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ABC Analysis Q2 2011: The biggest-circulating consumer magazines in SA

The biggest magazines in SA by category

Last ABC Period: April 2011 to June 2011 (ABC Q2 2011)
Position, Title & Frequency, Total Circ, Position Previous Corresponding Period, Movement (Up ^, Down V, Steady -)

Male
#1 Men’s Health Mtly 60,415 vs. 71,800 #1 –
#2 FHM Mtly 46,834 vs. 52,594 #2 –
#3 Popular Mechanics Mtly 45,071 vs. 47,714 #3 –
#4 GQ 10xA 28,160 vs. 28,770 #4 –
#5 Stuff AltM 23,215 vs. 17,962 #5 –
#6 Destiny AltM 14,994 vs. 15,036 #6 –
#7 Playboy Mtly 16,067 vs. New

Flashback 2005 (Jan-Jun 2005)
FHM was the top circulating men’s mag with 117,365 followed by Men’s Health at 91,849, GQ at 39,744
and Maksiman at 21,027.

Woman’s General (as per the ABC)

The top 5:
#1 Move! Wkly: 136,493 vs. 122,720 #2
#2 Sarie Mtly: 124,279 vs. 132,646 #1
#3 Rooi Rose Mtly: 108,898 vs. 118,395 #3
#4 Woman and Home Mtly: 95,718 vs. 95,982 #4
#5 Ideas/Idees Mtly: 83,366 vs. 84,108 #5

The other 5:
#6 Cosmopolitan Mtly: 83,273 vs. 90,833
#7 Finesse Mtly: 81,328 vs. 89,325
#8 Glamour Mtly: 81,215 vs. 83,672
#9 True Love Mtly: 75,932 vs. 82,648
#10 Vroue Keur Wkly: 75,352 vs. 80,024

Flashback 2005 (Jan-Jun 2005)
In 2005 the Top 5 consisted of Sarie (143,434), Rooi Rose (127,924), Cosmopolitan (118,296), True Love (115,904) and Glamour (95,552). The Other 5 were Fair Lady (90,852 – now 59,681), Finesse (87,593), DIT (now Ideas/Idees 85,642), Your Family (then 79,146, now 57,068) and Woman & Home (78,687).

Business and News

#1 Finweek Wkly: 27,815 vs. 28,358 #2 ^ +1
#2 Financial Mail Wkly: 24,023 vs. 26,224 #3 ^ +1
#3 Succeed Magazine Mtly: 23,367 vs. 20,825 #4 ^ +1
#4 Noseweek Mtly: 19,910 vs. 21,867 #3 V +1
#5 Entrepreneur Mtly: 19,201 vs. 29,039 #1 V -4

Flashback 2005 (Jan-Jun 2005)
Financial Mail had a circulation of 25,648, Personal Finance of 21,583, Finance Week of 16,898, Succeed of 16,771 and Finansies & Tegniek of 13,057. Finansies & Tegniek was later incorporated with Finance Week to create Finweek.

Celebrity & Family Interest
#1 Huisgenoot Wkly: 305,741 vs. 318,314 #1 –
#2 You Wkly: 186,066 vs. 189,304 #2 –
#3 Drum Wkly: 132,928 vs. 116,691 #3 –
#4 Bona Mtly: 103,946 vs. 106,159 #4 –
#5 People Wkly: 89,067 vs. 87,269 #5 –
#6 Heat Wkly: 35,049 vs. 43,782 #6 –

Flashback 2005 (Jan-Jun 2005)
Huisgenoot was circulating 355,487 copies and You 229,750. People sold 105,102 and heat sold 67,441. Note: The ABC lists TV Plus (Afrikaans and English editions) in its Entertainment category.

Home
#1 Tuis Home Mtly: 78,878 vs. 72,936 #1
#2 SA Garden and Home Mtly: 63,061 vs. 65,474 #3
#3 Sarie Kos. AltM: 60,532 vs. 66,564 (was Q changed Changed Frequency) #2
#4 Conde Nast House & Garden Mtly: 44,260 vs. 44,453 #5
#5 SA Garden / SA Tuin Paleis Mtly: 41,981 vs. 45,004 #4
#6 SA Home Owner 11xA: 37,392 vs. 35,380 #7
#7 Food and Home Entertaining Mtly: 36,560 vs. 40,047 #6
#8 House & Leisure Mtly: 33,371 vs. 33,623 #8

Flashback 2005 (Jan-Jun 2005)
#1 SA Garden & Home, 91,596
#2 Tuis/Home, 84,715
#3 SA Home Owner, 60,497
#4 Conde Nast House & Garden, 48,698
#5 House & Leisure, 42,109

