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Idea Bounty eyes UK future

Idea Bounty crowdsources creative ideas. Organisations put out a pitch, thousands of creative minds from around the globe conceptualise possible campaigns, Idea Bounty shifts through the deluge and places the best ideas before their client. Client picks, creative get anything from $1 000 – $10 000 for their concept, which client now owns.

Brands that have pitched for creative ideas via Idea Bounty include Unilever, Vodafone, Levi’s, Red Bull, Capitec and the Financial Times.

The concept originated from a discussion between Stokes and his London CEO Nic Ray into how crowd sourcing can be leveraged by the creative industry. They sat on it for two years unable to figure out how to execute the idea. On one side Idea Bounty needs to be able to guarantee that clients won’t be able to utilise the IP from non-winning entries, while ensuring that the client properly owns the IP of the winning pitch and which they pay for.

On average a single pitch generates 25 000 ideas for the Idea Bounty team to work through. Although most Bounties are once’ offs the group is starting to see clients return on a regular basis. Unilever has done three Bounties already. In the UK market, which generates most of the Idea Bounty business, pitches are driven by agencies keen to access thousands of creative minds across the globe (less than half the creative database comes from SA).

Talking about the creative engaged with Idea Bounty – Stokes say around 500 creatives consistently submit ideas on every brief, and of those a clear handful consistently tops the list when it comes to great ideas. Expect an Idea Bounty leader board listing its top creative contributors in the near future.

Stokes is currently negotiating an outside stake holding in Idea Bounty which will see operations move to London. He also has a ‘heavy-hitter’ CEO in waiting that will jump start the business once a deal is signed.

The talks, says Stokes, is at an advanced stage, and is taking place with a large FMCG multi-nationals’ venture capital arm. The valuation, hints Stokes happily, is quite substantial.

Find it: www.ideabounty.com

Reprinted from the September issue of AdVantage magazine.

Why Facebook Likes Google+

As Google+ rolls out enhancements to its social networking tools, industry leader Facebook refines its own offerings. ARTHUR GOLDSTUCK considers whether the “newcomer” can take on an 800-million-strong network.

You’ve probably been told you’re one in a million. I’m delighted to inform you that, as of Monday morning, you are one in 4,567,640. That’s how many South Africans had registered to use Facebook by then. Or one in 800-million – the global Facebook tally.

Those are astonishing numbers, especially when you consider that half of all users log on at least once a day.

One would think, then, that all other wannabe social media giants would have been sent scurrying back into their 20th Century business models, never again to darken the doorstep of digital greatness.

But when you’re Google, you can boast even bigger numbers. Such as 1-billion people using its site for searching. That doesn’t give them the automatic right to success in social networking, but it gives them a key to the gate.

They tried to gatecrash the party in May 2009 with something called Google Wave. It promised to combine e-mail, chat, social networking, live collaboration and project management, among many other things, in one place on the Web.

I’ve got a neighbor who once had the same approach to extensions to his home. It now has turrets, domes and double-storey backyard cottages wherever the space allowed. He’s been trying to sell it for years, but no one will touch his monstrosity. No matter how cool he believes it is.

Google had the luxury of being able to shut their version down.

Then they launched Google Buzz in May 2010. It let you see all your social networks in one place. And to let everyone else see who you’ve been e-mailing, instant messaging, tweeting or updating. It was like building a bathroom with glass walls. I know some people like that kind of thing, but perhaps not enough of them to make money for Google. They announced last week they’re shutting it down.

Their next venture into social construction came in July 2011, when Google+ had a housewarming party for invited users. Very exclusive. Only 10-million of their closest friends. It looked uncannily like Facebook, but instead of Status Updates, it invited you to “Share what’s new”. Instead of declaring your “Like” for a posting, you gave it a “+1”.

But it also had something not invented by Facebook, namely Circles. You get to add anyone on Google+ to any Circle you choose to create, and you can decide which circles get to see what material you post on the site. Exactly what people had been begging Facebook to do for years.

And then something amazing happened: within a few days, Facebook had added an option to specify which Lists of friends could see what on your profile.

It was like watching a price war. They blissfully ignore the customer’s concerns until the competition comes along and shows it cares. And you suddenly become a caring, not-so-sharing social network. What’s not to Like?

Google+ is now open to all, but so far it’s not getting the number of +1s it would like (or Like), or that convinces the market it can compete with Facebook. The difference, this time, is that Google is treating it like an open-plan house, waiting for residents to get a feel for it before deciding what else will fit where, how and when. Business pages, for example, are on the agenda, as is integration with Google Apps – the tools that give Google a business edge over other social offerings.

It will need more than that to match up to Facebook, but we tend to forget that the vast Facebook offering has been built up over seven years. Back in the day, it was a seedy Boston man-cave for Mark Zuckerberg and his buddies to jeer at the girls who’d stood them up.

The latest data from web site trackers Hitwise shows that, in mid-October, Facebook attracted 9.71% of all web traffic in the USA. Google and its two biggest non-search properties, YouTube and Gmail, made up 11.93% of traffic.

That’s a neat little +2 for the notion that this game is not yet over.

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

Now for a no-nonsense DoC?

The Department of Communications (DoC) was upended today when President Jacob Zuma announced his Cabinet reshuffle, with both Minister Roy Padayachie and his deputy hopping Ministries. But their replacements are both no-nonsense women, writes ARTHUR GOLDSTUCK.

When President Jacob Zuma, ahead of today’s cabinet reshuffle, cast around for a new team to run the Department of Communications, he could have done worse than run a Google search on “non-nonsense” and “women”.

That’s what he has given the Department – and the industry – in new Minister of Communications Dina Pule and Deputy minister Stella Tembisa Ndabeni.

