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Neo@Ogilvy global CEO talks up role of emerging markets, mobile

Neo@Ogilvy’s global CEO, New-York based Nasreen Madhany, has been visiting South Africa for a corporate summit, where she talked up the role emerging markets will play in the future profitability of her company.

Neo@Ogilvy, a fully integrated division of OgilvyOne Worldwide, is a full-service digital media agency offering media strategy, planning and buying, search marketing, performance marketing, analytics and technology, mobile marketing, social media marketing and related services. The agency launched five years ago and currently operates 33 offices in 25 countries. It employees around 800 staff members globally. The SA office launched two years ago and is headed by MD Mia Scholtz. Post-AlterSage-acquisition, it employees around 10 people.

Over the past five years, digital media has been growing by 20% a year globally and Neo@Ogilvy’s growth pace outstrips this every year.

Madhany believes when an agency sells clients on digital marketing it needs to create solutions that incorporate the entire digital spectrum, and describes Neo@Ogilvy’s service as agnostic digital media planning. Strategists, media planners and creatives work together throughout the duration of a campaign to optimise performance based on tracking results. Its international reach means it does cross-border work for IBM, Cisco, American Express, Lenovo, and Kodak.

Madhany says that, while its developed market offices continue to grow, the group has identified emerging economies as key growth and innovation points, especially in the mobile market, where emerging markets are often more advanced or regularly leapfrog developed markets.

Scholtz has therefore been appointed by Madhany to lead capability development for Neo@Ogilvy’s EMEA region in the mobile field. She will be exchanging tools and best practice with the groups’ Asian offices. In these markets, social media and search are often being driven by access off mobile devices.

Mobile has been the black sheep of digital advertising due to the role the US initially took in driving Internet penetration and the development of digital marketing, says Madhany, who points out that initially access there was driven by PCs. It’s in Africa and Asia where mobile has been driving access to the ‘net. The global rise of smartphones and tablets means these regions house the expertise required to adapt digital marketing to these developments.

Madhany joined Ogilvy 37 years ago, checking tear sheets against flighting schedules in the Toronto office, and has worked her way up through the agency. While the media landscape was much simpler then, Madhany still believes in the value of a full service offering to clients.

Read the full story on BizCommunity

S’HOT: The VW Date Drive infographic by Ivan Colic

The VW Date Drive infographic by Ivan Colic.

D&AD 2011 SA winners: Points list

The Creative Circle has released the points list of the South African D&AD Winners.

Consumer surviving emotion

One of the more interesting aspects of reality TV is the regular emotional schlock fest that occurs three-quarters of the way through whatever series it is you happen to be watching. Contestants are broken down by days on end without access to their electric can openers, fast food and loved ones. John Doe reports. They also intensely re-evaluate:

1. The world
2. Their place in the world
3. Their own approach to life, the universe and everything

Regardless of the show, reality TV cast members invariably expound on the dramatic effect the experience has had on them – they never realised how much lack of food and a King Coil mattress can toy with one’s mental stability.

The Shabir Shaik Show. Copyright zapiro.com

The reality TV formula is disarmingly simple: we simply cannot get enough of watching people build themselves up around their perceived values, and we lust even more for the fall – watching them degenerate, one by one, into a bunch of lying, cheating game show contestants.

Consumer demand has necessitated a fundamental shift away from fictional TV stories. How many cops and robbers have we all seen? How many times can we watch a coroner thoughtfully dissect a corpse, determine through a series of fortuitous events the cause of death, bed a budding young detective and valiantly shoot the baddies?

We want to believe. We want to be moved in our couches. And reality TV provides just that. Sure, we know the power is in the hands of the editor, but nevertheless it is fun watching real people jabber and prance their way through an endless series of plastic hoops and social confrontations.

And while there is definite appeal in watching someone gag while eating the brain of a goat, what ties the whole reality TV concept together is the clear distress the contestants go through. It is the consumer’s demand for the heart wrenching, our insatiable need to watch people discover their real place on the triangle of mankind, capitalism and the media, that has powered the reality TV boom.

And it is the very same consumer demand that drives a lot of the misery, hunger and pain on the rest of the planet. Were the western world to try and produce those brand name sneakers according to its own high standards of labour practice, well, it would simply be too expensive. Consumers would not accept such high prices.