Sport and Hobby
#1 Kick Off F: 41,464 vs. 49,821 #1 –
#2 SA Hunter/Jagter Mtly: 33,919 vs. 32,819 #3 ^ +1
#3 Amakhosi Mtly: 32,717 vs. 27,404 #5 ^ +2
#4 Tight Lines Mtly: 27,902 vs. 27,823 #4 –
#5 Sports Illustrated Mtly: 22,167 vs. 25,095 #6 V +1
#6 Runners World Mtly: 21,893 vs. 19,041 #9 ^ +3
#7 Complete Golfer Mtly: 21,409 vs. 19,623 #7 –
#8 SA Rugby Mtly: 20,049 vs. 18,572 #10 ^ +2
#9 Magnum Mtly: 19,083 vs. 19,547 #8 V -1
#10 Golf Digest Mtly: 12,998 vs. 43,937 #2 -8

Flashback 2005 (Jan-Jun 2005)
Kick Off has a circulation of 63,016 and SA Sports Illustrated of 39,695. Amakhosi had a circulation of 34,415, Golf Digest stood at 25,167 and Compleat Golfer at 24,233.

Travel
#1 Weg/Go Mtly: 81,432 87,440 #1 –
#2 Getaway Mtly: 54,297 51,507 #2 –
#3 SA Country Life Mtly: 39,187 40,100 #3 –
#4 Wegsleep. Mtly: 29,158 29,801 #4 –
#5 National Geographic Traveller Q: 11,605 13,708 #5 1

Flashback 2005 (Jan-Jun 2005)
Getaway had a circulation of 80,323, Weg stood at 74,396 and SA Country Life, 38,000

Notes: Excludes annuals and magazines with no cover price unless indicated otherwise.

Djo Tunda Wa Munga: An African Tarantino

You would not expect a Congolese movie to be bringing home an MTV movie award, as Viva Riva! did when it was named Best African Movie at the MTV movie awards recently, not when there has not been a movie made in the Congo in 25 years and especially not when, until recently there was not a single movie house to show it, reports Colin Macrae.

This, however, is no ordinary African movie, gone is the pedantic pandering, the look what we have done wrong hand wringing, the exotic romanticism. This goes straight for the jugular, a fast paced edgy crime film that could be set anywhere from Chandler’s LA to Scorsese’s New York, De Palma’s Miami or even Guy Ritchie’s London for that matter.

But this is the Congo, the original heart of darkness that has had to endure the worst forms of colonialism, followed by the despotic rule of dictators like Mobutu Sese Seko and endless civil war. This is no ordinary setting. For first time director and Congolese born Djo Tunda Wa Munga to take such familiar celluloid stereotypes as the criminal, the gangster and of course the moll and put them in the surreal setting of Africa in transition is a masterstroke.

The set up is universal, the lovable rogue criminal returns to the Congo from Angola with his swag. On a night out in his hometown of Kinshasa, while showing off his new found wealth he falls, as you would expect, for the resident gangster’s moll, played more than erotically by the sultry beauty Manie Malone. Added to the resident gangster’s displeasure, a group of Angolan gangsters arrive hot on the heels of their stolen swag and the setup is marked for a rollercoaster ride through the gritty back streets and glitzy nightspots of modern day Kinshasa. Add some corrupt cops, an equally corrupt lesbian army captain, some token witchcraft and loads of gratuitous sex and you have a recipe that would work in a Cineplex anywhere in the world.

What sets Viva Riva! apart, is its sense of place, a vibrant happening Kinshasa. Which is above all real, you feel that the director knows his subject matter intimately and if you look beyond the violence, which there is loads of, the movie conveys a genuine warmth for his hometown. Many critics worldwide have been tagging the film as African noir and yes it sure ticks those boxes, but there is an undercurrent of deep, dark humour, with in-jokes and cultural references, both local and Western, that gives the film more of an ironic overlay that owes more to Tarantino than it does to Chandler.

There is a serious side of course, poverty is everywhere and corruption is endemic and the plot line that money in Africa is the root of all evil is prevalent throughout. But behind the heavy handed beatings and callous characterisations there is a lightness of touch. It’s humour that brings the real point home. Projecting a self-effacing African take on the situation, power cuts and gas shortages are a recurring theme and one of the, many, stand out lines of the movie, sees one poor bit player when told in classic gangster style that they can make her assistance worthwhile, she replies with enthusiasm “What! Could you get me to Europe?”

This is no third world Scarface, frantic fierce and graphic it might be, but it has an African authenticity, a vicious honesty and fresh voice that makes Viva Riva! a cult classic in the making, a must see. Perhaps it even heralds a renaissance in African cinema on its own terms.

Reprinted from Mahala.