When Pule was initially appointed deputy minister of communications under then-Minister Siphiwe Nyanda, this analyst’s comment was that she had a reputation for her no-nonsense methods and her intolerance of mismanagement.

“This can only bode well for a more active approach towards the decision-making processes in both the Department and in the regulator, Icasa,” was the conclusion at the time.

Unfortunately, Nyanda had other ideas, running the Department like a personal fiefdom, among other attempting to fire Mamodupi Mohlala, who was subsequently appointed national consumer commissioner, while Nyanda himself was fired. In the October 2010 cabinet reshuffle, which saw Padayachie replacing Nyanda and Obed Bapela step into Pule’s job, Pule was given the post of Deputy Minister in The Presidency for Performance Monitoring and Evaluation. Ironically, Bapela has now replaced her in that position.

The new deputy minister, a Member of Parliament since is something of an unknown quantity, but seems to be cut from the same cloth as Pule. On her Facebook profile, she describes herself as “a no nonsense person who likes mingling with different people.

It will be a source of comfort to many in the industry that she is a keen Facebook user – with more than 2860 friends. Earlier this year she was appointed as whip to the portfolio committee on communications, suggesting she is familiar with the debates around the industry along with the language of the industry.

Her predecessor, Bapela, made a spectacular gaffe when he called for legislation to give authorities access to encrypted BlackBerry messages – despite the fact that current legislation already allows such access and that BlackBerry maker research in Motion had gone on record to confirm they would cooperate with law enforcement officials. That he now replaces Pule suggests that the Performance Monitoring and Evaluation position is a role used to groom inexperienced candidates for future ministerial positions. In other words, we haven’t seen the last of Bapela.

The DoC also finds itself with a strong administrative team, headed up by Director General Rosey Sekese. She has shown a deep commitment to transforming the Department into an effective organisation. If she gels with the new ministerial team, it may well make for an extraordinarily effective team.

The biggest shock of the reshuffle, however, was the loss of Padayachie to the Public Service and Administration portfolio. He has served the Department of Communications as both deputy minister (2004-2009) and minister (2010-11), and was regarded as the most knowledgeable minister to occupy that post in more than a decade. He was the first cabinet minister of the 21st century to acknowledge the shortcomings of broadband policy and to begin putting a new vision in place.

However, for some, his words did not seem to translate effectively into action.

The ongoing delay in digital terrestrial television migration as well as the lack of movement on auctioning off unused radio spectrum have been a source of both frustration and bemusement. The political considerations around these processes seem to have got in the way of having a focus on the end-goal.

Padayachie‘s reputation as an industry-insider may well have counted against him as he was required to crack the whip on companies and executives who regarded him as a friend. It is unlikely Pule will have such qualms. Backed by the equally no-nonsense attitude and online-savvy of Ndabeni, she may well be the best shot the DoC has yet had at moving South African communications into the 21st century.

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

Modise Makhene on how the Great Recession changed ad land

Modise Makhene, CEO of JWT South Africa, says the singing by protesters in front of the JWT Cape Town office at 30 Keerom Street makes a familiar sound-track, what with its offices situated right across from the Western Cape High Court. The chanting and singing of the well-behaved crowd drifting into the offices on the Velocity building’s third floor is a reminder that ad land can’t afford to cocoon itself from the broader society – here ordinary South Africans are literally reminding them of their daily struggles on an agency’s doorstep.

The number of agencies headquartered in the city CBD has been increasing, especially with the arrival of new and smaller start-ups, and it’s good to know Cape Town’s creative heart beats here, rather than in its ever increasingly sprawling suburbs.

Makhene says the Great Recession has brought great change to the advertising industry, forcing agencies to adapt to new business realities or die. Suddenly there is no place to hide, neither for the agency nor the client, resulting in more robust and hopefully honest discussions between the two.

That said, Makhene believes that, as an emerging market, the recession’s dynamics here differ from what is being seen in developed economies such as Europe and the US, whose economies are experiencing continued woe, while emerging economies are seeing an uptick in client.

The uptake of digital offerings, including online and mobile (already well-established in developed markets), is helping drive growth in marketing and media spend, and demand is seeing JWT investing in digital resources.

While a digital division sits with the rest of the creative team, forcing conversation on a strategic level, creatives throughout the agency are increasingly being sent on digital courses to force understanding of this environment beyond the digital team and throughout the agency.

Makhene says at the moment around 7-10% of budgets are going to digital platforms, 40% are going into activations and the remainder into what was traditionally considered above-the-line. Not very long ago, ATL’s share of advertising budgets at JWT was closer to 70%, he says.

Makhene believes the culture of inquisitiveness at his agency helped it adapt and allowed it to embrace the changes sweeping the advertising industry. As consumers become more informed, and thus more powerful, their ability to rebel against brands and brand messages becomes an important factor in how future brands will be developed, he says.

Media neutrality, Makhene admits, is often something more talked about than actually implemented at many SA agencies, but he insists that changing consumer behaviour, coupled with more critical clients, makes it a non-negotiable. “Clients are suspicious if agencies present a campaign primarily driven by TV advertising,” says Makhene, “and they are suspicious with good reason.”

At JWT the creative, digital and strategy teams are co-located and forced to engage on a day-to-day basis, which helps breaks down internal siloed thinking, says Makhene. It forces a culture change and pulls the focus away from a single advertising medium.

Growth at JWT will be driven by growing the scope of work done for existing clients and, says Makhene, as those robust conversations with clients lead to greater trust, it also leads to more work and better budgets, especially if clients are convinced they will see ROI.

JWT is also benefitting from work via its global network, especially in the Middle Eastern and African (MEA) region, thanks to shared case studies, information sharing and work done for sister agencies.

Makhene says WPP (the group that also owns JWT) is set to announce a major investment into expanding its African business outside South Africa. A new CEO is set to be announced soon for a new division that will look at investments, as well as how assets are currently deployed across African markets outside SA. It will fall directly under JWT MEA.

