CREATIVITY interpreted by 10 ‘younger’ shops

AdVantage magazine decided to give 10 ‘younger’ agency shops an opportunity to portray their interpretation of creativity in advertising today, by giving each one a letter from the word ‘creativity’ and asking them to portray it, on a first response basis… Visually. Graphically. Through words. Whatever. Carte blanche…

C was chosen by digital agency Native, formed last year in a digital merger between Cambrient, Brandsh and Stonewall+. Native in its submission contains an augmented reality feature on the page – a first for AdVantage. MD Jason Xenopoulos on their definition of creativity: “‘X’ was the letter used to describe a generation in search of its identity. ‘C’ is the letter that best describes a new generation – a group for whom identity is not something to be found, but to be defined. Generation ‘C’ represents a growing number of people who (regardless of age) realise that as consumers, they are now in control. Empowered by the ‘Democratisation of Media’ (cheap cameras, computers and editing software, free distribution like YouTube and Flickr, and simple but powerful marketing platforms like Facebook and Twitter), this new ‘content generation’ has begun to recast the world in their own image. To them, community is more important than country. Collaboration is as innate as competition and context is the condition that gives their lives meaning. For this new generation, creativity is no longer an individual pursuit, but a product of the collective.” www.native.co.za

R went to Studio Botes, headed by Brandt Botes. His rationale is: “’Creativity’ eludes a specific description or formula. It’s not bound by rules and often resists being conjured up on demand. In advertising, creativity is the stuff that gives you goosebumps or makes you laugh out loud. It’s the stuff that evokes an emotional response. It moves us as consumers to do things, buy things. It influences us. It’s not the rational or reasonable and it most often can’t be measured or calculated. It has to be felt.” www.studiobotes.com

E was chosen by Mick Blore, who formed originalforever/imagineers after leaving Y&R. Imagineers is a consultancy that’s looking to turn into a mini yardstick kind of venture. The strat and creative will be the domain of originalforever. Credits: Mick Blore, mick at originalforever dot co dot za, illustration: Bradley Stapleton… They say: “Audiences like to be entertained.”

A was grabbed by amicollective, headed up by creative Mark van Niekerk, who gives this… er… explanation: “The plant is a device used by ‘Opperbeheer’ in charge of ‘Die Departement van Binne Sake’. It is an ingenious device first conceptualised by Holbrand van Verlange’s great grandfather. In essence it is a vibe scanning device that remotely reports back to ‘Opperbeheer’ the vibe status of individuals and whether they need to have a vibe adjustment. Since the late 1970’s these bio engineered plants became common devices found in homes, offices and public spaces throughout ‘Verstikland’. These plants are also known as ‘Die Teenwoordigheid’. This was a direct result from the turbulent emotional uprising of the early 1970’s felt throughout ‘Verstikland’.” www.amicollective.com

T the first ‘t’ was chosen by Derrick and &Co. Livio Tronchin, ex-Jupiter Drawing Room Cape Town creative director, and his business partners Mark Stead (former CD at KingJames RSVP) and Myles Hoppé (former brand manager of Optimal Energy, the company designing the Joule, SA’s Electric Car), launched not one, but two agencies: &Co. and Derrick last year. Hoppé serves as MD while the other two partners serve as creative directors. Their creative deals with: “People, Profit, Planet.” www.derrickcapetown.co.za

I the first ‘i’ was grabbed by The Nest, recently launched by Gareth Lessing, gareth at the-nest dot biz, and Niki Cinnamon after they left DDB SA. They hope to create “a home, a nest, for those like-minded people who have the true fire for advertising in their hearts and who want to leave the bullshit out of it”. Their rationale is direct, as is apparent from their page…

V Owen Kessel are going “boldly where no one has gone before…” This full service agency, founded by Felix Kessel and Vaughn Owen, is making waves with innovative processes and client creative. They also decided to sponsor this supplement, ‘owning’ the covers and an inside DPS brand advertorial. www.owenkessel.com

I PenQuin’s payoff line is ‘Inspire the Individual’ and they chose the ‘i’ because; “We believe the future of advertising will centre around talking to the individual rather than big groups. A brand’s primary creative objective should be to inspire this individual to create brand affinity which will have a positive effect on sales and strengthen brand equity. We had our creative minds collaborate on this custom illustration. Each object was hand drawn, vector traced and coloured and then compiled and lit in Photoshop.” Contributors: Paul Salvage, Darren Leishman, Tamsin White, Ryan Wallis, David Doubell, Wayne Flemming, Stephan du Toit, Michelle Peake, Dylan Prentis, Mmeli Magubane, Dean Howard, Shaun Janssens, Veronica Weinstein. www.penquin.co.za

T Luma has risen to compete in the international arena with character animation, photorealistic visual effects, motion graphic design as well as high res print renders for magazine ads and billboards. Lead by Paul Meyer, Gerhard Painter and Jason Cullen, their rationale: “With everyone looking into the future, what is the last thing you’d expect to represent the letter T? Especially one that’s in as mysterious a word as CREATIVITY? This is it. A hairy, junction shaped monster that’s refined and proper, while secretly obsessed with 90 degree corners. This is an artist’s interpretation of him.” www.luma.co.za

Y 60 layers of cake, headed up by founder and CEO, Ben Wren, produced an interesting commentary… Their rationale: “As marketers, thinkers and creators our conversations invariably found a certain stickiness with ‘Generation Y’. Also known as the ‘Net Generation’, these millennials are shaped by an increasingly connected world and strongly driven by expression and acceptance. Our definition of creativity, and the essence of how we work, is based on three pillars: Innovation, Relevance and Collaboration. Project CreativitY seeks to explore and define creativity through collaboration. Participate and share your definition of creativity. We are what we share.” www.60layersofcake.co.za

[poll id=”2″]

[poll id=”3″]

Voting has now closed. ‘E’ by originalforever/imagineers won the most votes, followed by ‘I’ designed by The Nest, ‘I’ designed by PenQuin, ‘C’ designed by Native, ‘Y’ designed by 60 layers of cake , ‘T’ designed by Luma and ‘R’ designed by Studio Botes. Well done guys!

Reprinted from the AdVantage Creativity 2011 supplement

Hip kids on the block Injozi have but one stated aim- design a smarter world

Hip kids on the block Injozi have but one stated aim- design a smarter world, writes Gregor Naude of Enjin

Injozi, a Milpark, Johannesburg-based band of merry design pranksters, evolved from friendships formed at the former Wits Technikon. injoziSpecialising in (but not limiting themselves to) photography, graphic, digital and audio design, the creative outfit comprises Chris Green (head of online development, 3D and web design), Ross Garrett (photographer), Nick Argyros (executive producer and audio composer) and Craig Wells (head of design.) Each member pretty much does his own thing, while adding to the greater whole that is Injozi.

Over the past 5 years they have raised the bar on all things aesthetic – raking in awards along the way – by introducing an attention to detail that has caused a stir in the creative industry. An aspirational agency for clients and interns alike, Injozi is known primarily for its effortless brand elevation. Always maintaining an unflappable work ethic, their clients range from the very corporate to the overtly glamorous. Working with big name-advertising agencies, TV and radio stations, musicians, cutting-edge brands and products, the diversity of Injozi leaves them open and accessible to a wide array of clients. With an edgy approach and flawless execution, this unstoppable team will continue to make the world a merrier place.

Happy clients

As for clients, the best way to keep them is to make them happy, says Nick. “We’ve been extremely lucky in the fact that most clients approach us, whether through the grapevine or the website. Craft plays a big part in our service offering; spending time on the finer details definitely seems to be paying dividends. And, while it’s beneficial to keep up with trends in the design and illustration fields, I think you must be conscious of not being drawn too far into it. Just stick to the basics and do them well.”

Steady evolution

As far as the company is concerned, the biggest change over time has been the fact that, although it started out as a design studio, it has evolved to a point where it now commands a niche. Says Nick, “We have really found our niche, while at the same time expanding our own ideas and passions within the company. For example, Ross (a trained graphic designer) decided that he wanted to become a full-time photographer – and that’s we he did. We’ve pretty much all changed our job descriptions over time, with the exception of Craig, who has stayed true to his passion for design and illustration, but has added Flash and 3D design to his repertoire.” In addition to audio, photography and print design, the company has also immersed themselves in digital design, where the focus is on app and game development primarily for the iPhone and iPad. Says Nick, “A main drawcard for clients is the convenience of having sound, photography and design all under the same roof. Plus there’s a foosball table and free fizzers!”

Work: ABSA KKNK

Talk about getting down and dirty. Injozi’s photo shoot for the ABSA KKNK (Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees) was, according to Argyros, “one of the most fun jobs we ever did.” Who wouldn’t want to throw a couple of hundred liters of paint and wine about? Says Nick, “Conceptually, we worked very closely with the agency. The idea was to create a giant canvas and capture it developing as layers of paint, wine and other materials were added to it. As ABSA also wanted to feature some well-known South African theatre, dance and music artists, we had canvas clothing made especially for them – they performed with the giant canvas as backdrop and were good sports with us throwing all kinds of coloured liquid on and around them. The end result was colourful to say the least. “It was breathtaking to stand back and see it all come together,” enthuses Nick.

