Independent industry news for marketing, advertising & media execs
A stop frame animation from Brandt Botes at Studio Botes with advice from local and international designers on starting your own business
Going Solo. from Studio Botes on Vimeo.
A stop frame animation created for the Toffie Festival 2011. It shares advice from local (South African) and international designers on starting your own business.
Renee Silverstone has resigned as CEO of The Jupiter Drawing Room (Johannesburg) after 22 years with the company. Silverstone had co-founded the company with Graham Warsop in 1989.
Alison Deeb, MD and COO at Jupiter, takes over the running of the group, but it is understood no appointment has been made to the CEO position Silverstone just vacated. Deeb joined Jupiter in 2004 and become MD of The Jupiter Drawing Room (Johannesburg) in March 2005. She was previously MD of Ogilvy Mather Rightford in Gauteng.
Handover planned for a while
Silverstone says the handover had been planned for a while now. As early as the start of 2010, she had made it clear that she was planning to move on, but stayed after a request from Warsop and WPP, the international network that owns 49% of Jupiter (aka TJDR). Her cut-off date, related to the shareholders, had always been March 2011. Silverstone retains a shareholding in TJDR.
As she left the offices of Jupiter on her last day (Tuesday, 29 March 2011), she told Bizcommunity.com that, after 22 years at Jupiter, she was looking to open a new chapter in her life. Change, while often resisted, is good both for business (referring to Jupiter) and the individual, Silverstone commented.
Silverstone would not elaborate on her future business plans except to say that she has several opportunities and ideas she wants to explore. Not planning to rush into things, Silverstone says she will announce her plans in 4-5 months’ time. In the short term, she is leaving for a six-week break to the Karoo.
Asked which of her many achievements she is most proud of, Silverstone says driving a team (past and present) that built a truly formidable advertising brand was her proudest achievement. As she started handing over responsibilities, she said, her staff were surprised at the level of engagement Jupiter enjoys with the broader business community.
Silverstone was awarded 2007 Businesswoman of the Year by Entrepreneur, Agency Leader of the Year by Financial Mail‘s AdFocus in 2007, and was voted Absa Jewish Achiever of the Year, also in 2007. Jupiter was voted Agency of the Decade by Finweek‘s AdReview in 2010.
Key clients include MTN, Absa and Edcon. TJDR’s most lauded moment came when it pitched for three major accounts – those of MTN, Sasol and Absa – in 2006 over three consecutive days, and won all three, adding R1 billion worth of business to the group and doubling staff in just three months.
Originally published on Bizcommunity.com Marketing & Media | South Africa – click to see more comments.
In January 2011, they were two guys working hard to keep their group media buying site Twangoo running with a handful of freelance sales staff. Less than three months later, they have 40 staffers, a new office in Loop Street, Cape Town, and possibly the hottest thing since Facebook as their backers. That’s because Groupon acquired Twangoo in January 2011 and tasked its co-founders, Wayne Gosling and Dan Guasco, with establishing the Groupon brand in South Africa.
The duo’s first challenge was to put a strong management team in place, having realised it would be impossible for them to manage the whole operation by themselves in the quick turnaround times required.
Then followed more staff in sales, marketing, editorial and tech, as well as the new offices. All the while they were transferring their Twangoo customer base to MyCityDeal.co.za while they tried to sort out issues around the Groupon.co.za domain name (which had been registered by rival group buying company Wicount).
Twangoo had gone into business in June 2010 and shortly after Guasco and Gosling, both MBA graduates, attempted to initiate negotiations with Groupon regarding an acquisition. Several months passed before they made contact with Groupon’s Oliver Samwer, who had Guasco fly to Europe to negotiate a deal.
The possibility of a deal was first reported in December 2010 and announced in early January 2011. Guasco and Gosling seem to have been running at a breakneck pace ever since.
Whether the incredible growth at the new SA subsidiary is sustainable or not is an open question but it is certainly in line with Groupon’s international growth strategy. Forbes magazine headlined a story on the rise of Groupon “Meet The Fastest Growing Company Ever“. Pundits predict the company will breach US$1 billion in revenue this year. Some suggest revenue multiple that.
Groupon offers group buying, which means it basically emails its database of users a discounted deal every day and, if enough people take it up, they get the coupon to redeem at the product provider, be that a retailer or a service provider.
The group-buying element suggests that consumers can collectively bargain down (for argument’s sake) a retailer. In reality, Groupon bargains down the retailer and sees how effectively it’s done so, based on the number of consumers taking up the deal. It has a database, the retailer wants feet, consumers wants bargains. Ding, ding, ding!