JWT South Africa remains the primary centre in sub-Saharan Africa and will continue to feed work into affiliate offices.

The new business unit will aim to optimise output throughout JWT’s African affiliates and place them on the same quality level as the agency in SA. Makhene wouldn’t reveal the size of the war chest for the unit until it has been formally announced.

Another influence of the Great Recession is a steep decline in staff churn, as poaching levels fall and staff members stick to what job security they have.

While JWT didn’t retrench staff because of the recession, it did put a hiring freeze in place during the worst of it. At the same time, it decided to refurbish its offices to improve the physical working environment of staff. JWT SA employs around 160 people in Cape Town and Johannesburg.

The stable staff base meant more listening, more engagement and a better spirit inside the agency, and that spirit endures, says Makhene.

A greater sense of collaboration between the Cape Town and Jozi offices has been established to encourage the effective use of resources through-out the broader agency. The JWT SA team is one team with one culture across the offices, says Makhene.

Makhene describes his management style as one aimed at liberating and empowering staff – something he sees as essential in such a creative work environment. He doesn’t like drama or office politics and believes in agile and quick but calculated decision-making.

Makhene says JWT will be ramping up participation in local and international advertising award shows. It has been a strategic investment over the past two years and is one that is set to continue. This year, the JWT SA group ranked 16th in the official Loeries ranking lists of winning Creative Circle members while, as individual agencies (and Creative Circle members), its Cape-Town office ranked 23rd and Johannesburg office ranked 25th.

Makhene started in marketing as an intern at Coca-Cola headquarters in the US after studying business and marketing at the University of Iowa and completing a management MBA at Howard University. Back in SA he worked for Tiger Brands before acquiring an interest in a small B2B agency. He headed Primedia@Home for two years as MD before joining JWT SA in his current position.

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

Growing up Quirky

At Quirk the interns appoint their own replacements. It’s part of a culture that thrives on empowering staff, getting the best out of them, to the benefit of clients. These guys are more than digital, they are the future. By Herman Manson

Quirk sold itself as an advertising agency before web developers thought to brand themselves as such, before ad agencies thought digital might win the marketing budget war and thus force them to become ‘integrated’ (translation: look we got digital too), before, founder and Group CEO Rob Stokes admits, there was a market that understood its service offering.

Which is why as recently as 2007 Quirk was a respected but smallish operator in the digital agency space with around 17-20 staffers. Based in Cape Town, Stokes had opened a London office as well, where he spent six months of the year, flying between the two cities every two months.

Stokes still jokingly refers to his companies early days as ‘my poor days.’ Quitting his last pizza delivery job on Christmas day of 1998, Stokes launched Quirk six weeks later, while still studying Business Science Marketing at UCT, initially selling everything from hardware to networking services over the next two years.

His thesis on email marketing, completed by the end of 2000, would propel the business into a whole new marketing orientated direction, and Quirk the agency was born. Their do it yourself email marketing software would start Quirk in the marketing game, flimsy as it was initially, it would direct the business strategically to invest in marketing related technology and expertise.

Craig Raw, the group’s Chief Technology Officer, joined Stokes in 2001, and remains Quirk’s second biggest shareholder. He rewrote the email software, originally written in Perl, to Java, in fewer than 22 days, transforming its capacity from 400 emails a minute to 40 000. They could finally chase decent sized clients.

Stokes describes his own ‘lack of deep IT skills’ as one of the biggest challenges Quirk faced as an enterprise. Raw’s talents filled a gap in Stoke’s own, a point Stoke doesn’t mind admitting. Many of his subsequent appointments would flesh out organisational and management expertise Stokes could not bring to Quirk himself. For Stokes this is a point of pride and translated throughout the organisational culture he has built at Quirk.

Take the company’s much vaunted intern programme which last year attracted three of the top five business science graduates from his former alumni. The six month programme, followed by a six month internship, allows the interns to interview and find their own replacements. Stokes says they tend to hire kids of their own already high standard, and often up, but never down.

Stokes describes himself as ‘unemployable,’ a point many entrepreneurs make, and one of the reasons he pushed on with Quirk even at its most desperate times. He also hates nanny state environments and it shows at Quirk. The culture is very much about empowering staff to grow in confidence but also to support and help those around them. So yes, interns pick their own replacements, and every month the groups’ financials gets put onto a slide and shown to staff during a teleconference between the three offices (the company has a profit sharing scheme going – it pays around 20% of its profits out on a quarterly basis – and the exercise gives staff a stake in understanding the company financials on an on-going basis).

Stokes expects his staff to innovate, push at barriers and have no fear of new ideas, because for Stokes the only bad ideas are no ideas. Stokes calls the company culture an ecosystem of innovation and love. Seems word got out in the marketplace – Quirk shifts through 3-400 CV’s a month and hires around 10 – that’s around one staffer every three days.

His need to build a business his unemployable self would want to work for also informed the identity of the business. Quirk, Stokes explains, was named for his desire to be different. “There is very little which is ordinary about Quirk and we needed a name to reflect that,”
says Stokes. “I dislike doing things because ‘that’s how it’s done’ or ‘those are the rules’. When I started Quirk I wasn’t entirely sure where we’d end up, but I did know that I wanted to build a company that I would want to work at and that likely meant we would be very different from the rest.”

So Stokes and co has been selling Quirk as an agency since 2001, but nobody was interested in much more than building websites, and web development shops thrived at the time. It wasn’t until 2004, says Stokes, that business shifting their thinking towards a more marketing orientated (rather than IT/tech) approach to digital platforms, that the market for Quirks’ services really started to develop.