Yes, consumer demand is a hell of a thing. The appetite of the western consumer has kept the global labourer firmly under the hard capitalist heel since before Marx was even thinking about the revolution of the working class.

Your average consumer also believes on some level that the homeless are lazy. We all know they smell. We also believe, despite our inevitably liberal outlook, that street people could probably look harder for a job. They could also stop drinking and smoking that grass, they could wash and shave, they could make a bloody effort.

This is the way western society views the indigent – the millions of people who live a long way out of view, so far below the poverty line no one will ever find them. While we actively watch and participate in the mental disintegration and re-tuning of game show contestants competing for money, we in no way give the same attention to the starving.

Reality TV has the potential to teach us all a very important lesson: No matter who you are, once you’ve been without food for more than two days (or locked in a house, etc. etc.) you start to lose control of your mind – and your body will follow shortly thereafter. In the case of lack of food, your speech will slow. You will struggle to place one foot in front of the other. Washing will not be that important, falling some way behind the priority of finding something to eat.

Unfortunately, the potentially important realisations we gain from reality TV last only as long as it takes unwrap the next Snickers bar. Historical patterns of consumer demand indicate that we are destined to repeat the same process again and again for decades to come, realising and then forgetting in quick succession that poor people and hungry people are, as we sit in our couches, living through hell.

You could worry about it, the plight of mankind. You may even lose a few minutes sleep. But really there is nothing to be done. We are consumers after all, and it has always been the consumer’s prerogative to gorge on fake realisations and other people’s tears. We demand it, and so it shall be.

Breaking away from being a consumer, from being no more or less than another target on a marketing consultant’s demographic breakdown… Well, it requires life-changing effort. And besides, if we moved off the couch to do something about it all, how could we possibly stay tuned for scenes from the next episode?

— John Doe has enjoyed a long career as an executive assistant, working with a variety of major global brands in a clerical capacity. Long famed in the corporate sector for his legendary dictation skills, Doe has recently also gained acclaim for his incisive media journalism. Although queries have been raised as to the veracity of some of his information, Doe is adamant that he simply reports on media issues that he comes into contact with – his sources remain a closely guarded secret. Doe dismisses as ‘unsubstantiated’ and ‘possibly defamatory’ allegations that he is in fact one Andrew Miller of Unity Design.

Andy Davis digs up the underground with Mahala

Andy Davis’s name may forever be associated with the defunct student magazine SL. It really shouldn’t be. The not terribly rebellious and long-dead youth magazine, which he used to edit in the early part of the previous decade, has been properly usurped by the creation of Davis’s own publication – the youth-orientated Mahala magazine and website.

Launched in April 2009, the website was supposed to be followed by a print magazine in August of the same year, but the Great Recession delayed the printed version’s launch until August 2010, when the first print edition of Mahala (which means ‘for free’) finally went out to subscribers.

After Davis left SL, he started his own youth-orientated content marketing outfit called Jingo. He worked on projects for FNB, Levi’s and Red Bull, in-between surfing and freelance gigs for the Sunday Times Travel, the Mail & Guardian and ZigZag magazine. It all went very well – so well, in fact – that Mahala, which was conceptualised in 2003, stayed nothing more than an item on Davis’s to do list.

As his contract clients cut budgets and killed the projects he was working on, Davis finally had the time to launch his ‘life’s work’ in Mahala – which he did using his savings of around R300 000. The core Mahala team consists of Davis, deputy editor Roger Young, Brendan Edmonds, Montle Moorosi and a team of new young writers out of Jozi, including Lindokuhle Nkosi. Around 40% of the contributions to Mahala are unsolicited, and Davis and Young spend a lot of time coaching new writers on polishing their writing.

Davis says the cultural space in South Africa has definitely been under-reported while local underground culture stayed off the mainstream media’s radar. Mahala aims to be a critical voice of SA youth culture – its content moves beyond the ‘local is lekker’ mantra to something much more authentic, critical and entertaining.

Mahala offers cultural reporting with brains and balls – last time I read anything like that was in the mid-90’s in the M&G (thanks to Shaun de Waal).