Also see: Viva Riva!’s Djo Tunda Wa Munga: action man (The Guardian) and Director Djo Tunda Wa Munga makes his mark with ‘Viva Riva!’ (LA Times)

The next Windows shows future looks a lot like the tablet computer and smartphone

Last week saw the preview of the way more than a billion people will be using computers a couple of years from now. The next version of Microsoft’s Windows operating system, Windows 8, was partly unveiled at the BUILD conference in California, to show developers the environment in which they would be operating.

And the future, it’s clear, looks a lot like the tablet computer and smartphone.

Every previous version of Windows had a screen littered with Icons, but very little content. Windows 7 featured the predecessor to apps – called Widgets – on the home screen. But, in the half-hearted way they were implemented, these proved to be more of an irritation than attraction. The next version will see a screen containing live content, with an emphasis on user-friendly access to news, entertainment and business or leisure applications.

(See the full details revealed by Microsoft here: Microsoft showcases Windows 8.)

It’s going to take more than a year for Windows to come to market though. That will have the anti-Microsoft lobby jeering gleefully, but they should hold their sniggers. Microsoft learned from the disastrous rushed roll-out of Windows Vista – two operating systems ago – that rushing a product to market can all but destroy the brand. They took their time with the current version, Windows 7, and the market rewarded them with lavish praise and purchases.

Analysts argue that the delay will hurt sales of the current version, as the corporate market holds off on adopting it in favour of waiting for the new one. But that is an absurd argument that has already been disproven in the world of laptops and phones: when people need a new device or application, they will buy it.

Thanks to the competition, though, Microsoft has learned another key lesson: the developer community is all important. Both Apple and Google have built up seemingly unassailable positions in the apps market – with a combined billion apps available for their iOS and Android operating systems – thanks to a close relationship with the developer community.

Microsoft is getting the developers on board early, and enthusiastically. It no longer sees itself competing with outside developers, as it did as recently as three years ago. The more it embraces developers, the more it reaps the rewards of a richer ecosystem for users. And that’s where you and I eventually come in.

The Windows 8 style interface will probably appear on smartphones first, followed by tablets and finally laptops and desktop computers. That means a steady process of familiarisation, rather than the big-bang style of Apple’s the-world-changes-today announcements. That, of course, is also why Microsoft is seen as far more boring than Apple!

The new Windows will include almost every imaginable input option, such as mouse, keyboard, touch screen and virtual keyboard. Only voice and gesture control are missing for now, but don’t be surprised to see them pop up.

In a similar way to which apps are at the centre of the touch device user experience today, the new version of Microsoft’s browser, Internet Explorer 10, will be focused on web sites integrated with the Windows user interface. They will live alongside the apps that will be both pre-installed and downloadable, and apps will be able to draw information from each other – overcoming a major current limitation across all operating systems.

Microsoft’s cloud service, Windows SkyDrive, will be built into the system, playing catch-up with Apple’s iCloud.

Microsoft also promises an instant-on world, meaning you switch on the computer, and it is immediately functional, as opposed to the interminable boot-up process we still suffer today. Again, playing catch-up.

“We reimagined Windows,” said Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live Division at Microsoft, at the event. “From the chipset to the user experience, Windows 8 brings a new range of capabilities without compromise.”

The proof of the pudding, as the ancients used to say, will be in the eating. Just because Microsoft says it has reimagined its products doesn’t mean it will capture the user’s imagination.

– Arthur Goldstuck is editor-in-chief of Gadget. Follow him on Twitter on @art2gee. Reprinted from Gadget.

BlackBerry brand so powerful in SA, consumers associate it with their right to communications

The BlackBerry brand in South Africa found itself in the midst of two seemingly disastrous public relations crises in the past two weeks. But, says ARTHUR GOLDSTUCK, both events said more about the power of the brand, and the fall-out gave it even more strength.

BlackBerry is in trouble in South Africa. It has become the most powerful brand in the country.

If those statements are mutually incompatible, it tells you something about perception and reality. The perception is that the brand is under attack, from both Government and the mobile networks. But the reality is that it has become so pervasive in South Africa, any attempt to curb it results in a consumer and media outcry.

The Ministry of Communications has learned this to its cost, and blustered for days to justify its statements. Vodacom ran for cover after its own misstep. The latest incident, on 12 September, saw Vodacom announce “a series of steps to improve the customer experience by increasing network capacity and reducing congestion”.

According to a subsequent statement released on 14 September, “An increase in complaints from BlackBerry users in recent months had been investigated, and it was found that the service was being negatively affected by a very small number of customers downloading vast amounts of data.”

The initial mistake Vodacom made, however, was to characterise more than 100MB of downloaded data as high usage. In this context, proposing a clampdown on high users appeared to represent a cap on the supposedly unlimited BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS).

And here’s the rub: BlackBerry is the de facto standard in smartphones in South Africa, representing around 70% of smartphones being sold through the networks. World Wide Worx research at the end of 2010 showed that almost a quarter of adult cellphone users living in cities and towns in South Africa intended to buy a BlackBerry next.