Since 2005/6 all the digital players have started pushing themselves as agencies, and all the agencies are pushing themselves as having worthwhile digital capacities, while at that stage Quirk has had five tough years of being a digital agency behind its belt. And boooom goes Quirk. Sixty to 150 staffers in 12 months, while coming within a spitting distance of doubling 2010 revenues to R100 million this year (80% from the agency side, 20% from the education, IdeaBounty and BrandsEye businesses), with no sign that growth is about to come growth is about to come to a shuddering halt. Stokes expects 200 staffers by February.

The agency services a roster of high profile, high value clients, including Capitec, Warner Bros’ European business, SAB Miller, Investec, FT.com, Woolworths, Pam Golding (which Stokes spent seven years chasing down), DSTV, Sun International, Liberty, ADT and a number of Distell brands. Growth areas include social media management and video.

Stokes believes the rise of social media and services like Facebook and Twitter has brought home to many marketers to what extend digital has infiltrated in our daily lives. This in turn lead to a mind shift in how they view digital and goes some way to explain the increasing share of the market digital is grabbing. It’s a market share Stokes sees growing from 5% of the ad market today to 15% in five years.

Before the boom came several near busts, and Quirk nearly went belly up more than once, admits Stokes. During its first year in business Stokes’ mom lent him the rent for his first year (to be repaid with interest) and soon he felt left behind on the career ladder as former class mates scrambled up the corporate ladder. While he never missed a payment staff salaries the directors sometimes had to wait five months to get paid, and once, in an emergency shareholder meeting, it was decided to give the business two weeks to find a new paying client or close down. A week later they landed a R70 000 website which tied them over and kept them going to fight another day.

The only cash injection Quirk ever received was from Raw’s brother four years ago to develop BrandsEye for which he took 7-8% in equity from Quirk. In 2006 Quirk sold 25% of its business to Clicks2Customers, then run by Vinny Lingham, but bought back most of its shares after Lingham left that business.

It opened a London office in 2005, because Stokes and his team were already servicing some clients in the UK via Cape Town, and a staffer was heading there, so somewhat naively, the team grabbed the opportunity to become “a tadpole in a shark tank” as Stokes describes it. They suddenly found themselves in a sophisticated market not buying on price, and soon Stokes was spending two months very two months in London, managing client relationships and trying to grow the office (the London office, remarkably, still retains its first client to this day). For nearly three years Quirk London ended up being little more than Stokes on his own, with his service team backing him up from Cape Town, and would only turn around with the appointment of Nic Ray (today Ray is a significant shareholder in Quirk).

Ray, a former classmate of Stokes’ at UCT, had worked at Ogilvy in Cape Town and had been head hunted by Ogilvy London to work as a business director on Ford of Europe. Ray quickly stabilised the London business, turning it from a one man show into an office with 20 staffers, and building valuable relationships for Quirk with players like Google and Facebook in Europe. His appointment brought home the value of “hiring giants” to Stokes. He would now make a point of hiring high value (if pricey) talent to help turn his business into a success.

His next major hire would be Mary Mzumara as Managing Director of the Jozi QuirkStation. Stokes and Ray head hunted her in London where she had worked at the agencies Dare (named Campaign Magazine Digital Agency of the Decade in 2010) and XM London (part of OgilvyAction). Like Ray in London, Mzumara turned around the Jozi business, creating a new sense of equilibrium at Quirk.

Today Stokes is splitting Quirk into two businesses. On the one side is Quirk the agency, now run by the widely respected Justin Spratt, who left Dimension Data’s Internet Solutions to join Quirk in September 2010 as CEO. On the other stands Quirk Labs, “a seed fund and accelerator programme for marketing technology, ecommerce, and Software as a Service (SAAS) start-ups” under GM Caryn Walker. It draws in several existing Quirk subsidiaries including online reputation management firm BrandsEye, marketing crowdsourcing platform IdeaBounty and Quirk Education.

Labs will roll out new businesses dreamed up by Quirk’s staff but will also look at ideas from outside entrepreneurs. They currently go through around 2-3 pitches a week. Stokes, while retaining involvement with a number of clients on the agency side, will now primarily focus on growing the businesses housed and launched by Labs. Its culture of innovation, he hopes, will also find its way back to the agency side where the tools developed by Labs will be utilised for the benefit of clients on the agency side. So in short Labs basically serves as an R&D hub that solves client problems and create new businesses for Quirk.

As a self-described ideas guy the new role will suit Stokes, who suffered near burn out at the beginning of the year after 12 years in the driving seat at Quirk, and having successfully managed the recent growth spurt of the company. He gets to do what he does best, be a maverick entrepreneur, and the smaller businesses probably come with fewer rules and new challenges, aspects of life Stokes finds gels with his personality.

On the agency side Spratt is properly taking charge and implementing a broader management structure in accordance with the organisation’s size. It was one of the initial difficulties Spratt faced – Stokes had pretty much made all executive decisions up to the time Spratt came on board – running the business “through singular talent” as Spratt puts it. Spratt has since decentralised decision making, created internal communication channels and created a management structures in line with the needs of the company. The whole organisational structure has become much more scalable and adaptable says Spratt.

This does potentially affect Quirks’ corporate culture of course, of which Spratt says he is careful to preserve as much as possible, given the power it gives Quirk in attracting talent to the organisation. At Quirk it’s important to attract and acquire the best talent – and then to inspire them, says Spratt.

Spratt sees Quirks’ technical competence as a point of differentiation not yet fully exploited – Quirk employs 7 Java engineers and another 7-10 front end developers – and few agencies can compete with these numbers head-to-head says Spratt. He believes Quirk has the best engineering competence in his sector.

They are especially useful when it comes to Application (app) developments, which requires exceptional engineering requirements which also naturally lead into the larger mobile development environment. The technology, underpinned by heavy analytical competency, allows Quirk to do special work in this space, says Spratt.

