Thom.

* In an error during the editing process we attributed a quote to Justin Gomes rather than Andrew Whitehouse by mistake. It was corrected 12/03/13 at 12:29pm.

Nashua Mobile, Nokia, take on BlackBerry Internet

by Arthur Goldstuck Nashua Mobile has introduced a near-unlimited data package for selected Nokia phones that directly challenges the R59/month BlackBerry internet Service.

When Nashua Mobile executive head of marketing Tim Walter began addressing a press conference against the backdrop of flashing Internet and social media symbols, along with a “R59” block, it was obvious what was coming next.

It was to be an answer to the question asked most often about mobile data access in South Africa: when will other phones be available with the equivalent of the BlackBerry Internet Service’s (BIS) almost unlimited Internet Access for R59 a month?

The answer was simple: right now.

Walter announced that a range of Nokia smartphones and feature phones running on the Symbian S40 operating system would now be offered with the same package as the BlackBerry internet Service. This means that, for R59.00 a month, aside from normal contract charges, users of these phones will have unlimited browsing, social networking, instant messaging and e-mail.

As with BIS, fair use rules apply. This means that streaming media like YouTube and Skype is not included in the rate, and attempts to use it as a wireless hotspot will be blocked. Walter also pointed out that, while there was no hard cap or limit to file size, Nashua Mobile recommended that attachments and downloads be restricted to 1MB file. Users downloading larger files would be added to a watchlist which would flag very heavy usage. Walter didn’t specify what would constitute such usage, but continual downloads of large files throughout the day would trigger the alarm.

The purpose of such packages was clear, said Walter: “The predictable and fixed monthly cost removes the uncertainty associated with other data rate plans and eliminates the chance of ‘bill shock’.”

The data package is called Xtreme Data and is available for the Nokia X2-01 and Nokia C3 phones, which use the Series 40 platform, and the Nokia N8, Nokia E5 and Nokia E7 smartphones. Nashua Mobile MD Chris Radley said it would in the near future be extended to other smartphones, including the Windows Phone, iOS and Android platforms. This implied that Samsungs’ smartphones and the Apple iPhone could be included before long.

Said Radley, “The cost of data usage has been one of the most significant barriers to wider use of smartphones for Web access and other online applications. With our new offering, we hope to make the mobile Web accessible and affordable to a wider range of smartphone users.”

The Nokia Lumia 800, released in South Africa last month, is being trialled for the service, and may well become the first Windows Phone to come with the Xtreme data package.

“Fixed cost is a clear consumer trend in South Africa, and Nokia have been working with operators and service provider’s to provide true competition in the market for some time now,” said Colin Baumgart, Nokia’s General Manager in South Africa. “We have a wide range of supported devices which we hope to grow further, fitting perfectly with a key pillar of Nokia’s strategy which is bringing Internet to the next billion consumers.”

Nashua Mobile issued a statement today clarifying the way the service bypasses network operators’ data billing: “The new service works by routing data from the handset to Nashua Mobile’s shared GSM data access point names (APNs) from Vodacom and MTN. Web access is controlled and managed intelligently by Nashua Mobile’s infrastructure partners, giving the customer a seamless experience that will enable all of their communication, social networking and information.”

Radley made it clear that the service was intended to offer an alternative to BIS and its limiting customers to a single brand:

“No longer will you be restricted to only one manufacturer’s handsets if you want the peace of mind of an affordable fixed rate for your smartphone data usage,” he said. “Whichever platform you prefer, you will be able to fully enjoy your smartphone’s features without worrying about receiving an enormous bill at the end of the month.”

The deal is available on existing and new contracts for Vodacom and MTN customers who use Nashua Mobile as their service provider. It will not be available to pre-paid users.

The direct challenge to the R59 per month BIS service goes beyond pricing: it takes the onus of providing such services away from the networks and puts them in the hands of device manufacturers and service providers. This overcomes a major frustration to BlackBerry’s competitors, who have been unable to persuade the networks to offer similar deals on their devices.

It also means that, should the networks decide to drop the R59 package arrangement with BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, it will instantly lose its core competitive advantage to those players who have introduced it indirectly. On the other hand, it gives the networks an easy way out of providing such packages, which they have long complained clogs up their networks.

The big winner, initially, is Nashua Mobile, which will be able offer the BlackBerry-type deal on a wider range of phones, and attract those customers who want the deal, but not the brand. Expect other service providers to follow suit.

* Arthur Goldstuck heads up World Wide Worx (www.worldwideworx.com) and is editor-in-chief of Gadget. Follow him on Twitter on @art2gee. Reprinted from Gadget.