Groupon’s strategy was to digitise the coupon business and make it hot again. By all accounts, it has succeeded. The Wall Street Journal estimated its world-wide revenue in 2010 at US$760 million from US$33 million the previous year. The story in Forbes reports that Groupon and its clients (the retailers) splits revenue on deals 50/50 and that 97% of Groupon’s deals garner the required minimum number of buyers for the coupons to be valid.
One of the reasons Groupon is expanding so fast is that it needs to tie up the market. Its business model is easy to replicate and locally it already sports nearly a dozen competitors, including Wicount (which bought key words such as ‘Groupon’ and ‘Twangoo’ on Google and originally registered the groupon.co.za domain name, which Groupon SA only managed to get back last week) and Zappon – a new entrant backed by Avusa Media – owner of the Sunday Times, the Sowetan and The Times, among others.
Naspers was purported to have been in negotiations with Guasco and Gosling as well before the Groupon deal was announced. It’s widely expected to enter the market in the near future, backed by its extensive community and regional newspaper network.
According to Guasco, Groupon isn’t intimidated by the entry of larger media players as it is the expert in the field, with international best practise and research to back it up. He believes competition will grow the marketplace as people dip their toes into group buying and then migrate to those who offer the best experience (and deals). It’s happening all over the world, says Guasco, and yet Groupon remains number one in the markets it operates in.
As already mentioned, Twangoo shifted operations to the MyCityDeal domain after the Groupon deal was announced. A rival had registered the Groupon.co.za domain name and issues around this was only resolved at the end of March. MyCityDeal is a network of European group-buying sites that was acquired by Groupon in 2010. Guasco and Gosling expect that both the Twangoo and the local MyCityDeal domains will redirect to Groupon.co.za by the end of this April.
Gosling says the international group has set targets and expectations but basically allow the local management team to make the decisions. MyCityDeal offers daily deals in the major metros including Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban and Tshwane. Port Elizabeth was rolled out this past weekend and Bloemfontein should be live by next week. Once the metros are stitched up, Groupon will start targeting large towns.
Asked what a service such as Groupon offers brands, Gosling says Groupon will grow beyond bargain hunters to include anybody looking for good deals. After all, everybody looks for a good deal – from housewives to company execs.
Guasco says Groupon is a brand marketing tool, rather than a tool used to get rid of stock. It induces trial and gets feet through the door, offering their clients an opportunity to impress consumers with their products and service. It initiates a relationship; what happens after Groupon is in the hands of whomever is responsible for the customer experience.
Consumers will ultimately benefit from a Godzilla-sized discount business whose strategy requires lower prices online, rather than maintaining the status quo (hello, Apple!). I’m also looking forward to endless copy on rehabilitating ‘Groupzilla’.
If Google taught us anything, it’s that we are safe in the hands of powerful mega corporations. We are yet to learn if it were a deal worth taking.
Originally published on Bizcommunity.com Marketing & Media | South Africa – click to see more comments.
The SABC News department has had more shame heaped upon it by the Broadcasting Complaints Commission of South Africa 
(BCCSA) in a judgement that found it had been unfair to and broadcast ‘untruths’ about investigative journalist Sam Sole.
The allegations against Sole, who currently works for the Mail & Guardian newspaper and on which the SABC based its story, was made by controversial businessman Robert Gumede. He alleged that Sole had been bribed with a R900 air ticket by a business rival to investigate Gumede while Sole worked for investigative newsmagazine Noseweek. Gumede also alleged racial bias in the M&G’s reporting as related to Gumede himself.
Earlier judgement
In an earlier judgement on the same story, the BCCSA also found against the SABC in a complaint brought by John Sterenborg, a former business partner of Gumede, and the man alleged to have bribed Sole. In one of its most scathing judgement to date, the BCCSA found that the SABC was “unprofessional and actually reckless”, as well as “duplicitous” and deceptive, in its news broadcast.
In the complaint brought by the M&G, the judgement seems equally condemning. The BCCSA ordered SABC3 to broadcast an apology on its prime time (7pm) news slot, within the first 12 minutes of the broadcast, on 30 March 2011.