According to Spratt mobile is a major growth area for Quirk – some 30% of the work in the engineering funnel comes from mobile at the moment. Quirk has also been developing its video – or really motion graphics – competence. The group has just produced its second TV ad to be flighted on DStv. Digital agencies like Quirk can create motion graphics at a fraction of the costs production houses can – Spratt sees them as definitely under threat – and optimise those same videos for digital search and sites like YouTube.

The supersonic growth of groups like Quirk serves as a clear indicator that brands are shifting spend to digital media channels. So what the future of adland? Stokes sees it this way – by 2020 there will no longer be any digital agencies – only agencies that get digital. The rest will be dead.

This story was first printed in the September issue of AdVantage magazine.

Cover S’Hot: 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 blogger MediaSlutZA.

Everyone has their own opinion about what makes a cover great (or not). This week Sports Illustrated is the only South African cover that ‘did it’ for me.

INTERNATIONAL
ESPN, November 2011

For their annual “Body Issue” ESPN Magazine published 4 different covers with a sports personalities on each one. All of them naked. The Hope Solo cover is getting the most attention in the media but the Blake Griffin cover (above) is the one that stood out for me.

Key (New York Times Real Estate Magazine), Fall 2011

If I can look at a cover for more than 30 seconds, it’s a success. If you can look at a cover for almost 3 minutes to look at each detail that captures you every time you revisit the cover, it’s a mammoth success.

Dutch Esquire, November 2011

For me this isn’t a good cover, or one that will sell, but what makes it unique is that only the subscribers of Dutch Esquire received this conceptual cover. I think South African magazines should also start producing special covers for subscribers only…

LOCAL

Sports Illustrated, November 2011

Sports Illustrated took several risks this month. First they made their annual Swimwear issue a standalone title for the first time, which was published 2 weeks before the ‘usual’ issue appeared on shelf. And for their November issue, they decided on a very striking and strong conceptual cover and issue, which I hope will work for them!

– 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

Nokia re-invented in South Africa

Nokia have embarked on the road to restoring the brand’s image in South Africa. Gerard Brandjes, Nokia General Manager for East and Southern Africa, discusses the challenges with ARTHUR GOLDSTUCK.

Nokia has fallen far behind in the smartphone wars, but remains the biggest cellphone brand in South Africa. Clearly, it faces a massive image challenge. And it is about to take up the challenge.

Gerard Brandjes, Nokia General Manager for East and Southern Africa, discusses the challenges and strategies in a Question and Answer session with Arthur Goldstuck:

AG: Nokia has lost substantial market share in South Africa, yet remains the single biggest brand. Which segments represents its current core user base?

GB: It’s incorrect to think that we have lost market share in South Africa. We have, in fact, gained across a number of segments – and overall – when you look at independent sources like GfK. Looking at our core user base, the first important point is its incredibly diverse. This is due to the fact fundamentally Nokia makes products that cater to all, from the most income constrained consumer to the person requiring a high end smartphone.

AG: The one key area where Nokia has fallen behind is the smartphone market. What have been the main reasons for this?

GB: It’s important to point out that when looking at the smartphone market, you have to look broader than just device. More than ever, it is now about the ecosystem that is created around these products. Specifically optimized services, local applications and targeted, unique content are the things that are bringing true consumer value. Having said that, it has been well publicized that Nokia has had challenges in the smartphone market, across the globe. Primarily, our user experience was placed under growing pressure by new, fast moving, competitors really innovating in the space.

When it comes to South Africa, I think it is important to again point out that we have been managing very well despite these pressures. Devices like the Nokia N8, as well as affordable messaging smartphones like the Nokia E63, have been incredible successes for us and we expect – as the portfolio starts to become a lot more competitive – you will see us grow from strength to strength in this area.

AG: How does Nokia intend to regain smartphone market share in South Africa?

GB: The improvement in user experience will certainly help us here, but this will not just come for new products like the Nokia 700 based on Symbian Belle or theN9. These improvements will continue to find their way to the existing portfolio. We have already delivered a significant update to existing new Symbian devices with Symbian Anna, which is available now for all Nokia N8, E7 and C7 owners. This will continue with Symbian Belle, where initial reactions from global analysts and media have been incredibly positive.

AG: Why is WhatsApp such a focal point of current Nokia advertising?

GB: Low cost messaging is a key user dynamic for the South African industry and WhatsApp offers a great, cross platform, application that can send messages, images, files or your location. But it is important not to just highlight WhatsApp. If you look at others, such as MXit, people can communicate across a number of communities on their Nokia, be it smartphone or mobile phone. Something important here in addition to just messaging is fixed cost. This is a huge thing for the South African consumer, and currently only one handset manufacturer has an offering in that space. This is certainly an area we are exploring and something we want to start innovating in soon.

AG: To what extent is the N9 a stopgap, with an operating system – MeeGo – that has been written off by most analysts?

GB: Many analysts have focused on the platform, but we have always said focus less on the platform and more on the user experience.

Many key elements of the N9, both in software and hardware, will continue in future Nokia products and that is more important. I think when analysts, media and most importantly consumers use the N9 they will certainly see that the user experience is not only unique, but also leading edge. Even though the vast majority of South African’s are not inclined to download thousands of apps, we are making sure that most of the top global apps are covered, and we are working locally to make sure that is the case here as well.

AG: What is Nokia’s current thinking about the present and future implementation of Symbian on smartphones?

GB: Symbian will continue to be improved on, and there will be more Symbian smartphones in the future. We will support the platform for a number of years still, and with the great reception these improvements have been receiving, Symbian will offer great value at a number of price points and form factors.

AG: Will Symbian co-exist with Windows on Nokia phones? If so, in what way?

GB: Yes, Symbian will cover certain price points and form factors that are important in markets like South Africa.