Work: Motherland Coffee Co.

Argyros cites Motherland Coffee Co. as one of his favourite projects. “One of the factors that contributed to the success of the campaign was that we were practically given an open brief and – while the client had a clear direction of where they wanted to go – they didn’t interfere, and let us run with the creative as we saw fit,” says Nick.

The challenge: Motherland Coffee Company is a Fair Trade coffee company which sources only coffee beans of African origin from the continent. With an emphasis on equitable trade and social responsibilty in coffee-growing communities, Injozi needed to create a brand experience that captured this raw African spirit and the ideals of fair trade and social justice, while maintaining the polished, dynamic cafe feel of a premium coffee house.

The insight: Africa is the future. Injozi wanted Motherland to make clients feel that they are revolutionary African coffee pioneers. When customers enter the Motherland cafe space and drink Motherland coffee they should feel part of an African coffee revolution.

The execution: The brand identity captures an iconic African revolutionary feel. Illustrated text communicates positive and encouraging messages about the continent and its people. Youaretherevolution.org was set up as the social arm of the company, with its own logo representing a positive African uprising. Taglines of ‘Be the change’ and ‘The future is in your hands’ were kept in the same flat vector style as the overall brand. The look-and-feel of the store mixes earthy tones with sleek, polished design elements, charged with positive ideas on Fair Trade coffee and positive social revolution. Injozi also came up with the concept of using hand signals to create a visual language – using terms such as ‘pikanin’, ‘so so’ and ‘clenched fist’ to indicate the size of drink you would like to order.

Reprnted from Enjin magazine.

S’HOT: The new ID for Cross Colours

Cross Colours corporate IDCross Colours on their new corpoate ID. We digg it.

“In creating the new CI, everyone in the agency recorded a personal sound [no sniggering folks – ed] and chose a set of colours that resonated with their character. An installation that housed a speaker system was then custom built. The final step was to place a mix of colours above the speaker and play the sounds.

The result was a unique image every time that reflected each individual’s personality, their mark on the company and the nature of their work. The images will be incorporated into the company stationery, including business cards, email signatures, letterheads, etc.

To create the company logo, they mixed a set of colours with every person saying ‘Cross Colours’. This produced an unusual but mesmerising pattern that reflects the agency’s unconventional and original style.”

TBWA, Zille deny Sunday Times tender scandal report

The Sunday Times has published allegations that the office of Western Cape premier Helen Zille has awarded the province’s communication budget to agency TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris without following proper tender procedures. It values the contract at R1 billion over two years. The newspaper is basing the story on information supplied by an anonymous “whistle-blower.”

Zille’s office was quick to release a statement on the matter, denying the charges published by the Sunday Times. Zille’s office says “there is absolutely no truth in the suggestion that there was anything improper or unprocedural in awarding this tender.” It goes on to charge that the Sunday Times “chose deliberately not to present the facts as presented to them” and that a formal complaint will be lodged with the press ombudsman.

The ad agency involved has also denied any foul play. “We have incredibly high standards and ethics, as well as strict corporate governance rules,” said TBWA\ South Africa CEO Derek Bouwer in a statement.

“We value our good reputation above anything else and will immediately walk away from any tendering process even if there is just a whiff of impropriety or corruption. TBWA can say without any hesitation that the tendering process for the Province of the Western Cape communications account was clear and transparent.”

A number of inconsistencies have been pointed out in the paper’s report on the matter:

The Sunday Times states early on in the story that “the tender was not publicly advertised or placed on the government tender bulletin, as required by Treasury regulations.”

Yet local government portal Cape Gateway has information on the tender in question dating back to October 2010, including a link to the ad that was placed, inviting interested parties to attend a compulsory information session on the tender. Zille’s office says it advised the journalists writing the story, Caiphus Kgosana and Thabo Mokone, that the tender was advertised in regional newspapers Die Burger and the Cape Argus.

The Sunday Times reports that “the tender was initially described as a R1.5 million contract for the premier’s office when the agency was appointed in November 2010.” It goes on to suggest that, since it was transformed from a tender for the communication needs of the premier’s office to that of the provincial government, a new tender process should have been initiated.

The ad inviting proposals from interested parties clearly states that (emphasis added) “The Provincial Government of the Western Cape is planning to develop a brand and a brand delivery strategy, and hereby invites interested and suitable agencies to submit proposals to assist Government to drive this process.”

The tender ad continues: “The successful vendor shall work closely with the Provincial Government of the Western Cape and will be responsible for the development and implementation of the following deliverables and services, over a period of at least two years: The Provincial Government’s brand and brand delivery strarategy [sic]• A communications strategy • A corporate identity manual • Above-the-line and below-the-line communication campaigns in alignment with the strategy • Media buying.”

This suggests that the tender in question extended beyond the premier’s office to the entire provincial government from the very start.

The provincial budget for 2011 (which runs to 771 pages) talks about “aligning departmental budgets to achieve government’s prescribed outcomes” and says one of these areas of alignment includes “[d]eliverables to improve service delivery quality and access (modernisation initiatives, deliverables by the Centre for e-Innovation, communication strategy and provincial brand, service delivery improvement plans, etc.).”

So the provincial treasury says in its budgets that spend on communication and provincial branding will be aligned between departments. The Department of the Premier was tasked with overseeing this.

A couple of key questions for the Sunday Times:

  • Who suggested the tender was initially worth only R1.5 million? According to the provincial budget, the department of the premier receives R697.197 million in 2011/12 and R695.601 million and R751.117 million in 2012/13 and 2013/14 respectively.
  • Why would you believe that a R1.5 million communication budget for the Premier’s office sounds like a legitimate figure, given the scope and size of its responsibilities, never mind that the ad clearly states the communication budget would that of the entire provincial government, as well as the broad scope of the responsibilities of the winning agency?

To Cape Gateway and the premier’s office, I would ask: Why has the full value of the contract, the name of the winning bid, the date the bid was awarded and for what duration not been posted on the Cape Gateway website? Don’t pretend to be an open book when clearly the information is not readily available on your website designed to encourage transparency in government.

The price tag the Sunday Times puts on the tender comes to R1 billion over two years.

Zille’s office says the total communications spend of the provincial government is between R50 million and R70 million per year. TBWA\ Hunt Lascaris has also confirmed that the account, which was awarded in November 2010 and has been running since the beginning of this year, is worth between R50 million and R70 million.

One billion rand on communication over two years, when the provincial government’s budget is around R34-36 billion a year, would give anybody pause for thought. It would mean the province spends more on communication that it does on the provincial department of cultural affairs and sport, the department of community safety or the department of environmental affairs and development planning. Yet the editors at the Sunday Times happily swallowed the figure without querying its accuracy.

The Sunday Times did not publish information that the tender was, according to Zille’s office, “assessed by an independent and separate Bid Adjudication Committee consisting of officials from various units including Legal Services, who found it in order. Received no disputes from participating bidders. Was assessed by Legal Services who found no irregularities. It is important to understand that nobody involved in either the Bid Specification or Bid Evaluation Committees were members of the Bid Adjudication Committee that made the final decision to award the contract.”

The premier’s office itself needs to undertake to update government communication services, such as Cape Gateway, with all the relevant information to ensure the public can easily access this information for themselves. It needs to place the review compiled by the province’s treasury department and from which the Sunday Times picked up several shortcomings in the public domain and respond to its criticism (rather than have the rest of us have to read the sections the Sunday Times – possibly quoted out of context).

The Mercury has already asked to see the report but Zille’s office has declined to release it. Instead, it referred, the daily KZN newspaper reports, to a formal document released by the Provincial Treasury which found tender discrepancies which it did not deem “critical”.

On the upside, Zille’s office was quick to respond to the allegations made by the Sunday Times, and with facts rather than rhetoric nogal, while also directing a request to the auditor-general to conduct a tender process audit. Zille has offered to resign if any fraud is uncovered. She must be sure of her case – she is also setting a contrast to other politicians, who wouldn’t resign if they got caught with a 4×4 stuffed with cash and tender contracts and a jet waiting on the tarmac.

TBWA’s Bouwer also confirmed it would assist in any formal investigation into the tender process. “We will support any process that may investigate the awarding of the tender because we believe it was done with integrity,” said Bouwer. “We will give our support and cooperation if and where required and are happy to open our records to the auditor-general, if called upon to do so.”

All in all, these actions place Zille’s office on the high ground, while the Sunday Times is left trying to defend what seems like a gross misreading of the available facts at hand. Sunday Times editor Ray Hartley confirmed on Monday 15 August via Twitter that the newspaper is standing by its story.