Have you seen its take on MK – that barometer of Afrikaans youth culture? “Will the music channel eventually descend into some kind of alt-rock laager around Die Taal or will it be able to embrace the new paradigm of a more inclusive SA youth culture? The question those who run the channel need to ask themselves: is MK a SA youth music channel or is it a commercial entity that makes its living off Afrikaans culture fetishists?”

And Mahala doesn’t bow at the altar of SA’s biggest zef export, Die Antwoord, either. “By most accounts Waddy Jones was always a bit of cunt. And now Ninja, with the fame rushing to his head, is starting to display the same paranoid cuntish tendencies,” starts one review. Everybody has tendencies these days, and while Mahala does sometimes stretch theirs a little past breaking point, as with one ode to wanking and surfing (“Surfing is Wanking”, Mahala print, issue 2), it’s incredible to read simply because you know you won’t read it anywhere else on the SA web. Or on anything.

Davis describes the magazine as post-racial and its readers as the first generation representing a truly integrated segment of our population. While fully aware of their race, says Davis, the kids are no longer hung up on it, and are treating it in an increasingly irrelevant tone. It definitely positions the magazine at the forefront of what Davis describes as “progressive and fearless SA youth”.

When Davis talks about youth, he isn’t talking tweens. The readership extends from 18- to 35-year-olds, with the bulk comprising 25-35-year-olds. Brands such as Puma, Red Bull, 8ta and Billabong have all signed with Mahala, proving, says Davis, that Mahala really does deliver its market segment.

Even so, Davis is considering initiatives to ring-fence editorial content. He believes the current publishing model is broken: publishers should be creating content for readers – not advertisers. Their dependence on advertising money for survival means marketer’s needs often influence what gets into a magazine and what does not. His contract with his audience is something he cherishes and funding from foundations and through crowdsourcing are several options currently being investigated by the Mahala team.

The site has around 25 000 unique monthly users but it’s a figure Davis believes can be built out to 50 000 or even 80 000 in time. The magazine’s print run stands at 10 000. While he took a financial knock on the first issue, the last two both managed to cover cost. Currently quarterly, the aim is to ultimately produce six issues a year.

Davis is keen to create residency programmes in other African countries. Culture, and underground youth culture, is everywhere, of course, and nobody is really digging around for relevant content on the rest of the continent. Davis sees a gap here, especially as global interest rises in the continent and its people, and he believes an international audience can be found for more Africa-themed Mahala-style content. This in turn, says Davis, will allow him to build a network with the young creative scenes in countries outside SA.

Mahala is also keeping a close eye on the tablet market – Davis says he thinks a tablet product will available from Mahala within the next two years unless it gets fast-tracked with outside financing. The multiple platforms he works on makes the business scalable – he goes where his audience is – a belief he shares with the mavericks over at the Daily Maverick and the soon-to-be-launched tablet newspaper iMaverick.

Read the full story on BizCommunity.

From print to mobile, this conversation screams Laduuuuuuma!

Soccer Laduma is the biggest-selling sports publication in the country, as well as the biggest-selling male interest publication. It’s also the second biggest-selling weekly paper and the third biggest-selling newspaper in South Africa (after the Daily Sun and the Sunday Times). Not too shabby for a publication as niche in its content as Soccer Laduma.

Back in ’97, there were no publications dedicated to the game of soccer in sport-mad South Africa. Peter du Toit, spotting the gap, founded the newspaper that year, with sales averaging around 27 000 copies per issue. Today, that circulation figure stands at 314 130 copies (ABC Q1 2011) a week. According to AMPS, the sales figure translates into a readership of around 2 925 000 (AMPS 2010B).

Needless to say, omnipresent publisher Media24 holds a stake of 74% in Soccer Laduma, while Du Toit retains a 26% stake. Last year, the business saw a total turnover of R67.5 million and an advertising turnover of R40 million.. The editorial team consists of around seven journalists, led by editor Clint Roper (@soccaclint), out of a total team of 24.

Zizi Hollander, GM at Soccer Laduma, says the paper has a pass-along rate of around nine readers per copy. This varies from province to province, as three readers might read a copy in Gauteng, while that figure is closer to 20 readers per copy in Limpopo (distribution and disposable income both play a role).

Du Toit launched the paper as a platform for players and coaches to talk with fans, and with fans to talk with one another. It’s a conversation that is booming; the letters page receives as many as 1000 contributions a week, as the paper has a full-time staffer dedicated to editing the letters pages and responding to fans. It also publishes the email addresses of fans alongside their letters, so readers can talk directly with one another.