AG: Does Nokia have a differentiated app and content strategy for the SA market?

GB: Certainly, this is a very key focus for us, in contrast to many other platforms and manufacturers in South Africa. From a content perspective, we have over 800 local apps and items in the Nokia Store. Add to that our unique position as the only company with integrated operator billing, across all three major operators, and we have a very strong proposition. We are currently working with over 120 local brands, developers and companies to build content unique and compelling content. The Nokia Music Store in South Africa is still the largest source of legal music downloads, which makes us very proud. We have a huge catalogue of local artists, unequalled in the local scene.

AG: How are local apps and content performing on Nokia phones?

GB: Local apps continue to grow as a percentage of local downloads and getting high quality content like You, Huisgenoot Skouspel, News24 or the FNB App. We expect, as we get more quality content, this will continue.

AG: How closely is Nokia working with Microsoft in South Africa to provide local content on the coming Windows phones?

GB: We are engaging with Microsoft on a number of levels, across a number of streams. Both Microsoft and ourselves appreciate the importance of local content and have already run developer workshops for Windows Phone in South Africa. Here, we are aligning with the hard work Microsoft have already been doing with local developers and content and expect to see a vibrant app offering when Nokia with Windows Phone comes to South Africa.

AG: On a personal note, what is your favourite gadget outside of the Nokia family?

GB: I would have to say the Nintendo Wii, I have spent quite a bit of time getting beaten by my son with this gadget. However, I think an Xbox will be arriving in the household very soon and I have been amazed by what I have been seeing with the integration of Windows Phone, Xbox and Kinect.

AG: What gadget do you wish would be invented now?

GB: Despite being in the technology industry I am going to say I have all the gadgets I need. I think what I would love, something that would add real value, is anything that can emphasize the quality time I spend with my family. I firmly believe that we need more technology that emphasizes the amazing everyday moments in our lives, not something that distracts you from them.

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

Finweek’s gospel according to Marc

The recent repositioning of business magazine Finweek has upped the stakes in what many consider a rather stale magazine segment. Not that a lot isn’t happening in the business press, or that it isn’t already highly competitive – take the recent entry of Forbes Africa into the fray, or how the tablet market has opened up access to publications such as Bloomberg Businessweek to South African consumers.

It’s just that, for a while now, business media has seemed stale in a time when interest in the economy and business management news has skyrocketed, courtesy of the Great Recession, the sovereign debt crisis, and the ‘double dip’ bogeyman that keeps entrepreneurs awake at night.

Financial Mail and Business Day have stepped forth as the authoritative media voices of business people (in the formal economy) when it comes to the political economy. Their ballsy editorial approach hasn’t really been translated onto the design of these publications as consumer products, though. In look and feel they remain conservative, even as their audience grows accustomed to digital reading environments and global cutting-edge-designed media products.

This isn’t necessarily a doomed strategy in the case of FM, if only it can get its digital house in order; just look at that most unreadable of business must-reads, The Economist. But you are definitely not going to pick it up because its cover jumped off the shelf at you, or because you enjoy the reading experience.

Of course, all this just highlighted the precarious position of Finweek, a title stitched together by Media24 from the former English title Finance Week and Afrikaans title Finansies & Tegniek. You never know what monster strategy Media24 is going to throw against the wall, hoping the goo will somehow transmutate into a success.

Just mix together two magazines with two vastly different reader constituencies and task it to take on Financial Mail, then shovel the magazine into the newspaper division, and don’t forget to impose a superbrand in the form of Fin24.com on the title’s digital product offering. Having second thoughts? Then place it in there with Media24 Weeklies, of Huisgenoot and You fame. Sometimes magazines survive in spite of their owners.

The magazine itself has made some negative headlines in the last couple of months. Business Day (rather gleefully) reported that Finweek made a R8.9 million operating loss for the 2010/11 financial year.

So it’s rather amazing to see the title picking up its head, putting on its fighting gloves, and stepping forward to not only fight for its survival but to reinvent itself.

Firstly, acting editor Marc Ashton has made the product much more reader-friendly, with attractive covers and shorter, punchier content inside. He has upped the use of infographics inside the book, and is working on the quality of the photography, which will be used more frequently to give stories a greater visual element and pull.

Rather smartly, the short news items no longer sit across several pages in the front of the magazine but instead sit individually atop features. There is a new consistency in the fonts and colours used in the book, and the type doesn’t seem as dense as that of some of its main rivals.

It makes for an attractive package and one that will attract a younger readership. This suits Ashton, who says the average reader is around 32 (and 60% black), with the Afrikaans edition skewing the figure upwards. According to Ashton, Finweek’s Afrikaans readership has been in decline for the past five years, while its English readership has climbed.

Ashton is basically producing one magazine for two audiences; although they are moving closer together in certain demographics, simply translating a magazine into another language doesn’t leave much space for cultural nuance. While 50% of copy were produced in Afrikaans five years ago and translated for the English edition, some 95% of copy is now produced in English and translated for the Afrikaans edition.

Ashton is bringing in more Afrikaans writers to help remedy the decline in the Afrikaans readership. Vic de Klerk also got a column in the Afrikaans edition and, says Ashton, he is getting positive feedback from readers.

Ashton says his readership is all working; at their age they don’t hold property portfolios; and content is centred around how to best use your money to empower yourself. Hence the strap line – ‘Money. Power.’

Ashton has brought in content from the Harvard Business Review because, for his readers, “their assets are their jobs” and they want to know how to do well in it. Feedback already suggests readers find the Harvard content useful.

Finweek’s journalists are being trained to think about how the story will be laid out and illustrated while they are writing it. So, instead of 1200 worders, they need to be coming up with shorter pieces and ideas how to illustrate it and where, when possible, infographics can come into play. They have access to Bloomberg Businessweek on their tablets as a reminder of how it’s done on the global stage, says Ashton.