In the USA, BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) is on the backfoot. Despite sales remaining high, in the context of an exploding smartphone market, that translates into rapidly shrinking market share. RIM in North America wishes it had to deal like with crises of the kind the South African office faced.

The attraction in this country is threefold: the unlimited BIS for around R50-R60 a month; the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service that has burnt through the teenager and family market like a veldt fire; and the aspirational power of the BlackBerry as a high-end business phone that is accessible to the ordinary user.

In this context, any tampering with the brand would be disastrous for the tamperer. And every such attempt merely reinforces the power of the brand, creating a buzz of consumer solidarity. The media, too, have become BlackBerry co-dependents, buying into that buzz and promoting it into their headlines.

Deputy Minister of Communications Obed Bapela discovered that last week when he declared, in an off-the-cuff statement, that Government was considering legislation to force BlackBerry to open up encrypted messages to the police. This despite the fact that any encrypted messaging is already covered by the Regulation of Interception of Communications Act (RICA) – the implementation of which had every cellphone owner in South Africa scrambling frantically to register their SIM cards. And despite the fact that Research in Motion has already made it clear that it cooperates with authorities in such matters (see its policy here).

The result was a double whammy for the Department of Communications (DoC): it was seen to be ignorant of its own laws; and it was seen to be targeting one brand unfairly. The latter, in the context of BlackBerry’s brand power in South Africa, focused attention heavily on the former perception, to the great embarrassment of the DoC.

The media has moved on, but the DoC persists in making statements about criminals turning to BlackBerry because of the encrypted nature of its communications. The reality is that criminals are turning to BlackBerry because a quarter of the market is turning to BlackBerry. All the DoC is succeeding in is reaffirming – and reinforcing – the power of the brand.

Then came Vodacom. In truth, it is a matter of nuance. The BIS is intended to cover unlimited e-mail, messaging and browsing on the phone. Streaming media, such as movies, video and music, is explicitly excluded. So is downloading such content onto other devices. By Vodacom’s own admission, 95% of users do not use more than 100MB of data a month, making the R50-R60 fee a tremendous money-spinner for the networks.

The nuance in Vodacom’s subsequent statements makes their position clear, but was absent from the first announcement:

“The BlackBerry service was designed to enable customers to use a BlackBerry smartphone for internet browsing as well as sending and receiving e-mails and messages on the handset itself. This on-device experience is provided for a fixed fee, made possible by the use of the BlackBerry service which compresses data. The device can also be linked to computers and used as a modem, which is called ‘tethering’. Since tethered data does not run via the BlackBerry service, it is charged at normal data rates. The same is also true for video.

“By using special software and web sites to circumvent the BlackBerry service and by downloading huge files for use off the handset itself, a very small number of customers are abusing the service. This can amount to hundreds of gigabytes of data per user each month. By doing this, this small group has negatively affected the network experience of all Vodacom’s BlackBerry customers.”

There you have it: the issue is not the 100MB, but the 100GB – a very different matter for the ordinary user.

Even those who do not use as much as 100MB – the vast majority – resent the very idea that they may be capped at that level. It would mean that, when they really need to use more, they would be penalised.

As is his style, Vodacom CEO Pieter Uys immediately took the lead in putting customers’ minds at ease:

“I’m very concerned that the steps we were planning to put in place were interpreted as punishing normal users. This is not at all our intention and no changes have been implemented to slow down any customer’s BlackBerry service. We are instead working with the makers of BlackBerry, Research In Motion, to find a solution to manage the bulk movie and file downloads, since these are responsible for degrading the service for all other users. By managing this issue we’ll improve the service for all of our BlackBerry customers.”

The bottom line, for the typical user – and that makes up almost all BlackBerry users – is that there will be no change in their service.

The bottom line, for the networks, is that they dare not tamper with the BlackBerry model while it dominates the market. The brand has become so powerful, consumers associate it with their right to communications. And, in South Africa, an enterprise tampers with basic rights at its peril.

– Arthur Goldstuck is editor-in-chief of Gadget. Follow him on Twitter on @art2gee. Reprinted from Gadget.

Ad award success no longer sole arbiter of agency and industry respect

The 2011 Loerie Awards are done and dusted (no pun intended), with Cape Town agencies grabbing three of the top five (first, third and fifth) spots on the official overall ranking table. Two of the three Grands Prix were awarded to Cape-based agencies.

Cape-Town-based FoxP2 leaps back to the top of the rankings, largely on the back of its creatively successful ‘Love To Meet You’ campaign for Brandhouse, which was also the most-awarded brand at the annual advertising industry back-slap. It also won praise for its launch campaign for Frank.net.