The statement SABC3 viewers will be treated to, and some unfortunate SABC3 news anchor will be subjected to, include the following:
“SABC3 news did not deal fairly”
“Firstly: SABC3 news did not deal fairly with the Mail & Guardian newspaper or Mr Sole. The SABC did not adequately address the matter of the alleged bribe. The fact is that Mr Sole did not receive a bribe, and despite the reply broadcast on behalf of the Mail & Guardian and Mr Sole, an incorrect inference could still have been drawn. Mr Sole had merely been reimbursed for an air ticket that he had purchased in order to interview a potential news source.
“Secondly: The SABC3 news item did not counter false insinuations regarding the further payment of bribes to Mr Sole. Mr Sole denied receiving any bribes at all, and the SABC should have included his denial in the Mail & Guardian’s reported reply.
“Thirdly: In this reported reply, the Mail & Guardian was not granted the opportunity of denying accusations of racial bias against Mr Gumede.
“In conclusion, these omissions constitute unfairness towards Mr Sole and the Mail & Guardian, and the broadcasting of an untruth. The BCCSA has therefore issued a reprimand against SABC3.”
“Serious intervention into the independence of SABC3”
The BCCSA decided not to levy an additional fine on the SABC. It reasoned that its order constituted a “serious intervention into the independence of SABC3 to decide itself what should form part of the newscast” and this was seen as sufficiently serious reflection of the judgement. The BCCSA also did not order an apology from the SABC, saying its rules did not allow it to do so. It will be up to the SABC to decide if it wishes to apologise to viewers and others wronged in its broadcast or not.
Read the full story on BizCommunity
The making of Art South Africa Cover from Am I Collective on Vimeo.
Am I Collective were commissioned to create the Art South Africa’s December 2010 cover. The issue’s theme: art and public spaces. This video shows how it all came together.
Have a video of you created your latest campaign? Send it to MarkLives!
The Toffie Pop Culture Festival and Design Conference is back in Cape Town for its second year and promises to give delegates lots to chew on (ok, that was cheap – like the tickets!). The festival/conference hybrid, which takes place at the truly lovely grand dame of Cape Town, the City Hall, Thursday 24 March – Saturday 26 March 2011, offers a mix of workshops, speakers, curated exhibitions, films, boxing matches and parties.
The venue, in the heart of Cape Town next to the Grand Parade, has been undergoing urgent renovations, and it’s inspiring to see the Mother City’s creative pulse showcased in one of its most beautiful buildings, as part of our industry’s contribution to a larger effort to rejuvenate the city centre.
It’s also encouraging to see a major design event actually made relatively accessible to designers. Tickets are priced at around R750 for the three-day event, with an extra R250 for specific workshop sessions. Design Indaba is a different beast altogether; its early bird tickets started at R5670 this year and ended at R6930 for on the day registration, by comparison.
The festival part of the event includes boxing matches, a curated exhibition and a club party in City Hall (Saturday 26 March at 9pm) featuring Liver, Dirty Paraffin, Sibot with B-Team and a light performance by Daito Manabe. Delegates and the public may also look forward to the B-LIVE Orchestra performance (Friday 25 March at 8pm, tickets available to public at R150 each) – a collaboration between the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra, hip hop artist Tumi Molekane and electro musician Peach van Pletzen.
Exhibitors at Toffie includes Liam Mooney, Angie Batis & Shane Durrant, Porky Hefer, Kobus van der Merwe, Dave Pepler, Cornelia & Adi Badenhorst, Superella, Dokter & Misses, David West, Janet Kinghorn, Brandt Botes, Elle Decoration, Michelle Son, Frauke Stegmann, Marcii Goose, Freddy Sam, Black River FC, Andrew Putter, Barend de Wet, Sangoma & Photon Foundation, KingJames, Pieter Heyneke, Hannes Bernard and Iziko Museums of Cape Town.
The You & Me & Everyone We Know Market, meanwhile, will feature over 30 independent shops. The broader public is also invited to participate in the festival, with access to a market and exhibition area, at a cost of R25 per day (opens Thursday 24 March at 12 noon, Friday and Saturday at 9am). Madrid-based artists Boa Mistura will undertake several projects in Cape Town that will be showcased at Toffie.
Read the full story on BizCommunity
The Blindness of the Woods – Short Film from Flamboyant Paradise on Vimeo.
Javier Lourenco is the Buenos Aires-based creative director of visual studio Flamboyant Paradise and founder of TheUncoolHunter, a website throwing a cheeky middle finger to the trendoids of the world by insisting on filling in the often-ignored aspects of popular culture Wallpaper and Visi decide to give a miss.