All this allows the team to get to know who they work for, says Hollander, who edited the letters page herself for eight years. Readers also have access to the journalists and editor, and Roper says he often fields calls from readers wanting to provide feedback on an angle a story might have taken.

They make an opinionated bunch; as Roper notes, every one of his readers has an MBA in soccer.

The paper is leveraging mobile technology and the web to turn the once-a-week conversation into one that’s on going 24/7 and its mobisite, which recently relaunched after several false starts (it never managed to scale for the amount of traffic the site received), has a current user base of 201 079, generating 7.9 million page views a month.

The website has around 121 000 unique users, generating 2.77 million page impressions.

With its web and mobile platforms now stabilised, Soccer Laduma (@Soccer_Laduma) expects great leaps in traffic through these platforms, and for them to make a sizeable ecommerce play going forward.

According to Hollander Soccer Laduma has contributed to the professionalisation of SA soccer as readers have finally found a platform on which to hold those in charge accountable. It has also upped both the quality and quantity of soccer coverage in the daily press.

Roper says his readers are all soccer fanatics, and he is seeing increased interest in European leagues and games, while local players are becoming stars (and front page news) in their own right. At the moment Kaizer Chiefs, Orlando Pirates and Mamelodi Sundowns players dominate the covers, which he often chooses based on who supporters voted for with for their feet by attending games and filling stadiums.

Roper says the 2010 FIFA World Cup didn’t improve the quality of local football; instead, it was never showcased as it should have been, and the broader media didn’t pay it the attention it deserved. All this helped Soccer Laduma build its audience.

As play analysis moves directly to readers through social media, Roper says the paper needs to take them beyond the game and behind the scenes, where they are unable to go themselves.

Hollander adds that her readers are aspirational, and increasingly made up of the growing middle class. Nearly a quarter of them are students – pointing to increased future mobility – even if it means dips over exam periods in the short term.

On the revenue front, advertising flows in cycles, and the paper, along with other soccer media, saw spend dry up immediately after the world cup (it got so bad that Avusa decided to shutter its soccer magazine SoccerLife 442). Spend is only now recovering, says Hollander.

Hollander says a lot of brands don’t look past the soccer to see the market. More than 32% of Soccer Laduma readers have a household income of R8000 or more per month, 50.9% R5000 or more and 72.5% R2500 or more per month.

The Cell C Soccer Laduma Readers’ Player of the Season campaign generated 1.5 million votes off its mobile and web platforms (the official vote count at the time of closing was Andile Jali 35298, Jimmy Tau 29873). A campaign by Black Label, meanwhile, in which readers can play coach and select the players to clash in the Carling Black Label Cup game between Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates on 30 July 2011 at Soccer City has resulted in more than a million votes on the Chiefs’ side and another 740 000 in that of Pirates (as of the 22 June 2011 issue). The readers decide who makes the field and who the bench.

It all points to a level of engagement between Soccer Laduma and its readers (and the brands that support their read) that must leave most media owners spitting. The level of integration between the print and mobile platforms, meanwhile, could serve as a learning school for many publishers.

Marketers and media planners make a mistake if they believe Soccer Laduma is simply another soccer read. It’s a sophisticated media brand that respects its readers. And deserves your respect.

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

Cannes 2011 Results Tables

The Creative Circle has just released the final Cannes 2011 Results tables.

•To avoid double counting of creativity points, the highest score only is recorded, i.e. If an ad wins a Lion – the shortlist is omitted.
*To calculate Creative Circle Points – if a Lion has been won for a campaign – the one ad will get the Gold/Silver/Bronze points, and the remainder get finalist points.

Small Screen ‘Sextravaganza’ set to replace Teleshopping

Commercial TV has announced a new focus for 2011. John Doe reports.

“Our growth has been phenomenal over the past year,” says Brent Doss, Commercial TV MD. “Our hard hitting news, socially focused documentaries and the pick of old US sitcoms and movies have clearly delivered what the public wants, and now we’re looking to build on this growth. Consequently, our programming will be moving heavily towards smut as the year progress.”