HelloComputer, also in Cape Town, won for a Digital Grand Prix its Applications & Interactive Tools entry for Musica, ‘The Flo Browser’. Ogilvy Cape Town won a Grand Prix for its Live Activations entry for Volkswagen, ‘Marching Band’.

The final Grand Prix went to Net#work BBDO in the Radio Commercial Campaign category for Mercedes-Benz, ‘New Friends’.

Net#work BBDO found success with its campaigns for Mercedes-Benz, which also emerged as the second most-awarded brand at the Loeries. The same Loerie-winning campaign had won a Radio Grand Prix at the 2011 Cannes Lions for what Adweek describes as “a set of creepy-comic ads” promoting Mercedes-Benz’s accident-avoidance features.

Ogilvy Cape Town took third place on the rankings, and its Grand Prix, for the campaigns it created for Volkswagen. It also produced winning work for Kraft and the Sea Rescue Institute.

TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris Johannesburg, which swept ad award ceremonies in 2009 with its “Trillion Dollar Billboard” campaign for The Zimbabwean, took sixth place on the overall rankings. Its follow-up campaign for The Zimbabwean handed it only three Silvers.

King James, which dominated the Loeries last year and ranked first place on the overall table last year, hardly registered this year. Its work for Kulula.com and Allan Gray, usually sure-fire award-winners, were barely noted by the judges.

It shows that award success (or lack there off) doesn’t necessarily mirror what is happening at an agency. King James is on a success streak with McCain, British Airways (King James already holds the account for sister airline kulula.com) and short-term insurer Santam (strategic lead and above-the-line), all signing up as clients over the course of the last year. It has also bagged the whole of the Parmalat account, won the Pan-African Johnnie Walker business of the global “Keep Walking” campaign, the consolidated Nashua account and the Galaxy business. The agency was also named AdReview Agency of the Year in 2011 by Tony Koenderman. Alistair King didn’t cry himself to sleep last night.

Quirk, which is building itself into a hugely successful digital agency, didn’t feature at the awards either. With revenues nearing R100 million this financial year, marketers seem to be voting this agency a different sort of award.

Joe Public, also on a successful account-winning streak, has similarly fallen off the top 10 ranking table since last year, while DDB South Africa and McCann Erickson has clambered up, thanks to successful campaigns for McDonalds and 8ta respectively.

140 BBDO, formerly Net#work BBDO Cape Town, caught attention with its innovative interactive print advert for Mercedes-Benz, as well as its digital solutions for Visi magazine (alongside Native). M&C Saatchi Abel made a respectable debut at the Loeries with a Campaign Gold in the Direct & PR Communication category for its repositioning of Mr Delivery as Mr D.

Overall, the event itself was much slicker (and shorter) than it was last year, achieved through cutting back on the entertainment. The Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC) is surely one of the city’s better investments. First night MC was Riaan “I’m on a stage” Cruywagen (who had also been used in the 2009 Pendoring awards campaign) and second night was David “The Hoff” Hasselhoff.

With the ceremony over, I for one cannot help but feel that the industry is shifting away from judging their peers based on award results.

King James is a case in point; Joe Public, with its innovative initiative to help every willing client to search for the core purpose of their business, is another; or Saatchi & Saatchi Cape Town, which is rekindling its creative spirit. None of these agencies made a huge splash at the awards show; nobody doubts their influence in this industry – everybody is talking about what they are busy doing.

At the same time, nobody doubts the creative credentials of TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris, even if it hadn’t been able to match (even by a long shot) its award success for the Trillion Dollar Campaign.

The Great Recession is stranding the egos. As an industry advertising is looking at alternative ways to judge industry and business success (like those 300-400 new CVs passing through Quirk every month). Awards are becoming an ever-smaller part of a larger parcel, allowing agencies to use a broader set of tools to build their reputations.

For many, it will come as a relief to no longer be held hostage by award success as the sole arbiter of agency and industry respect.

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

Loerie 2011 Official Rankings

OVERALL RANKING BY AGENCY
RANK AGENCY
1 FoxP2
2 Net#Work BBDO
3 Ogilvy Cape Town
4 DDB South Africa
5 The Jupiter Drawing Room South Africa (Cape Town)
6 TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris Johannesburg
7 McCann Erickson
8 Draftfcb Johannesburg
9 Ogilvy Johannesburg
10 140 BBDO

OVERALL RANKING BY AGENCY SIZE
RANK AGENCY
LARGE (100 employees and above)
1 Ogilvy Cape Town
2 TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris Johannesburg
3 The Jupiter Drawing Room South Africa (Cape Town)
4 Draftfcb Johannesburg
5 Ogilvy Johannesburg
MEDIUM (41 – 99)
1 Net#Work BBDO
2 DDB South Africa
3 McCann Erickson
4 Ireland/Davenport
5 Saatchi & Saatchi
SMALL (1-40)
1 FOXP2
2 HelloComputer
3 Gloo Digital Design
4 140 BBDO
5 Makeka Design Lab
Note: The agency ranking by size includes traditional agencies,
digital agencies and communication design agencies.