Better and more infographics, and more interactivity in them online, will be a design focus going forward, as will be improving the quality and frequency of photography in the magazine.

Ashton says that, as magazines will increasingly see circulation shift to tablet devices, it’s important to look at global standards – or risk being passed over. Finweek has sold roughly R150 000 worth of annual digital subscriptions and single copies – mainly on Zinio.com – over the past three-month period.

The Fintalk website is a joint venture with Charl Norman – the entrepreneur behind local social network Blueworld Communities. Ashton says Finweek is a magazine brand and will stand for the print, online and tablet editions, while Fintalk represents a community-content platform for the magazine to engage with readers on the web.

Ashton brought in Norman since Finweek lacked the in-house skills to rebuild its website (Finweek content had previously been sitting on the Fin24.com website). Also, readers need to realise they can’t access Finweek without a subscription – not even on the web. Fintalk sure – but it’s not the same as the magazine product and purposely so, says Ashton.

Advertising, which fell flat when Finweek’s demise was so widely rumoured – at one stage the ad load sank as low as 3% (the average per issue is 30% including corporate profiles) – is back up to normal. The book is attracting lifestyle advertisers such as Rolex.

Ashton acknowledges that rebuilding Finweek’s readership and profitability will be a lengthy process but is optimistic that the magazine is purposefully reengaging with its core audience – the basis for any attempt at regaining readers lost over the past five years.

Staff, meanwhile, are rallying around the new product, says Ashton, and while it isn’t perfect yet, it’s certainly the first brave step the magazine needed to jolt it out of the mud.

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

The desolation of disconnection

There will be many kinds of fall-out from last week’s BlackBerry outage. One is how people respond to the desolation of disconnection, writes ARTHUR GOLDSTUCK.

Loss. Bereavement. Deprivation. Divorce. Estrangement. Separation. On 10 October, several million South Africans added another word to this lexicon of personal desolation: disconnection.

That’s when BlackBerry services went down across much of the world, and stayed down for three days. This was somewhat amusing for users of other phones, who find BlackBerry users’ constant need for communication annoying.

But when more than 2-million people are using a service, and become dependent on it, the consequences go further than a few missed e-mail messages. It means 5% of the country’s population is scrambling to find alternatives, and it means loss of productivity for business decision-makers who depend on their e-mail to do their job while on the move.

But it also has a deeper meaning, and not only for BlackBerry users.

We have become so deeply dependent on the devices we use for communication, we feel naked without them. Inadvertently leaving home without a cellphone, for example, creates a level of insecurity that ranks right up there with carrying no money or other means of payment.

This is not the first communications outage to strike large numbers of South Africans. The entire Vodacom network went down for half a day recently, creating the single biggest communications disconnection this country has yet seen.

The two outages in fact provide case studies in crisis management. In Vodacom’s case, CEO Pieter Uys took the lead in responding to media and customer enquiries, the company’s Twitter feed was used to broadcast status updates, and executive head of media communications Richard Boorman was fully available to media by phone and e-mail.

As a result, although customers were briefly angry and frustrated, the media was kind to the company, and the event ultimately had little impact on the business of Vodacom.

The response of Research in Motion (RIM) was the diametric opposite. For the first two days of the crisis, they provided no access to company representatives whatsoever. They issued brief statements twice a day, with no reference to human beings. Local offices were not allowed to add any further comment or assurances.

Only when the outage reached the United States, on the third day, was there any sign of RIM leadership. Their chief technical officer called a telephonic press conference, and the chief information officer issued a detailed apology on the RIM web site. Only then did the world hear from the company’s joint CEOs – who already happened to be under fire from investors.

Aside from the public relations disaster that this kind of response represents, it also deepens customers’ sense of disconnection. Not only are they cut off from the services on which they’ve come to depend, but they are also deliberately disconnected from the service provider itself.

One can create many analogies for the emotional impact on customers. For example, it can be described as the equivalent of parents accidentally locking their children out of the house, and then refusing to tell them how or when they can come back inside.

Such children lose faith and trust in their parents, and begin devising ways to avoid finding themselves in that situation again. They find a way to acquire duplicate keys, or a secret entrance, or alternative accommodation at friends or family.

That, for a service provider, is a worst case scenario. It means that, the next time there is a disconnection crisis, their customers may well have a back-up solution in place. And when they switch over to that backup, they might not come back again.

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

Cartoonist vs. President

Last week, Jacob Zuma obtained a court date for his defamation lawsuit against Jonathan Shapiro, aka Zapiro, thus paving the way for history’s first civil court battle between a president and a cartoonist. Carlos Amato spoke to Zapiro, whose 16th annual collection, The Last Sushi, hits the streets this month. Interview by Carlos Amato, illustration by Zapiro. Thanks to Mahala.

Amato: What’s the latest on JZ’s defamation lawsuit against you?

Zapiro: We’ve just been informed the court hearing will happen on August 28 next year, in the South Gauteng High Court. We’re not 100% sure if it’s just that they’re trying to apply pressure on us, if it’s simply intimidation. But I’m not intimidated and neither are my lawyers. We will make it extremely uncomfortable for the president. The court case will be all about whether he came to power in a kosher way – or not. That was the nub of the cartoon he’s suing us for. [The cartoon in question depicted Zuma preparing to rape Lady Justice, with the help of his political allies at the time, and was published in the Sunday Times in 2008.]

Roughly when did the ANC start losing its willingness to tolerate satire?

Of course there can never an exact answer, but you could peg it to the beginning of the Mbeki administration. Nelson Mandela had a fantastic sense of humour. He was not defensive and understands satire. Mbeki, as smart and intellectual a man as he is, is also prickly and paranoid. And that carried over from when he was deputy president: the seeds were there already there. But Madiba’s presence and immense authority as head of government was enough to minimise that aspect of Mbeki.