This follows upon a question posed Murray Williams, chief reporter at the Cape Argus, in which Williams asked Hartley (also via Twitter), “Sir, does the ST stand by its story on Zille’s tender which didn’t follow ‘proper procedures and regulations’?”

In turn, Hartley responded to Williams with: “We do. It was the provincial treasury which criticised the report, not us. We reported their criticisms.”

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

Let the tablet wars begin

The tablet wars are here, with a dozen options on the South African shelves. ARTHUR GOLDSTUCK kicks off Gadget’s extensive coverage of the field with an overview of the available devices.

After months of battlefield manoeuvres, the tablet wars have been joined in earnest. More than a dozen opposing armies have lined up their forces, and the shooting war has begun.

Nothing signalled the ferocity of the war better than preliminary court injunctions granted to Apple against Samsung this week, barring the latter from selling its Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia and Germany. Apple accuses Samsung not of copying its technology, but its look, feel and intuitive interface. Both the Samsung device and Apple’s iPad have screens of around 10 inches in diagonal width – the iPad is 9.7” – regarded by many as the ideal tablet size.

It is no coincidence that Apple went after Samsung before any other tablet brand: the Galaxy Tab offers the strongest challenge to the Apple iPad’s domination of the tablet market. Most contenders have rolled out smaller tablet devices with 7” screen. However, their prices were initially not much lower than the 10” devices.

Now prices are plunging and features are improving, and they are becoming viable entertainment and even working devices. Right now, the choice is between three operating systems: Apple’s iOS that runs exclusively on the iPad, BlackBerry’s QNX, exclusive to the PlayBook, and Google’s Android – running on most other tablets. HP also runs something called webOS on their TouchPad, but have done a great job of hiding it away from consumers.

This week saw the introduction in South Africa of the first sub-R1000 tablet, the 7” Colpad. Manufactured in China, it’s been customised locally by a company called Luckymobile, and made available online at R999. Taking advantage of the fact that Android’s App Market has the largest selection of free apps of any of the contendors, the distributors pre-installed those they believe will have the greatest appeal.

The initial Colpad stock sold out within hours of the first report appearing in Gadget last Wednesday. New stock is expected to arrive this week.

The Colpad underlines the fact that there is now a pecking order of tablets, depending on your budget. The following brands are readily available in South Africa:

The 7” footsoldiers:

Colpad 7”, aimed squarely at students, with its R999 pricetag, and an extra R300 for a bundle that includes a clip-on keyboard. It’s too slow for interactive gaming, but that’s to be expected at a price less than a third of the next cheapest tablet.

Huawei Slim 7, the best-priced 7” tablet on the market before the Colpad came along, at about R3500. Low quality screen and performance will count against it, but very comfortable in the hand.

Dell Streak 7, from around R3700. It’s hard to find anyone using it.

Samsung P1000 Galaxy Tab, officially around R6000, and a frontrunner in design and performance, but needs a price attack.

BlackBerry PlayBook, from about R6000, one of the best-designed 7” devices, solid, with beautiful screen resolution, but has to be linked to a BlackBerry phone for e-mail and messaging. The corporates will love it.

HTC Flyer, from R7000 up, the most expensive 7”, but also probably the best all-rounder in quality and flexibility.

The 10” warhorses:

Apple iPad 1: It may be the first generation, but at R3200, it still compares well with all the non-Apple devices. Best value for money in tablets.

Apple iPad 2: From R4400 to R7600, depending on specifications, it sets the standard by which all other tablets will be compared.

Acer Iconia A500: from R6000 up, it doesn’t boast the cool design for which Acer is known, nor the lightweight character of tablets in general. But some like it solid.

Motorola Xoom: from R7000 up, due to be launched in South Africa this Wednesday. It may be worth waiting for the rumoured Xoom 2, which is expected to set a new standard for Android devices, but watch this space.

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, from R8000, comes closest to rivalling the iPad in build, design and usability, but may be blown out of the water by better pricing and legal action. With a price drop, though, it could give the iPad a bloody nose on the battlefield.

Shop around online, and you will find many of the devices, aside from the iPads, available for up to R1000 less than the official prices. If you are a slavish follower of brands, there are also wannabe warriors from HP, Lenovo, LG and Asus on the way.

For this war, it’s worth waiting.

– Arthur Goldstuck heads up the World Wide Worx market research organisation and is editor-in-chief of Gadget. You can follow him on Twitter on @art2gee. Reprinted from Gadget.

M&C Saatchi Abel gets thumbs up from Moray MacLennan

M&C Saatchi Abel is buzzing. The agency, which launched in early 2010 with no clients signed up front but a powerful management team, has grown to more than 63 staffers working with 29 client organisations. It just won the account for Geely – the Chinese auto manufacturer that also owns Volvo. The agency recently took another floor in the block in Cape Town where it is headquartered.

The management team is also energised by the presence of Moray MacLennan, worldwide chief executive of M&C Saatchi, in South Africa on a two-day stint to check in on progress.

“I’m clearly pleased,” says MacLennan, with regards to the results of the investment his network made in launching its Cape Town and Johannesburg offices. The UK-based group has and continues to invest tens of millions of rand in growing its South African business.

So far, the SA agency’s financials match those set out by the revenue and profit plan co-founder and chief executive partner Mike Abel drew up before the shop opened, says MacLennan.

Abel is on record as saying he expects the agency to break even by the end of 2011. It would give the agency’s critics pause for thought – the broader industry was widely dismissive of M&C Saatchi Abel’s attempt at entering the market, believing its initial top-heavy structure would prove too much in a tough economic climate.

London-based MacLennan says his group agreed with Abel’s vision of investing in talent from the get go in a bid to grow the business into a major player in the local market. But his strategy looks beyond SA to the broader African market. For M&C Saatchi, SA serves as a key to the rest of the continent – MacLennan notes that more and more clients in the telco and FMCG fields are moving to invest in the continent and their ad networks are following suit.

MacLennan doesn’t rule out physical offices in Western or Eastern Africa but says a business case for these has yet to be made. He would, however, look at local affiliates with a view on consolidation a couple of years down the line.

For the moment, he is looking at establishing a presence in the Scandinavian market, probably based in Stockholm, because of its high-calibre talent base. He is also looking at emerging markets such as Mexico, Indonesia and Argentina, but insists his network would need a sound geographic reason for setting up a physical presence in any of these.

M&C Saatchi prefers investing in owner-managed businesses and tapping into local executive talent rather than establishing wholly owned offices. MacLennan says good talent can succeed in a bad market but the opposite doesn’t hold true.

The entrepreneurial spirit that built M&C Saatchi is being replicated in the network’s offices around the world through this ownership structure, and it means management and shareholder aims are better aligned than in most other scenarios. They will rarely over- or under-invest in a business, which is good for cost management.

In some markets, M&C Saatchi will take a short cut – the network recently opened in Russia through a 50/50 joint venture with EMCG, one of Russia’s leading independent agencies – if MacLennan believes a start-up faces to many hurdles at launch. It also created scale for its Sao Paulo office by acquiring a rival agency (growth was fine but Maclennan felt it should be speeded up). The network is eyeing Rio as another possible office.

MacLennan says M&C Saatchi isn’t interested in buying talent; instead he wants talent to be attracted to his business, and his way of doing business, and to build long-term careers at M&C Saatchi that stretches over decades, rather than years. The network attracts people because it doesn’t feel like working in a civil service – the spirit is entrepreneurial – and the people are like, and like, one another.

All this breeds a uniquely different culture.

On MacLennan’s side, it means a lighter hand on the tiller, owner-managed means real responsibility for local managers, and means London can’t force a jelly mould on local offices. The leaders of each of the networks 26 offices report to MacLennan (the network also has a regional CEO for Asia in Chris Jaques).

MacLennan doesn’t believe in building up big central corporate overheads – he views it as unnecessary and believes it slows down decision-making. The network prides itself on short reporting lines and the ability to speedily implement decisions. Twice a year, all the office heads meet up to exchange views and news – the November meeting is scheduled for Cape Town. The two days they spend together MacLennan describes as a key management tool.

When MacLennan finds new partners to start local offices with, he looks for passion, drive and determination, intelligence and a sense of humour. According to him, start-ups are difficult things to run and to be successful entrepreneurs need resilience and a fire in their belly.

MacLennan says the global economy has been tough for such a lengthy period of time it feels as if has become the new normal. In the network’s favour is its size, which allows it to buck some of the difficulties networks with huge numbers of offices now struggle with. MacLennan expects the market to remain tough over the next 18 months.

Recently appointed president of EAPA (the European Association of Communications Agencies), MacLennan is an advocate for creativity as an engine of economic growth for Europe (and obviously believes in its power to grow economies elsewhere as well). MacLennan says Europe is fast talking itself into being yesterday’s news when this is not really the case. It needs to look at how it’s marketing itself before talk becomes reality.