OVERALL RANKING BY BRAND
RANK BRAND
1 Brandhouse
2 Mercedes-Benz
3 McDonalds
4 Volkswagen
5 Musica
6 8.ta
7 Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT)
8 Frank.net
9 BP South Africa
9 The Zimbabwean

RANKING BY DIGITAL AGENCY
RANK DIGITAL AGENCY
1 HelloComputer
2 Gloo Digital Design
3 NATIVE
4 Pixel Project
5 Prezence
6 Digital Fabric
7 Leftfield
8 Strike Media

RANKING BY FILM PRODUCTION COMPANY
RANK FILM PRODUCTION COMPANY
1 Velocity Films
2 Picture Tree
3 Egg Films
4 Fundi Films
5 14 10th Street
6 Orange Films
7 Hotel de Ville
8 Bouffant
9 humanoid@eggfilms
9 Plank Films

How the rankings are calculated:
1. Points are given for each award, with the points based on the probability of winning each award.
2. 300 points for Grand Prix; 110 points for Gold; 40 points for Silver; 15 points for Bronze; 90 points for Craft Gold; 30 points for Craft Certificate.
3. Single entries that are combined into one campaign award during judging will receive 1,5 times the points. For example, if three print posters are combined and awarded a Campaign Gold, then the award will be worth 1,5 x 110 = 165 points.
4. The following categories will all be awarded 1,5 times the points: Mixed-media campaigns;
Integrated Campaigns; Communication Design – Identity Programmes; Internal Marketing Programmes, CRM Programmes; Live Events & Sponsorship.
5. Where more than one company or individual has been credited, the points will be divided
equally between the parties. For example, if two companies share the Agency credit on a digital website, then each company will receive half the points; or if three people share the Writer credit, then each person will receive a third of the points.
6. A company cannot receive points as both an agency and as a production company.
7. Production companies will receive points from International Craft entries; however agencies will not receive any points.

Silver Loerie Winner Found

The advertising industry breathed a collective sigh of relief when copywriter Jason Smythe-Wallace returned to his desk at agency CBA Ford Smith Jones and Broadbent. Although the agency has declined to comment on Smythe-Wallace’s whereabouts over the last few weeks, reliable sources have indicated that the emerging young talent had been languishing in a Cape Town jail since Saturday, one of several creatives caught on the wrong side of Loerie law.

While many young creatives were arrested at the annual Loerie Awards for narcotics offences of varying severity, Smythe-Wallace seems to have run into trouble of a serious variety.

“He’s back at his desk, and that’s the most important thing,” says an anonymous colleague at the agency. “To be honest, he still looks a little bit shaken, but who wouldn’t be?”

Smythe-Wallace was arrested by local police for being in possession of 15 marijuana joints and a half-kilogram pack of a suspicious-looking white powder. The enormous quantity of the powder on his person led to his being separated from the other suspects nabbed at the awards, and being taken to a jail traditionally used for the housing of hardened criminals.

“Actually the poor bugger got a very raw deal,” the source continues. “The white powder was a natural mood enhancer that he had taken along with the express purpose of avoiding doing as much coke as he did last year.”

According to additional inside sources, Smythe-Wallace’s absence was not noticed initially.

“After the Loeries, no-one really comes back for at least a week,” says another anonymous colleague. “They may be at their desks, but nothing’s happening. Jason actually won a silver, so we all thought he was still out partying. It was only when we missed him at the after-party on Sunday evening that we began to get concerned.”

A third source, also employed at CBA Ford Smith Jones and Broadbent, paints a slightly different picture.

“No one would have noticed that he was missing at all if we didn’t just get this massive new chewing gum account. They want to focus on ‘teen skate punk’, and the only person around who has ever showed an inclination towards Avril Lavigne was Jason. We tried to get hold of him to inform him of the brief meeting client scheduled for Monday but no one could find him.”

Attempts to interview other creatives arrested for drugs at the Loeries were unsuccessful, although anecdotal accounts reveal several arrests were made over the weekend of the event. According to a wide cross-section of insiders, all of those arrested are safely back at their desks. Serious charges look likely only in the case of one individual caught carrying a backpack of high-quality horse amphetamines.

After his absence was officially noticed, Smythe-Wallace was liberated from his incarceration by a crack squad of CBA Ford Smith Jones and Broadbent lawyers, who were aided in their efforts by the quick-fire development of a cutting edge, multimedia defence presentation, put together by a team of volunteer creative directors.