Commercial TV recently signed a deal with an American media company to buy C and D grade soft porn movies in bulk. The deal will give Commercial TV significant leverage in terms of capital expenditure, according to Doss.

“Look, they’re not great movies by any stretch of the imagination, but the ‘boob count’ is really high, and they’re dirt cheap. These are important value factors when it comes to bulk purchasing.”

Included in the Commercial TV purchase are some better known soft porn titles, including Sex Bombs (I- IV) and Killer Virgins. These flagship titles will be shown in Commercial TV’s prime time late night slots.

The bulk of Commercial TV’s soft porn purchase will be screened during ‘teleshopping time’, marking a clear shift in the station’s programming policy.

“Teleshopping is very viable, fiscally speaking,” says Doss. “But really the content is morally repugnant – and our brand has suffered as a result. Our research indicates that ex-consumer journalists demonstrating carrot peelers is proving increasingly offensive to our late night viewers – hence the move to smut.”

According to industry pundits, Commercial TV’s soft porn purchase (which is rumoured to include over 250 movies) will broaden the station’s already comprehensive offering.

“I think it’s a snappy move,” says Tomlin Harris, strategic consultant at CBA Ford Smith Jones and Broadbent. “There is a risk that some viewers might find a barrage of bad soft porn offensive, but it’s probably worth the risk.”

According to Harris, recent media research indicates that most sensitive viewers are fast asleep by 2:30 in the morning anyway.

“The move opens the door for Commercial TV to target kids under 25, drug fiends, sex addicts and insomniacs – to name a few,” Harris adds. “These market segments form a significant percentage of television viewers, with no known brand loyalty. The opportunity for Commercial TV to gain viewers is thus significant.”

Commercial TV will launch its ‘Sextravaganza’ on Christmas Eve, with a premier screening of Killer Virgins.

See local press for details.

– John Doe has enjoyed a long career as an executive assistant, working with a variety of major global brands in a clerical capacity. Long famed in the corporate sector for his legendary dictation skills, Doe has also gained acclaim for his incisive media journalism. Although queries have been raised as to the veracity of some of his information, Doe is adamant that he simply reports on media issues that he comes into contact with – his sources remain a closely guarded secret. Doe dismisses as ‘unsubstantiated’ and ‘possibly defamatory’ allegations that he is in fact one Andrew Miller of Unity Design.

SA races for RICA deadline; 3.6m still outside net

Around 3.6-million South African mobile accounts have not yet been registered as the RICA deadline arrives. ARTHUR GOLDSTUCK sums up the state of play.

Yesterday I received a call from an elderly woman. “Can you tell me what this RICA thing is all about?”

She’d heard me talk about it on radio, and thought it might affect her.

It sure does. If she’d tried to make the same call a week later, she wouldn’t have been able to get a signal. Her phone number would have been disconnected. She would have failed to comply with the Regulation of Interception of Communication Act (RICA), and her cellular network provider would have been obliged to remove her number from their network.

How could she not have known about it? The networks have invested many millions of rands on a marketing and education campaign, and you can barely enter a retail outlet without seeing the reminders.

But we tend to forget that there are numerous people who don’t read newspapers, who switch off mentally or physically when any business or technology topic is discussed on radio or TV, and who don’t pay attention to signage in stores.

World Wide Worx had assumed that the deadline would arrive on 30 June 2011 with around 10 per cent of SIM cards not yet RICA registered. It had already been extended from the end of December 2010, and that had been a new deadline set after a previous one had proved unrealistic.

So by now everyone would have been given a chance to register, right?

Not quite.

Many of the SIM cards in use in the past year have been secondary cards. The 52.6-million* active accounts as at the end of March 2011 in reality only represent 39-million users. Around 3 to 4 million are SIM cards for mobile broadband modems, and up to a million represent “SIM farms”, PABX switchboards and machine-to-machine use like GSM tracking devices. That would still have left around 5-million potential cut-offs.

The reality has proved only slightly rosier. As of 22 June, the networks reported the following levels of compliance:

Vodacom: 93%. Leaving 1,855,000 accounts unregistered.
MTN contracts: 98%. Leaving 68 680 unregistered.
MTN Pre-paid: 93%, Leaving 1,103,410 accounts unregistered.
Cell C: 91%. Leaving 639 000 unregistered.