The creative economy can contribute to both economic and social vibrancy and improves the way people view their environment. It’s a lesson Cape Town, with its hat in the ring for World Design Capital status, should take to heart.

In the meantime the city, and M&C Saatchi Abel, can expect MacLennan to make a “disproportionate number of visits” in the foreseeable future. It’s a vote of confidence in the local office’s business credentials and in the city that gives it its creative juices.

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

John Brown wins triple play, challenges for top content marketer spot

John Brown has quickly become a force to be reckoned with in the South African custom marketing field. It launched in 2007 with Pick n Pay as a client, producing its monthly food magazine, Fresh Living, which has since emerged as the bestselling food title in the country. Now, suddenly, it has grabbed Cell C, Edgars Club and Discovery Health in short succession, shaking up the local custom marketing industry.

Lani Carstens
Lani Carstens, Group MD, John Brown South Africa

In the UK, John Brown is an important player in content marketing, doing catalogue and publishing work for clients such as retailers John Lewis, Orange, Waitrose and RBS. Its titles are known for its quality and craftsmanship.

When Pick n Pay announced it was looking for a publisher for its new in-store magazine, John Brown CEO Andrew Hirsch initially hoped to pitch for the title alongside local partners. Unable to find suitable partners, the group launched in SA on its own steam – and managed to win the Pick n Pay account with, as MD Lani Carstens put it, a team of “two-and-a-half people”.

Today the magazine, which retails for R13.95, is the biggest-selling food magazine in the country. with a circulation closing in on 80 000; facings at Pick n Pay till points make a real difference to the magazine’s success. The account has since been expanded to include a cook book, an internal company magazine, electronic newsletters and more.

Having consolidated the office locally and with Fresh Living firmly established Hirsch approached Carstens, then living in Shanghai, to become group MD of John Brown South Africa. In China she’d worked on Women’s Health China and other lifestyle titles for Titan Media, and before that she worked as a publisher at New Media. She had also been the publisher of Shape and FitPregnancy at the now-defunct Touchline Media.

Carstens still flies to China three to four times a year to oversee the group’s Shanghai office, which falls under her management.

The recent growth spurt has seen the company grow form 15 people in December to 32 today, while revenues have grown by more than 100% year-on-year. The team is taking more office space and will have to deal with a knocking down of walls around them in between deadlines.

Carstens says that the company is focused on consolidating its latest gains and that its strategy is not chasing as many clients as possible. Instead, it will aim to win business from blue-chip category leaders.

It has also worked hard at becoming platform-agnostic, as publishers it will go where clients’ consumers are. Carstens builds teams around the editors – usually senior journalists or editors.

The Edgars Club pitch process started lasted nine months and John Brown’s first issue appears in October. The magazine will appear 11 times a year and feature 13 supplements, including four focused on men’s fashion. Edgars Club will be spun off from the main Edgars website and will have its own URL plus electronic magazine (based on a content management system John Brown is bringing in from London).

John Brown also takes responsibility for the club’s social media efforts. The new look is part of Edgars’ plans to reposition the retailer as a fashion-forward brand.

For the Discovery magazine pitch, John Brown redesigned the entire magazine back to front and sourced all the required content from local journalists. It then printed 25 copies of the magazine for the potential client. The new-look magazine launches in October – Discovery liked the dummy issue so much, most of it made it into the first issue of the October edition – including the rather stunning cover.

It will be produced three times a year but a new e-magazine will be published monthly.

John Brown SA is bringing the UK office’s Go Publish/Go Review to SA, which will see a significant part of the client approval process move online. Clients can make comments and recommendations on laid-out pages online via the system, resulting in fewer potential misunderstandings and approval mishaps.

Next John Brown is looking to invest in an in-house repro team – although that will probably only happen in the next year or so. All the content in each of its magazines is sourced locally.

While Carstens didn’t reveal financial figures, she says she is comfortable in claiming that John Brown is now in the top four, possibly even top three, content marketing firms in the country. The company is looking at following clients out of SA as they expand into the rest of the continent. Pick n Pay would be the one to watch as it ratchets up its expansion in the continent.

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

Oliver Hermanus on critics and Skoonheid’s marketing strategy

In the second part of our interview with Oliver Hermanus, he discusses Skoonheid’s marketing strategy, the critical reaction of the major trades and South African critics, his reasons for making the film and the faults of the local film funding system. By Roger Young (for Mahala)

Read Part One

Roger Young: Skoonheid is not going to make a lot of money in South Africa. You could have called it Beauty for a European audience. To me when you say Skoonheid it sounds like kind of hard.

Oliver: It is harder. It’s a much harder word and also it’s ironic because what it means and how it sounds is very opposite. The way you think about beauty and the certain things around what that word should feel like. Skoonheid just sounds so aggressive and it also looks quite ominous. I think an international audience looks at it like “I don’t know what skoon means but I’ve heard of heid. They had an Apartheid.” In Germany they were like ‘Is it about skinheads?’ In South Africa, we’re basically telling every Afrikaaner in the country that ‘It’s about you! You need to go and see it’ Which I do feel. And we’ve really gone really old fashioned, our marketing team is a team that does major, major Afrikaans genre films. I showed them Skoonheid and they were like we can take this to the people. So it’s not being played in like Cinema Noveau or Rosebank, it’s playing in multiplexes in Pretoria and Bloemfontein and other Northern provinces and in Cape Town, it’s only playing in Somerset West and the Waterfront and the marketing campaign is all Kyknet. The big media houses said we’ re going to make a point of helping you because we think it’s time to grow this audience. I think a lot more people are going to see it than if I had gone the NFVF system which is like, this film has the potential to make five bucks because in our limited experience that’s what it’s going to make. I think we may prove through this marketing process that if you market something in a certain way, it will attract a larger audience than you might think. I’m not saying that they’re going to stick around more than 30 minutes but they may go.

One of the reactions that I got coming out of the screening was from someone who said that she felt raped because she wasn’t prepared by the maketing and that’s essentially dishonest and you’re not allowed to do that to people.

I am allowed to do that; but the press isn’t allowed to do that. Mine is just like I’ve made this, whatever, but then again on Kyknet, we do have warnings in our trailers.

Graphic content.

Exactly. But I’m not going to have this huge disclaimer about like, this film is going to rape you because artistically that’s what you want. You want people to see this film without any preconceived expectations and I don’t want people to go in there just waiting for the bad parts.

Did you approach the script with the marketing in mind?

No but I always knew, making this film, that this was going to be something that would come up, as to how will people respond to this. But you know, Sanjeev Singh has been distributing films in this country with hard natures for some time and they have a limited audience. The difference now is that this is a film set here, about here and people will connect more with the content because it is familiar.

Was it The Hollywood Reporter or was it Variety who called it plodding?

The Hollywood Reporter.

In the same review they referred to that farm scene as an orgy which it’s not really. I mean, that’s not an orgy.

No, an orgy would be far more fun. Those guys haven’t been to an orgy clearly.

Well that’s what I thought and that’s a fairly educated publication and to call that scene an orgy kind of made me go, well these people don’t really know what they’re talking about.

Well, when you go to Cannes or Toronto then you must get reviewed by all three of them, Variety, The Hollywood and Screen and the way that the sales agent thinks about it is that the film gets screened and they just wait for one after the other and there’s like this value system that’s internationally understood. If you get bad Variety, bad Hollywood, good Screen then it’s not strong enough. You can’t give it to the distributors. If you get good Variety that’s always the strongest. If you get good Variety, good Screen, bad Hollywood, not such a train smash because they never ever really agree. And so the Hollywood one came out first and it was bad and at first we were like Yes, we’re going to get a good Variety. They’re trades and not really reviews, their job is to evaluate the sales potentials of the film so in terms of trade, Variety is the most powerful trade in the world and Hollywood is competing. Those reviews are important to distributors. For me the New York Times is not a trade, it’s a culture publication so as a film maker I would be more nerve wrecked by what they said. They are definitely reviewing me more than they are reviewing how much money my film is going to make. So here in South Africa I’m not sure how the reviewers think. For example, like Screen Africa or The Callsheet are supposed to do that if they want to take themselves seriously. Telling Mnet if they should buy it or telling Kyknet if they should buy it because they should be able to read the pulse. But they don’t. The other tragedy is that young people don’t read newspaper. That’s the big problem.

Well they don’t read the newspaper because there’s nothing of value in it.

Twenty-somethings, their choice of movie watching is not based on what so and so said in such and such a publication.

It’s based on what they friend said on Facebook.

And it’s also based on whatever the fuck is on the screen when they go to the cinema house because they don’t really make a choice until they get there. So the important thing for me is as long as they know what my film is about and they’ve heard something about it and they’re standing in the queue and they see the name on the poster and they go ‘ah!’ But that ‘ah!’ never comes from a newspaper, it comes from Facebook, it comes from friends and television ads and some sort of hype. You’ve got to create the hype.