Smythe-Wallace has kept mum on the affair, although it is known within the industry that he has been officially cautioned by senior partners within CBA Ford Smith Jones and Broadbent to stop attempting to quit cocaine. One senior director from the agency has been quoted as saying, “This is exactly the sort of silly nonsense that ruins our productivity. If he had just scored at the event we would have the chewing gum account in the bag by now.”

– Andrew Miller has been a media and corporate ghost writer for the last 13 years. He used to write marketing satire under the John Doe pseudonym for Brand Magazine and Media Toolbox. When not releasing communications bile, Andrew runs Newtown’s Unity Design, a socially orientated arts and media company. Catch up with Unity on Facebook and Twitter.

Loerie Grand Prix winner: Ogilvy Cape Town, Live Activations entry for Volkswagen, ‘Marching Band’

Loerie Grand Prix winner: Ogilvy Cape Town, Live Activations entry for Volkswagen, ‘Marching Band’

A tongue-in-cheek guerrilla activation for VW Golf saw a silent marching band traverse the Sea Point promenade, effectively advertising the joys of silence and how it can be enjoyed inside the quiet VW Golf.

The waning influence of ad award shows

The statues are stacked in neat rows along office walls. It’s come to define our industry. Kids are told they need to win ’em to impress the creative director and secure that job. Creative directors are told they need to win ’em to impress the MD and prove their relevance in a competitive industry. MDs care because they are told the talent cares, and with a bit of spin and a celebratory lunch, the client might be induced to care, too.

That’s a lot of caring taking place right there, so why am I seeing more and more stories along the lines of ‘Death to Design Awards‘, published on the influential design blog Design Observer, or “What’s wrong with advertising award shows?”, published on Adsoftheworld?

I suspect the centre of the industry is moving. Moving on, to be precise. The Great Recession, as the last economic crisis is increasingly being called, changed our industry more than it might care to admit.

It has put consumers firmly back on the agenda of brand managers, who wants agencies to forget about awards and stay focused instead on the strategic importance of the conversation that gets people engaged with a brand – and keeps them engaged.

The realisation that organisations need more honest, and thanks to the rise of social media, intimate, relationships with consumers, translated into the realisation that marketers needed more intimate relationships with their agencies. This back to ‘people basics’ continues to have a knock-on effect, as agencies are coming to realise the need for a more intimate relationship (as opposed to relations, stop sniggering) with their own people.

A key point made across the board by the teams behind 2010’s most interesting agency launches – and that year saw a good haul of them, from Livio Tronchin, Myles Hoppe and Mark Stead at Derrick and Ben Wren and Michael van den Heerik at 60layers, to Mike Abel and his team at M&C Saatchi Abel – is that agencies no longer sustain intimate relationships with clients. This disconnect drove these entrepreneurs, all passionate advertising people, perfectly understandably, to seek a model that allows them to reconnect with the people they do business with. Creativity in isolation offers less and less reward it seems.

Andrew Whitehouse took members of his FoxP2 team to Afrika Burn this year. They had a party, they had time to get to know one another better, and they had an experience. A creative director related to his team in a way that in all likelihood meant something, especially if he did so not as a creative director. It’s why Whitehouse helps run one of the most inspiring ad agencies in the country and why it remains one of the most creative in the industry.

In “Death to Design Awards” Maria Popova argues that “the output of this flawed and incomplete system of evaluation becomes the currency designers flash at prospective clients and use to bargain their billing rates. It makes clients lazy and designers complacent. Lazy because it creates a cheat sheet for judging the merit of a designer or studio, making the client uninterested in actual inquiry into the process, work and product of smaller studios and emerging designers who may actually have a better, fresher solution to the client’s problem than the award-encrusted top-biller. Complacent because it’s easy to buy into your own brilliance when you spend your days sitting across a shelfful of awards in your posh office. And between laziness and complacency, the whole marketplace for design becomes a self-contained universe isolated from the bigger cultural context in which it lives and from the human lives it touches.”

Information, and for the moment I’m including advertising here, makes an increasingly fleeting impression due to the volumes we are forced to process daily. Michael Bierut, also on Design Observer, notes that award shows return an industry’s attention “to something that’s become easy to ignore: the design artefact.”

But the web, with its proliferation of blogs, magazines and corporate websites, already preserves design, especially advertising design, for much longer than in the past.

And, as more people connect to digital environments, the more exposure design receives. Award annuals get flipped through; research, whether it’s to back up what’s written in a CV or to access a portfolio of work, is done online. What industry commentators say, and what consumers say, now carry more weight that what award shows say. Young designers are loading portfolios onto Flickr and sites such as 10and5.com and make contacts via LinkedIn to build their profiles.

This isn’t new. It’s been happening for at least a decade now. But change happens slowly in some corners.