The grand total of RICA-unready users, then, is 3,666,090. That comes to 6.9% of the overall base of SIM cards in use, and well below the worst case scenario.

That’s a lot of cards to fall off the grid in one fell swoop, but there are two pieces of good news in this:

Many of these cards are secondary cards, so the number of individuals cut off won’t be as high as it appears; The numbers will remain “retrievable” for another six months. If a number is de-activated, the user has until the end of the year to present documentation for RICA compliance and have the number reinstated.

The bad news is that even one or two million people being cut off will result in a flood of complaints, bad news stories of the impact of the cut-off, and a public relations storm for the networks. Don’t try their call centres for the next week or two if your query is not essential!

Reprinted from Gadget. Follow Arthur Goldstuck on Twitter on @art2gee

New Media adapts strategy for digital world

Firms such as New Media (formerly New Media Publishing) have always positioned themselves as the meeting point between content and marketing. Now they are moving away from pulp and ink (though it remains a large and profitable chunk of the business) towards multiple platforms including mobile, the web and tablets.

Andrew Nunneley, publishing director at South Africa’s dominant content marketing firm New Media, says the phrase ‘custom publisher’ as a descriptor of his business is out-dated, and following trends over the past several years in the UK and Europe, content marketing is both more descriptive and accurate. It also positions the sector to grab a bigger slice of the overall communications and marketing budgets, probably eating into spend currently flowing through ad agencies.

“We have always provided marketing solutions – we just never really put it out there,” says Nunneley. Repositioning the sector in the competitive communications market is important as marketing spend moves to interactive content.

Already a R1 billion market, of which New Media holds around 30%, Nunneley and MD Bridget McCarney expects content marketing to follow international trends and keep on growing in SA.

It’s a growth market Media24 recently expressed confidence in by upping its stake in New Media from 50% to 58% – buying out most of the shares belonging to one of the co-founders of New Media, Naomi Herselman. Irna van Zyl (content development director), John Psillos (business development director), McCarney and the NMP Share Incentive Trust hold the remaining shares.

It a brave move giving up the equilibrium of a 50-50 share split to a partner as dominant as Media24, which recently showed its finite patience with properties not meeting the expected returns. Remember Touchline Media, Atoll Media, Uppercase Media and 8Ink Media? They have all been swallowed in a corporate reorganisation (one that seems to be continuing as staffers FinMedia24 recently found out) that for all intents and purposes wrote them out of existence.

Nunneley, to his credit, doesn’t miss a beat when asked if any of this makes the remaining partners nervous, saying as long as New Media performs, it has nothing to worry about. And performing it is – Vodacom just shifted its content marketing contract from Interactive Africa to New Media.

The business published six million magazines last year. It employs 170 people, serves 25 clients and its editorial teams face 300 deadlines a year. New Media also pulls in R75 million in advertising revenue pa.

Content marketing, as the name implies, brings together journalism and marketing in a bid to change consumer behaviour for the benefit of the marketing partner. On its own, journalism is only credible as long as the subject is not paying for the message. In the world of consumer magazines or newspaper media, the raison d’être of content marketing would be the kiss of infamy.

Consumer marketing products don’t try and hide what they are, often putting the name of the brand that gets the final say on each product on the cover, as in the case of Woolworths Taste or Plascon Spaces.

The New Media team looks to find what content area its client would carry credibility in and create editorial products around that position of strength. For Mercedes that would be luxury travel, for Woolworths good food. It’s a sensible strategy and one consumers can obviously live with, given the success of many of these magazines (both online and off).

For recently signed client Vodacom, New Media is constructing a content hub that will feed material to the web, mobile phones, tablets, niched digimags and print. De-coupling the content marketing strategy from print will allow for numerous niched content hubs to be created, serving the numerous fields of interest in a client base as substantial and broad as that of Vodacom. Consumers will finally be able to pick out the content they want.

According to McCarney, 25% of the company’s profit is already generated off digital platforms. It’s here that content marketers can really take on or partner up with the agency world – somebody has to populate all those company websites that have been built and now sit (mostly) idle.

In a nod to the changing marketing and communication environment, agencies are already creating editorialised worlds (think of those Johnnie Walker mini-films), says McCarney, and New Media has been editorialising marketing environments for a long time, giving it a strong competitive edge.

Read the full story on BizCommunity.