Then the last thing is, the film winning the queer?

The Queer Palm.

And having people identify the film as a gay film, that’s like a problem?

Producers would say yes, that it’s a big problem because no one wants to be pigeonholed and the word queer does send people running. But for a film maker an award is an award. It’s an accolade and you appreciate it and it’s important, but from a marketing perspective, yeah. I think, I really do think that someone at the SABC read that wrong and this whole explosion about the Queer Palm is because they thought it said Palm d’Or because no one in my party sent out a press release regarding the Queer Palm. Fuck knows how they found this out. I’ve won the main award at a film festival and it never got this much attention.

But just in terms of themes you’re exploring, does having a label as a gay movie..

It’s kind of ironic. I was quite scared that the gay community would have an allergic reaction to Skoonheid. That it perpetuates a stereotype.

Does it perpetuate a stereotype? But I don’t really see him as a homosexual at all.

No, he’s homosexual in his true sexual preference. He’s not gay because he doesn’t live a gay lifestyle. Technically he’s a man who has sex with other men because that’s all he does and the process of this film is him actually equating his feelings with his preference and then choosing what he had before in the end anyway because he just can’t bring himself to kiss in the Spur.

I kind of read that scene as the culmination of choices of his life and his age and where he grew up.

And where we are now in the world.

And like he would never cross that divide and I thought that was what was so tragic about it for me was that even if he came to full realisation, he would never be able to.

No, and that’s part of the reason why he’s also the victim, massively in this process. So I think that it was my ambition to make a film that transcended gayness in terms of only for the gay market and I remember talking to Tom Ford about this, the fashion designer.

You had to. You had to drop that in.

I was talking to Tom, you know Tom. He won the Queer Lion at the Venice Film Festival for A Single Man and he congratulated me for winning the Queer Palm because I made fun of him for winning the Queer Lion about two years ago. He had just won it and he came to Toronto, because Toronto and Venice slightly overlap, and there was this big Hoo-hah about A Single Man and everyone was like oh it’s Tom Ford’s movie tomorrow night and he just won the Queer Lion and I was like “What the fuck is the Queer Lion?” Then I met him at a film festival in Sweden like a month later, we were up for the same award and the film was just about to come out in America, it was Oscar season and I asked him how’s it going with the film? Are you finding it hard for the film? Do you have an audience in America because of the award and because of you? And he said it is hard but at the same time he also wanted to make a film that was more than a film about a gay man. A Single Man is definitely more than that and it succeeded in the end. It did pretty well here in South Africa as well because it’s quality and it’s a solid story and it’s more than that.

Well because a lot of gay cinema is…

…intentionally exclusive and ridiculous and bad? I don’t think that anyone watching A Single Man who is not gay would find the emotions to be completely separate from them. It’s a broken heart and that’s it. It’s well made and it’s interesting. My hope with this film is that no matter how many gay awards we win, when people go to see it they won’t feel like that was just not for me.

That was too gay.

Yes. Or I just didn’t relate and I think the politics that undermine Skoonheid are not only gay politics.

I saw in Francois this guy that even if his priorities had changed, he was trapped.

Francois never really equates Christian with any other type of being, he doesn’t see Christian as being “Oh. I’m going to live this gay lifestyle” he just sees it as I want to be with Christian and he doesn’t even want to think about the definition.

Or the process or whatever would happen, the consequences.

That’s why that scene where they’re talking in the restaurant, Francois is trying to concoct a vision of what this future will look like and the way he describes it is by everything that it’s not. It’s not like them and it’s this and I can show you how it works and it’s like he’s expressing through all of these negative connotations about what he hates about himself and the world around him. So the reality for him though is that he spent his whole life compartmentalized and he spent his whole life constructing these separate rooms because he assumes that he must and it’s horrific for someone like that in his own space in Spur to see people of his own class and his own race in his own country and his own upbringing, himself 20 years ago doing that. Because as far as he knew because he hasn’t pulled his head out of his hole, and that’s horrific for him because he’s lost touch and there’s no way that he will be able to bridge that gap and I think even young people do that. It’s a choice.

There’s an amazing Faber and Faber, you know the Lynch on Lynch one.

I haven’t read it.

I don’t know the exact quote but he makes this statement “In life as you grow older you think you’re getting smarter but really what you’re experiencing is a narrowing of your choices.”

I think another element of that moment in that restaurant is the thought of like, I just don’t have the energy. I just don’t have the will to be able to reconstruct myself. And I think it’s also quite interesting because Afrikaaner men who are the same age as Francois who did make a choice 10 to 15 years ago, during Apartheid or towards the end of Apartheid, to live gay lifestyle and from very conservative Afrikaans families, I think they do find Skoonheid to be not their tale, like this is not how it goes because I didn’t do that. But that’s unfortunate for them because yes, it’s not that story. It’s not the positive story of someone accepting themselves even though they were in very unfavourable conditions.

But why would you tell a happy story? That doesn’t teach you anything.

But I think Barry Ronge was one of those men who went into this film at his screening thinking this is going to be too much reality and no film worthiness. He seems to have dismissed it as an odd piece of cinema that is as odd as going to see Sara Baartman in a cage. I was very disappointed in his reaction, from the bits I was told, because again he will warn an audience against something that he deems to be “arty” and disconnected to what an audience “wants” to see. He will probably describe it as “slow and dull or labored” etc.

Has he done a review yet?

No, he’ll do one next week. I think what happened there with Barry was he saw it and I think it was just a little bit too much for him in terms of the choices of the main character. Perhaps he did identify massively with him, especially with the idea of age and youth and beauty in that sense. Charlie Keegan versus Deon Lotz and all that. Perhaps he just didn’t like the way the film made him feel. You can say that about Barry, he doesn’t care. Leon van Nierop saw it and he had a different reaction and they’re both gay men and they’re both critics and they’re both of a certain age and they both live in this country and one of them is Afrikaans and one of them in English. And so it’s interesting because as major film critics in this country and both being gay men, there’s a lot for them to say or not to say. Because they did both make choices to live their lifestyles and they probably do have some sort of connection to whatever Francois is going through. So I’m interested to see if they bring that.

That’s what I think is successful about Skoonheid, is the lack of detail. The detail is there visibly and in the actions and the emotions but the detail is not there in that you don’t know everything about Francois but you don’t know everything but you see where he is and you can make assumptions and everyone’s allowed to make their own assumptions and plot their own life on them.

But it’s interesting how people don’t need much thread to accept what must happen to him. Their narrative is so subconsciously existent so if I look at the two men in that sex scene on the farm, the two men that we found to shoot that scene when I spoke to them about doing this film they were very happy to do it because they felt so strongly about the content. I think that the older guy has had a very hard life in terms of that. He just immediately looks like someone who’s not gay in that very stereotypical way because he’s big and he’s got this great beard and he dresses in a masculine way. When people find out that he’s gay, well, I think his whole life has been this cognitive dissonance. He looks like Eugene Terblanche sometimes; so I have a lot of respect for those men because there are very few men of that age and of that culture who are very open about who they were in the 50s in the 60 in the 70s. So this one is for them.

This one is for the old Afrikaaners.

This one is for the old Afrikaaners who say ‘I am gay. Go away’. But also the other part of it is that every single person in the world can tell you their own story about their uncle or their cousin or their friend who was married and blah blah blah. Our script translator, when he was 21 his father did this, just left his mother and suddenly he’s gay. So I mean it’s there somewhere. Just like Shirley Adams is there somewhere.

I have to ask, that scene at the beach at the end of Shirley Adams, was that added in development.

You won’t believe this but that was the first idea. That was the fifteen year old in me.

So we can’t blame the NFVF for that one.

No you can blame me for that one. The NFVF never touched the script for Shirley Adams. They had no input. I refused.

So you went to them after, you didn’t go for script development?

Fuck no. No, The NFVF got involved in Shirley because I had Roland Emmerich paying for Shirley Adams. The South African producers went to the NFVF with this whole attitude like “what are you going to do when everyone finds out that a foreigner paid for this whole damn movie and you guys gave not one dime?” And then they were like “oh shit, you’re right” and that’s when they threw us R250 000 and for that they thought they were going to buy like complete creative control and that never happened. Clarence [Hamilton, Head of development for the National Film and Video Foundation] thought that he had won the battle then we showed him the first cut and he was like “this is unwatchable.” And then Locarno (International Film Festival) was like “we love it” and Toronto (International Film Festival) was like “we love it,” change of tune from Clarence. Suddenly, I’m talented. But he knows we don’t agree on much so he doesn’t bother anymore. I think he has too much power and that it has a negative impact on the films they make. It’s a big problem.

It’s not the job of the funding body to be involved creatively.