Creativity thrives on renewal, imagination and change. Awards shows’ revenue models is built on entry volumes and sponsorships; their solution to the changing communication environment is simply to add more categories, as if spending five hours in bowels of the Good Hope Centre as was the case with the 2010 Loeries awards ceremony, isn’t punishing enough (no wonder they have to spread it over two mind-numbing evenings). While advertising seeks communication solutions for an age marked by information overload and attention deficit, its trade shows swings in the opposite direction.

Once awards shows grew the creative industry; now the creative industry is outgrowing award shows. It’s a sign of how far advertising has come to be strategically integrated into the broader business environment.

Originally published on Bizcommunity.com Marketing & Media | South Africa – click to see more comments. (First published last year on BizCommunity.com – check outwhat the industry thinks on their poll that ran alongside the column.)

A history of brands and branding in South Africa

An exciting new addition to South Africa’s marketing literature come in the form of the recently published From Groot Constantia to Google: 1865 to 2010 – a colourful history of brands & branding in South Africa by Affinity Publishing.

Publisher Ken Wilshere-Preston rightly states in his introduction that “[t]he influence that brands exert on consumer behaviour means they have also become part of the social history of the times, reflecting the fashion, art, literature, technology, health, sport and social norms of the day.”

So in short – they reflect us – what we hold dear and how we relate to the world around us. The book helps reflect the social zeitgeist before we had Google doing it for us. It also tells some of the stories of the characters behind the brands.

So we learn that the first female owner of Groot Constantia in 1724, Anna de Konigh, was the daughter of a slave, Angela of Bengal; SA’s first newspaper, the bilingual Cape Town Gazette and African Advertiser, or Kaap Stads Courant en Afrikaansche Berigler, launched in 1800, was owned by slave dealers and privateers Alexander Walker and John Robertson; and JC Juta, who founded Juta and Company in Cape Town in 1853, married Carl Marx’s sister Louise.

It’s a written timeline that stretches back 300 years, with a noticeable boom during the late 1870s when SA’s first trademark register was established in the then Cape colony.

Wilshere-Preston says the seed for the book was planted five or six years ago when he learned that the Companies and Intellectual Properties Registration Office (CIPRO – now the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission or CIPC) had an archive of original registration forms dating back to 1877. He realised that some record of our branding history existed and started digging and researching to find out more.

The intent of the book is to both entertain and to chronicle the history of branding in SA, says Wilshere-Preston and it is constructed around a timeline with brand profiles slotted in between. The book contains a 1000 images and mentions over 300 brands.

Wilshere-Preston says he was personally surprised that so many of todays’ great brands had such humble beginnings:

Mrs Ball’s Chutney was first made in an outhouse at 59 Southfield Road in Plumstead, Cape Town, in the late 1800s

Cecil John Rhodes’ first business in Kimberly was ice-making

Standard Bank was the first to be established in Johannesburg, in a tent, in 1886

Anchor Yeast can trace its history back to 1845, and the first flour mill, Specs Bona Flower Mill, was in Cape Town.

Zam-Buk is thought to have entered pharmacology through SA war field craft.

The book is closely tied to another of Wilshere-Preston’s projects, The Brand Museum, a project that seeks to establish a physical museum to showcase a wide range of branded product, advertising material, packaging and memorabilia. A venue in Rosebank, Johannesburg, is currently under discussion.

SA history, as well as its branding history, is affected by apartheid, and A History of Brands & Branding does address this era in the book. But Wilshere-Preston says this period in our branding history lacks proper historical research, though this will hopefully be addressed as the book inspires students of marketing to dig deeper into the past histories of brands, which will allow for a substantial expansion on this era’s coverage in the book.

Wilshere-Preston identifies Groot Constantia as SA’s oldest surviving brand. This has been the subject of some discussion online as critics argued that “Groot Constantia” did not exist “until van der Stel’s estate [the original Constantia] was broken up after his death, into three farms” – Groot Constantia, Klein Constantia and Bergvliet. They argue that ‘Constantia’ would be more appropriately identified as the country’s oldest brand.

Wilshere-Preston counters that Groot Constantia is the dominant Constantia area wine brand and also holds the infrastructure of the original farm. Mercedes-Benz celebrates its 125th birthday this year, points out Wilshere-Preston, while the name Mercedes-Benz actually came into being only in 1926 (the company has its origins in the Benz Patent Motorwagen). Same rules apply to the Constantia case, argues Wilshere-Preston.

The book offers our industry a written history and shows the evolution of professional brand-building. Brands suffer from ‘future mania’, says Wilshere-Preston, when a bit of history can give perspective to the longevity and success of a brand and serve to show current consumers its storied interaction with their predecessors.

From Groot Constantia to Google: 1865 to 2010 – a colourful history of brands & branding in South Africa (ISBN 978-0981419947) is available from selected bookstores or from lynn@brandsandbranding.co.za for R345 (including VAT).

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