But when he became president, that’s pretty much where you can see a turn, and how much he held the ANC in his sway, and how frightened people were to buck his authority. And at that moment I think you could also see that there was a sense of humour failure. And I think that has carried through into the Zuma presidency, even though Zuma is more charismatic and less aloof on a personal level. But somehow politically, he is also prickly and defensive. And in fact he has done what Mbeki didn’t do, and that is to sue satirists and commentators.

Would you agree that South Africa’s ingrained memory of oppression and its culture of irreverence serves to protect us from would-be tyrants?

I’ve been asked many times in other countries whether we are on the Zimbabwe road, and I’ve always said no. But I have to say in the last couple of years, there have been some seriously disturbing incursions on freedom of expression and of the press. And rampant corruption and cover-ups. So I’m still saying no, we’re not becoming Zimbabwe. But we still have some extremely big problems. I think the public is not going to roll over and let these things happen – with the help of strong NGOs and media.

But there is one thing that has worried me: I think that the government and the ANC have in some instances been fairly successful in smearing the media, the judiciary and other institutions as counter-revolutionary in the broadest terms. And some members of the public have bought this nonsense. I’ve been on radio programs, where people have called in and I’ve been disturbed by the number of people who have been hoodwinked by this official spin. So we’re poised: we are that raucous, noisy society that accepts jokes about politicians. And to an extent as well, there’s been some trickery to turn some members of the public against the irreverence that satirists and commentators hold dear. We have to see where it goes. It’s not quite as clear cut as I thought it was.

Which of your cartoons are you proudest of?

There are a couple of tribute cartoons to Mandela, which I feel have crystallised what he has meant to the whole country. One that was published on his 80th birthday, showing a young Mandela in the class room, with “What will I be” on the blackboard. The teachers says: “This one can’t make up his mind, he put down: ‘Lawyer, activist, freedom fighter, prisoner of conscience, nation builder, 20th century icon.’ It’s the kind of cartoon that has an in-joke with the reader. This is how we think of him, and how could he have imagined himself being all these things?

There are a lot of dimensions to it. I like cartoons like that, which present a funny moment with warmth in it, but also another dimension. There’s another cartoon where Thabo Mbeki is in a limo outside parliament, and a guy is asking for money at the window of his limo. Mbeki just doesn’t get it, and says: “Change? Change takes time, my friend.” And that was a sort of summary of the era, and perhaps the country’s history since 1994. I’m proud of those cartoons which have that kind of resonance.

But there are others I like because they are totally scatological and irreverent. Like George W Bush getting a colonoscopy, with a probe up his butt and you see his brain, and he’s humming a little tune. Or PW Botha when he wouldn’t come to the truth commission, on the phone, while bonking his new girlfriend. And he says: “TRC subpoena? Impossible! Uh! Uh! I’m suffering ill health!”

You’ve been a political cartoonist for close to 30 years. How long will you keep at it?

I flirt with the idea of other forms of cartooning. I love the editorial cartoon as a form. It gives me that immediacy that I love. It gives me a voice. It’s a combination of some forms of journalism and comics, and caricature. I feel privileged that I’ve had the chance to express myself in that little white space. So the idea of giving it up is quite scary, because I do love doing it. At the same I studied sequential art, and I would eventually like to do more in that genre.

What are the emotional rewards and costs of your job?

What’s so exciting about it is the contact with readers, the feeling that you’re touching parts of people’s minds, that they’ve been trying to access and found it difficult to make connections with. The bad stuff is the deadlines, which I have to admit I’ve never fully mastered. I struggle. I really do want to make sure that the cartoons are good and that they work before they go into the paper. So clocks and deadlines. And what goes with that is angst and second-guessing. I’ve never become completely complacent, I’ve never felt that I’ve made it and that I know exactly what I’m doing all the time. I once did a cartoon in which I’m lying on a psychiatrist’s couch, saying: “If I have a day without self-doubt, I worry.” Which is kind of true. I suppose in some ways I’m Woody Allen with a pen.

You relish drawing people with exaggerated, cartoonish features – Bheki Cele, George W Bush, Julius Malema, Peter de Villiers. But which faces do you find too bland to caricature?

It’s not always about blandness – there are some faces that have quite a lot of depth and character, but they don’t have the kind of features you can get rough with. One example is Dikgang Moseneke, who I’ve recently had to draw a couple of times. Lots of personality in his face, find it hard to latch onto a feature and really push. Jeff Radebe I found a bit difficult. Tokyo Sexwale has gone from someone I enjoyed drawing to someone I struggle with, maybe it’s because he shaved all his hair and beard off, and got a bit older.

How worried are you about the Secrecy Bill?

We should definitely not relax. It’s because of the efforts of the media and civil society and to some extent some opposition parties, because of pressure from those groupings, that some aspects of the bill have been rolled back. Of course the huge exception being the absence of a clause which provides a public interest safeguard for media and whistleblowers who release important classified information. Various groupings will continue the fight against this, and I will join them and continue to draw cartoons about it.

If Julius Malema should exit the political stage, would you miss him?

You always miss the noisy populists as a cartoonist. He’s a very fascinating character. He’s not all bad, but I do think he is in some ways very dangerous. The dangerous stuff is that he is the best example of tenderpreneurship, and of giving some legitimacy to it. I think he’s lost a bit of the credibility that he may have had, I think he overplayed his hand. But there are many more like him: people who are populists in the Peron tradition. It’s the gangster on the block making his living in unsavoury ways, and giving out lots of presents.

That’s what Malema represents. He speaks his mind, sometimes outrageously. He’s seen as someone who has the guts to stand up to anybody, but in fact he is full of contradictions. He is making his money with the very people he’s attacking, and at the expense of the very people he purports to defend.