The majority of the time, in other countries is that they don’t really equate to the content. They equate the cost versus the risk. So they need to know how many films they can fund every year, that’s all they need to know. They need to be able to say ok, we can fund 50 films a year and that’s it and then the first 50 get it. Get your application in quick. Then it’s up to you to make sure you’re one of those 50.

Because you don’t get a second film if you fuck up the first one.

So it just sifts out the people who will never get more instead of making everyone basically beg for their supper and then hand it out in completely no logically fashion. I have this great quote from Clarence once when he told me “You don’t know what you’re doing, because you don’t know the first rule of film making which is drama is the essence of life distilled”. He was like you haven’t distilled anything in this film, Shirley Adams. That was at that meeting and then of course fast-forward five or six months later and it’s a completely different story. What has the NFVF done in terms of strong films or strong box-office? There no box-office and the Afrikaans film makers do have box office. So in fact if you want to talk about box office we should just go to all the Afrikaans film makers and say so Ok you’ve got box office, you’ve got an audience, you’ve got financers and you’ve got a market so let’s all just feed that market because that market pays to go to the movies.

It’s a culture that really supports the exploration of its identity.

They’re tried to test the depths of how far the Afrikaans audience will got to support the culture and the limit is the Kurt Darren movie. It only lasted a week. Getroud Met Rugby, Hansie, yes but Kurt Darren, fuck this! I’m trying to push them up a little bit. But what is amazing is that this audience is learning and it’s consuming and they’re buying. This is a business. This is what America is, American’s buying American; made in China.

And with you it’s Afrikaaners buying Afrikaans.

Made by Coloureds.

Paid for by the French.

Exactly but the point is as long as they have something to take from it, that is theirs. So with the NFVF model, I don’t know what the masses of this country pay for in terms of cinema. That’s why people should feed the street distribution market because black people, en masse, don’t go to the cinema, because there are none in the townships. And you can’t get a bunch of people from Sandton to understand how the street market system works. And that’s why it works in Nigeria, because it’s their system. So the NFVF can’t really tell you what movie is going to drive the majority of Joburg mad because the truth of the matter is the majority of Joburgers don’t really go to the movies. But the whole of Pretoria and Bloemfontien does. Everyone should just become Afrikaans.

Reprinted from Mahala

Oliver Hermanus on filming Skoonheid

Oliver Hermanus’ Shirley Adams was an assured debut, his follow up Skoonheid is a far maturer and bleaker work. Skoonheid is an important new work in the South African canon because it starts a process of interrogation that has been lacking in local film for so long. We had a lengthy chat with him at the DIFF about the process of making the film, the state of film as art in South Africa, funding and the perception of Skoonheid as a “gay” film. Here is part one by Roger Young (for Mahala)

Oliver Hermanus: My first film was an experience and this is an extremely different experience.

Roger Young: But you wouldn’t have been able to make this second film without that first film, do you think?

It’s hard to say because for me personally, no, but from a financing point of view, possibly. Because the producer of this film wasn’t motivated by my previous film to make this one, he was more motivated by the fact that I was writing this film with the Cannes Residence, that was the more convincing element. But for me, I know that I wouldn’t have been able to direct this if I hadn’t directed that. Just because of the challenges.

Was Skoonheid a different work ethic from Shirley Adams?

Well, you do what you feel like you can do. Obviously it mustn’t be list a complete walk in the park but definitely in terms of schedule, I learnt on my first film what I can do in four weeks and I knew I could only do this one in five weeks and then you also know what kind of actors you need to work with so I know that I can’t really work with people who are not actors.

Do you ever work with non-actors?

I had a scene in this film that was a real chore for me. There’s this scene in this kitchen of this farm house where I had two actors and I had three guys that weren’t actors and it was like paint by numbers for me having to cut it up into extreme pieces.

But you had three actors in the kitchen?

There ended up being six actors in the kitchen.

Six people.

Seven people. The main character arrives.

But the guy that arrives with the coloured boy, he’s an actor?

He’s an actor and the guy who’s running the party, he’s also an actor and the guy that Francois ends up having sex with, he’s also an actor. But the other three guys are not actors. But they were cast on the fact that they were prepared to bang each other in front of an entire film crew. But for me that was difficult because then I have to think that I need to get reactions so then I would shoot shots with them and just keep talking to them like “and he does this now”.

Working with non actors is a totally different head space.

It takes time. It’s not directing and it’s not rehearsing, it’s kind of massaging into situations and you have to exact all the technicality from it. The self-conscious is what seeps through. It’s acting and not being. But sometimes you just get lucky. Sometimes you get great performances from people that are not actors because they just have it but it also takes time to find. I’m quite old-fashioned. I prefer to have trained actors. But Deon is not trained he’s just experienced. The one thing with directing, you must know your limitations and you must also know how you operate. Because then you must find the actors in relation to what you know you can do. That how I operated on my first film.

Part of directing is…

Casting. 90%.

So you’re a fan of Mike Leigh?

Yeah. Mike Leigh for me is like Father Christmas. He comes to school and he gives you classes but we all know that Mike has a very particular style of filming and that it’s not the norm; not even for the most Avant Garde film student who likes six months of rehearsals and having scripts. Mike is not like that. What I like about Mike Leigh is that he’s approachable and a really amazing teacher and her simplifies it for you and he really makes you understand what directing is through his process. He really is like Father Christmas because he looks like Father Christmas and he’s really engaging and giving. I really like his new film.

Which one?

Another Year. It’s my kind of film, although it was kind of long, there’s this one performance that you only get because of Mike Leigh’s methods. I like actors and he likes actors. But some of his other stuff is just so draining.

So he works with actors but he does intense rehearsals?

He workshops. So basically they construct their own characters. He kind of is directing for nine months because he doesn’t know in which direction he is going.

And he keeps it very rooted in the common man.

He’s part of a collective. He’s part of the Ken Loach, Stephen Frears, Mike Leigh band. The three of them. Lez Blair also. Their whole system is in reaction to the BBC system where they all come from. Which is this onstage, very dry, obviously British, that whole context wasn’t real, it wasn’t socially real hence they invented the kitchen sink drama basically. I love that fact that when Mike Leigh makes a film he still has the same problem as the rest of us, fundraising and a lot of other complications because even for someone like him, the British don’t really watch his stuff. He had a high period with Secrets and Lies and Topsy Turvy and then he sort of became an auteur again. But I think Another Year, that one performance is totally worth it because you don’t see that much in English language cinema. You don’t see that kind of vivaciousness.

Do you think that’s because English language cinema has become pure entertainment?

Yes, but I think Another Year works because of the way that performance relates. That’s not scripted dialogue. It’s just that the actress has so much knowledge about what she’s feeling and what she’s trying to communicate that it’s direct and it’s clear and it’s authentic. Whereas the construction of scripted dialouge and trying to unpack the construction as the actor, is not always as great and I think French cinema, I think it’s also the language, the way that the language is is more expressive than English as is German as is Latin language. So you find that the characterisation is a bit more advanced in that sense but American cinema, I can’t think of a single contemporary American film director under the age of 30 who is very exciting and doing something very original. This is no independent cinema in America anymore. No one pays for it. Hollywood has completely sucked it dry. Even Sundance has become one of the most commercial places you can go to and in fact one of the hardest countries in the world to become an independent film maker is America. You have no NFVF or you have no DTI. You can’t just like take a camera and go. You can’t get money from anywhere unless it’s a private person or producer and that producer is in Hollywood. So it’s painfully depressing.

And the Sex, Lies and Videotape period, was that independent?

That was a boom. That was a very big boom in the late nineties or mid-nineties, including Tarintino, but that also happened because there was a Miramax.

It wasn’t really independent.

Because Miramax was this champion of independent but then it became an institution and this is the same with Spielberg and Coppola and Martin Scousese, they were independent but right now you can’t think of a young American company. I mean even Christine Vachon who was like this bastion, she was this New Yorker and she makes these very hectic films, even she’s been confined. She has this deal with Focus Features now and even for her it’s become harder and harder to make something else. No matter what’s happening in America they still make these millions and millions and millions of dollars at the box-office for junk and New York Times is trying desperately writing editorials trying to explain why boring is not boring. These long essays by the two main film critics trying to refocus their horizons of the country on the fact that you’ve got to broaden your horizons because the Hollywood marketing machine has taken over and the audience does not relate to the film anymore, they relate to the marketing.

And the European audiences?

They kind of the same to a degree. People have this assumption that France is this really educated audience and only watch the best films but they are equally hard to please and they are also very American-focused. Like any country in the world. I think Germany is the hardest right now to be independent in because they are also struggling to keep that independent spirit right now. They also don’t have a name. They are struggling to get a brand.

An identity.

Like France still has like these up and coming guys but it’s not like Romania where the collection of film makers there are just really anti-establishment and they develop a serious following.

So do you think in South Africa we’re kind of lucky because the audience isn’t really entrenched?

In fact the audience is kind of Down Syndrome.

Yeah.

Basically you’ve just got to educate them. We are lucky because there is room to grow. It’s not like having to un-teach bad habits, they just don’t have any other options, but it’s good to be able to say to them “oh, you can go this way and there’s something else at the end of that road”.

I had this thought after a couple of the early South African screenings at DIFF, I was like ‘wow, all these films are like genre education pieces’.

Textbooks.

Yeah, they’re textbooks to the audience and I was like maybe this isn’t such a bad thing that these films are so basic at this point.

I don’t expect to reach an audience with my second film, I expect to develop an audience. Like a twitter name. Gain as you grow. So you have to have that mentality. Pedro Almodovar didn’t start out making these big brand international films worth 18 million dollars .

You’ve got to learn by making mistakes.

And to make mistakes you’ve got to make a film. So more importantly the audience comes as long as you keep providing quality material, you develop an audience. But you can’t just then try and apply what you think your audience wants to watch. Which the NFVF assumes is Hollywood genre stuff. Because let’s face it, if you go to the cinema and you’re faced with some random low budget film and some really expensive 50 million dollar film, you’re going to go for that, not because it’s a better film, just because the marketing of that film is five times the budget of the South African product.

So why compete?

You can’t compete with the products and you can’t compete with the marketing. So give it up. You either have to make something that’s not comparable and the audience therefore has a direct different option as opposed to trying to put two things very close together. It doesn’t happen because that’s how Hollywood survives. They don’t get taken out of the equation. It’s not like we’re going to eradicate them with our own big blockbusters. Goodbye James Bond, Hello Simphiwe. It’s not going to happen. Other film making countries do this. I mean, Mexico never really had a brand, never had an image, never had a film business and the government was kind of like we’ve got 50 million dollars, we’re just going to like gooi it.

Australia did that as well in the 70s.

So it works. It doesn’t mean you’re going to get a hundred film makers, you’re going to get five.

But that’ll count.

It’s worth it because the film makers become a commodity for the country and it creates narrative and the audience is created so now Mexico does watch Mexican films as opposed to before when they watched nothing.

OK, so social realism, right?

Social realism, yeah.

There’s a scene in the restaurant where he’s eating on his own and it’s just that one shot and it looks like all the lights are off in the restaurant, but you’ve just chosen to subdue it. When you talk about social realism how in sync with it is that ethos to manipulate the lighting?

To be honest I wouldn’t even describe Skooheid as being social realism. My first film was social realism because it’s more of a document about a truth and a plot. This film, the approach was far more classical. Locations were chosen on the basis of their aesthetic qualities and their harmonious structure. It was a very constructed film in terms of colours and design. That night when that scene was shot it was also a game of where to put him versus how many colours to have and the temperature of the light so we didn’t feel obligated to walk into a space and not touch it. Some places we did because we chose places that were exactly what we wanted but this was a far more construct film. The plot line is meant to be cinema rather than pseudo-documentary.

So the Bronx scene…

Cause Bronx doesn’t look like that.

I’ve been in that bar at 4am feeling exactly the way that he felt. I know that situation.

Exactly but also when you walk into Bronx, you can’t actually shoot Bronx without those lights because it’s that dark and when you ask Bronx “Can you turn up the lights?” they’re like “We don’t have lights”.

So I was watching him in that situation thinking I know this but it didn’t look like this.

Yeah, that’s a perfect example where from a creative point of view; me and the photographer and the designer, we walk into it and I want Bronx because that’s logical for me. Somerset road is logical for me. But then you walk into Bronx and you turn the camera on and you get a whole bunch of… We actually went into Bronx and it was open that night and Bronx does have a bunch of strobe lights and blah blah blah and we were like we’re going to have to just pump this element up but then they kind of went a bit crazy with the like snake lighting so when you go into the bathroom, there’s like this big halo. But that was like half technical requirement for the camera and a production design solution for that. For me to be able to use that location, to have some sense of authenticity of Cape Town. But the like Clifton for example, you’re not allowed to close Clifton but through the producer talking to the city of Cape Town, I threw this tantrum, I was like “Look, do you have any fucking films shot on Clifton that was meant to be Clifton?”and not the south of France or the south of Spain and they were like no. Well now’s the time for you to think about the tourist implications of me finally putting on the international screen Clifton as Clifton. So they were like that’s a good point.

Did they have any idea what the script was at that point?

No, not at all. No one knew. This was the most tightly kept secret, this script. Fuck. I’m waiting for the lawsuits to come in. So we did close Clifton but even then when you’re trying to reconstruct something like I know what it feels like to go to that beach and I know what it looks like and then when you actually have to reconstruct it, it’s kind of weird because you’ve got like eighty extras and I’m looking at a frame, an empty beach and then moving person by person into that frame and then the designer comes with the umbrellas and moves colour by colour across the frame. So you can’t believe you’re looking at a frame and going, are we happy? Whereas in Shirley I would have never thought about that. The whole point was that the camera just follows and I would never not do something because I felt like it was the wrong colour. This was a completely more gay experience. Also because of the title ‘Beauty’. We chose the photography and the stylistic to be the beautiful element.

It doesn’t happen so much at DIFF but it has happened in films in previous years, like when Uzulu Lami was screened, people recognized elements of the landscape and cheered and like ‘Oh, there’s so and so’, and I’m not quite sure how you’ve achieved it but there’re so many familiar elements in your film that they just became subsumed in the story as opposed to…

Those standing out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you think that’s the function of the way you designed it or do you think about that at all?

When writing this film and plotting his events and I was thinking OK, what would he do now and I was like OK he wants to go to a bar and then OK, it’s Bronx and then why does a Christian come to that braai? Ok, he’s gone to the beach because it’s a hot day and that’s what Capetonians do and then OK, he goes to Clifton. It’s all logical for me and it’s all very real for me. And then in trying to create it on the screen, I think that maybe people are so distracted by what’s going on cock-wise that they don’t have the time to go ‘Woo -hoo. Look!”

The only time in the entire screening when I heard someone react that way was when somebody behind me went: “Oh God, it’s Chase!”.

I think my first film was so claustrophobic. The house and the streets and here, definitely, even the hotel that we shot in, because we shot in a hotel for three days, in Eastern Boulevard. It was chosen for the fact that the décor was so depressing. We couldn’t afford to redo a whole hotel room so we had to find a hotel that was suitably depressing and bam, there it was. It was the right green tone for us and continently it had the really great view of the harbour. That was based purely on a budgetary requirement and then at the same time the hotel was really excited about the idea of him saying “Oh, I’m staying at the Garden Court” and then like 20 minutes later he commits a crime in their hotel. They still don’t know.

They’ll know on Friday.

But also the family who’s farm we shot on in the Freestate.

Which one?

The sex farm. That man was uber excited about Skooheid coming to shoot there.

OK, that’s interesting. Is this film meant to do any real work? That family is obviously going to react badly because they’re from the same environment as your character is from.

Yes, the family has two choices. They either going to feel really robbed because they didn’t know that content was going to be shot in their house but we asked them ‘Do you have any problem not knowing what we’re shooting?’ and they were like ‘No, but is it political?’ and we said ‘No, it’s not political.’ And they were happy. So we kind of set them up to shoot themselves down. Because we said to them we can’t tell you what we’re shooting for the security of the plot or whatever but if you have a problem with that then we won’t do it and they said no we don’t have a problem with it as long as it’s not something about you know, Julius Malema which is an interesting main priority. I don’t think they ever assumed it would be about this. But I’m really interested to see what Bloemfontein thinks because we did shoot major sequences there. That Spur is like a Bloemfontein icon.

That scene! I don’t know, obviously it’s written but it’s so unexpected, suddenly the message that came across in that scene and you said this in the Q&A, the different milieus but you didn’t really highlight it until that moment. That’s when you really drove it home, it was heartbreaking.

I really have always wanted to shoot something in a Spur because even when I wrote that scene I was like what is he going to eat? Monkeygland burger. It came so naturally to me, all of the detail, in terms of like a Spur and the beach and it was so important for me. There was a moment when I was like it must be the Spur.

Have you spent time in Bloemfontein?

We did.

No before?

When I was much, much younger.

Cause there’s like a little jibe at the Mystic Boer as well.

She’s going to the Mystic Boer.

Yeah but it’s her. It just made it seem like an insult.

But everyone goes to the Mystic Boer and I mean where else is she going to fucking go? But I was insistent on that Spur because there was the option to shoot that scene in Cape Town and it could’ve easily been cheated but Bloemfontein would know that it’s not Bloemfontein. Bloemfontein will never know if the house that we shot for Francoius house is in Bloemfontein because unless they know every house in Bloemfontein they won’t. But the Spur was important for me because I wanted them to go “oh he really is here”.

Oh God, he’s among us.

That for me is a very important social element. I wouldn’t shoot major events in Cape Town, in places that you wouldn’t recognize.

But there’s been a couple of local movies at the festival, examples where local knowledge, and not just this year, in other years too, like I’ve seen a movie shot in Durban substituted slightly North coast stuff for slightly South coast stuff and it’s one or two shots in a sequence and people freak out.

It’s kind of down syndrome in that way because they assume that everything they seen that’s shot in America, that’s all accurate spots. I think that New Yorkers by this stage, they totally accept that Toronto is actually New York because whenever people are walking down the street in movies in New York, every person from New York goes ‘That’s not New York, I’ve never seen that fucking building’ but no one complains because it’s just part of the shooting because it’s too expensive but it really is Toronto, sometimes it’s Cape Town. So you kind of have to get over it. When you’re making films you can only shoot where you can afford to shoot so if you have to cheat them you have to cheat but you have to cheat right. I took me a long time to be convinced to shoot both houses in Cape Town and then I was like Ok that’s fine, we’ll cheat the Bloemfontein house in Cape Town but surely because the other house is set in Newlands, we should set in Newlands. It turns out that it’s really impossible to shoot in Newlands because these Newlands families are so used to charging R80 000 a day for a commercial. So then they were like why don’t we start looking in Somerset West for Newlands as well, turns out Somerset West is everything in this whole country. You can shoot Boksberg in Somerset West. You can shoot fucking Cape Town. You can shoot the South of France. And bam we found two houses, almost right next to each other. One of them has Cape Town architecture, late 80’s and the other has very early 60’s, late 70’s stuff. You cheat responsibly. You cheat and don’t get caught. Just like anything else in life.

End Part one.
Part Two tomorrow: Marketing, Funding, Gayness and Awards.

Reprinted from Mahala.

Mike Abel asks are you a Challenger Brand or simply the Underdog?

M&C Saatchi Abel MD Mike Abel takes a closer look at the art of creating true challenger brands.

It seems to me that we have entered the time of the true Challenger Brand. Today’s zeitgeist is perfect for this as people are now looking for those who offer more, rather than those wallowing in the malaise of past successes and using it as the barometer for future trading.

mike abelA Challenger Brand as I apply the term, and having studiously avoided looking for formal definitions, is simply a brand or business that wishes to aggressively occupy the territory or market currently held by established others, usually through a differentiated offering and/or approach.

This definition usually applies to inanimate objects like product brands or companies, but can also apply to people or a mindset.

Robyn Putter and I used to talk endlessly about how brands can maintain a challenger mindset when they grow and become successful. Any new company needs to offer something special in order to succeed. Certainly one or more of the following: better product (functional or design), better price or value perception, better or easier distribution and better promotion (we’ll include advertising here).

Because initially this company has little to lose, it is aggressive in how it scrutinizes its emotional and functional offerings. Once this company succeeds however, it has something to lose, so instead of fearlessly innovating, investing and anticipating market shifts, it focuses its efforts on sustaining the status quo – market share, pricing, volume and margin.

It becomes far less about attracting the customer through understanding their needs and developing product around them, but rather about flogging the existing products and patents irrespective of consumer needs – and so the shift happens from a pull strategy to a push one.

Take Virgin, the darling of the 80’s and challenger for the skies, music, colas, banking and telecommunication. It is very easy to spot where the brand had real consumer traction, where it innovated and where it could or couldn’t deliver.

The airline and gyms were a winner at launch with strong and highly differentiated tangible and emotional products, so Bars and massages at 35 000ft, and in gyms, a great vibe and range of equipment for would-be fitness fanatics – even if you had the card and never went you felt healthier!

Richard Branson was also the perfect playboy personification of the brands’ ethos at the time – but he is 30 years older now and the brand is arguably identically positioned around him – I would imagine that would have some of the marketing folk scratching their heads.

It’s pretty obvious though, Branson is a “value system” wrapped up in a celebrity, it would not be overly hard to sustain the “brand values” but subtly evolve away from the individual…not that Sir Richard would want that I’m sure. Maybe his son or daughter could be the next Virgin flag-bearer?

But look at where Virgin has not found sustainable favour – cola, telco or financial services….the challenger brand cannot differentiate on emotion alone, it ultimately needs the product to back it up.

Similarly IBM was the bedrock of computer hardware. Indeed… Enter Michael Dell, Samsung, HP (they evolved quite nicely), Apple, Acer, Lenovo etc. Sony owned portable music (the Walkman) but the iPod (and more particularly iTunes) was the game changer.

Even the establishment can be swiftly brushed aside. Remember Nokia – they made cell phones. Smartphones are now the order of the day and the Scandinavian brand has completely missed out. Why? Too safe, too complacent or possibly so arrogant as to believe the brand overshadowed the competitor products?  It was obvious at the time that easy-roaming email was a killer app.

Challenging banking norms: I remember Investec phoning me about 16 years ago to join them. I was 27. They offered me a SAA Gold Card with my Investec card. They understood that as a young executive, I travelled and that I would want to use the lounge, collect extra points and then, even pay less on a financed car or bond than I was used to having to pay.  I moved banks at the time purely because of the SAA Gold Card. When the gold card was dropped a few years later as an offer, they had evolved their online banking to a point where the convenience of banking with them overtook the irritation of not having the airline loyalty programme benefits and status.

Challenging Medical Aids: Another example is Adrian Gore’s little stroke of genius in launching Discovery Health (not Discovery Medical Aid) with gym membership, movies etc. It was a lifestyle brand centred on health (and recreation) rather than the customers perception of being continually ripped-off by their medical aid – which was positioned all around sickness. It will be interesting to watch how their short-term insurance products or their investment products stack up. I don’t see the innovation that launched the brand. Look at what Outsurance did in the short-term insurance space. That gem of a notion “you’ll always get something out” was simple brilliance as it was focussed on a real consumer need and insight.

Seems obvious but the above examples above are all game-changing tactics – where little David can actually place that accurate shot twixt the eyes of Goliath. Many of my agencies’ current clients have come to us with precisely this objective. It takes more than lip service to become a challenger brand – it requires real change in behaviour.

What is your business or brand doing that’s better (for the consumer), easier (for the consumer), more inspiring or intriguing (for the consumer). What value are you offering on multiple levels – as pricing is far from the only measure of value and is often, the most easily replicated.

And if you own a territory in customers minds, don’t necessarily vacate it if you are challenged, rather look at how best to amplify or innovate around it e.g. Volvo should have owned safety in perpetuity and just launched hot product. The consumer would have said “Shit, have you seen those hot Volvo’s”. The safety property would certainly not have been a deterrent. Toyota should have continued to own reliability (no, I haven’t forgotten the small “brakes” episode) whilst evolving to sexier product. It is often best to retain the What and to evolve the How when the What has exceptional long-term resonance, as it is based on a fundamental human need.

So, moving swiftly off intangibles, let’s ask how is your personal brand? How original and relevant are you? Lady Gaga for instance is so frighteningly reminiscent of the Madonna of my early adulthood – the pointed bras, outrageous behaviour, ongoing reinvention and sexual innuendo. And even with some of the raw talent. One can easily see how she is a modern day challenge to the very market mindset that a “Madge” would own, were she as active as before – Gaga simply identified that today’s audience are looking for that type of persona all over again, and has mined that territory.

Similarly a Michael Buble’ CD would give Ol’ Blue Eyes a real fight on the CD retailers “shelves”. He and Frankie have the same offering just two generations apart – tapping into that need has found new relevance with today’s audiences. A Challenger Brand can easily identify a previously highly successful space that has subsequently been vacated and is now open for the re-taking.

A few weeks ago I stumbled across this great Oscar Wilde quote: “you might as well be yourself as everyone else is already taken”. This pertains to humans, brands and businesses.

Some people that set the personal brand rules include Jack Nicholson – pure class. Nobody quite like him. Love them or hate them, David Beckham, Elton John, John Lennon, Donald Trump, Desmond Tutu…..much like that great old Jaguar campaign line “a copy of absolutely nothing”.

Pity Jag didn’t remember that little pearl of wisdom.

My grandfather, who was an incredibly wise man, often used to say that “there is nothing worse than being a square peg in a round hole” – I guess that thought defined his time. I used to agree with him, but today I feel there’s actually nothing better. Square pegs are uncomfortable and they get noticed. Like pebbles in our shoes. They are different. They chart their own course and fight for a new or better way.

So how are you thinking differently about your brand and business? It’s not about simply wearing a waistcoat or a funny hat. You have to be authentic but you also need to tap into your bit of crazy.

It’s about taking calculated chances based on consumer insight.

Here’s the check list: Being a true Challenger is ultimately about making everyday lives simpler, easier and brighter – and therefore better; for our customers, our people and ultimately, ourselves.

There is absolutely no glory or sustainable future to be found in sameness.

Reprinted from the blog of Mike Abel.

Online CPD Courses Psychology Online CPD Courses Marketing analytics software Marketing analytics software for small business Business management software Business accounting software Gearbox repair company Makeup artist