Lourenco, who co-directed the short film The Blindness in the Woods (think fairy tale meets Nordic erotica), is visiting Cape Town as a guest speaker at the Toffie Pop Culture Festival & Design Conference organised by creative agency The President, where he will be discussing filmmaking. The festival runs 24 – 26 March 2011 at the Cape Town City Hall.
Herman: What is uncool at the moment?
Javier Lourenco: Uncool does not have the same meaning as it used to five years ago. It has a new connotation; uncool is not used as a pejorative word as before because we incorporated the uncool as part of our consumption. The elite incorporates uncool stuff to their daily consumption and, because of that, it becomes trendy.
Anyway, for the time being, we are in the presence of two kinds of cultural products and both of them are subjects to be studied:
* The genuine uncool
It is a product that comes from the research of a field that is not known or it is slightly known. It is not referenced in other things. This is everything we have to point out in The Uncoolhunter’s primary study: the kitsch, the bizarre, the freak, the sub-professional, the eccentric, the extravagant, the pretentious, the expensive sold at a lower price, the cheap sold at a higher price, the incoherent, the surreal… This material is what we mainly publish and basically we pay attention to it but, on the other hand, sometimes we publish other kinds of articles that have to do with the Genuine Uncool.
* The non-genuine uncool
This product derives from the research of those professionals who can differentiate between the cool and the uncool (artists, filmmakers, designers, creatives, etc) and who can produce by referring from a genuine uncool product or an aesthetic reference coming from their own world. The final result is an aesthetically uncool product but with a cool meaning.
Herman: Why do we choose to ignore significant parts of our popular culture?
Lourenco: Because the elite think that being massive (after a product becomes main stream) becomes popular and we the trendy tend to ignore that.
Herman: Do you see a cultural trend towards ‘real’ (underground restaurants etc) that leaves our preconceived notions of cool/uncool behind?
Lourenco: Nowadays, [the] limits between cool and uncool are totally blurred. I believe in original things more than cool/uncool. It doesn’t really matter if they come from the supposedly cool (elite) or uncool world (emerging).
Read the full interview on BizCommunity
Visi is one of a handful of truly iconic South African magazines. It has always prided itself in superior design and production values, as well as a quirkiness that resonated with many South Africans. For a while now, though, the public seems to have been less enamoured with the magazine as seen in its declining circulation in recent years.
Enter Jacquie Myburgh Chemaly, Visi’s new editor (appointed in September 2010 but December 2010 was her first issue), with a promise to reconnect this home-grown décor, design and architecture magazine with its readers.
Much more than a magazine
In fact for Myburgh Chemaly, Visi is much more than a magazine. It’s an attitude that seeks out better (and quirkier) ways to do things – she describes it as “Visiness’ – that goes beyond print and even media in the broader sense. Myburgh Chemaly’s ‘aha’ media moment came while she was watching the London subway bombings unfold on live TV during 7/7. Networks were carrying cellphone video from regular people while they scrambled journalists to the affected scenes.
“The media has changed” might sound clichéd by now but many magazine editors still haven’t cottoned on. Myburgh Chemaly has, and this democratisation of media (in terms of content creators and broadcast channels) has led her to decide that she, and Visi, should tap the huge pool of design eyes and ears outside her office of journalists.
Visi (@visi_mag) has launched a new visually focused website, done by Native, plus a social network or design community, as Myburgh Chemaly calls it, aptly named ‘covet.’ The new site focuses on daily content and design news, freeing up the bi-monthly title to focus on less-time sensitive topics. An iPad app is also in the works and is awaiting approval from the Apple store. The magazine is readying an ecommerce feature, too.
The magazine itself will be heavily themed with a key trend explored in every issue, and Myburgh Chemaly promises not to repeat trends, as magazines often do, especially around seasons of the year.
Restore the credibility of the print element
In short, Myburgh Chemaly wants to restore the collectability of the print element of Visi by promising a read gratifying to the senses. Expect big images where the image is the hero, rather than the magazine design, and stories that relate to people (‘creating design heroes’) rather than solely on product. The brand will retain its unique character and its out-there, quirky attitude, with a focus on delivering real insight on important trends.
The magazine is only one part of a larger lifestyle brand instead of being a product isolated by its dependence on one distribution channel, and Myburgh Chemaly promises new activations and initiatives over the year ahead. In all of this, the brand will have to live up to the high expectations of Visi readers through a healthy infusion of that distinct sense of ‘Visiness.’
Read the full story on BizCommunity
…The rest will follow. That is the assumption trend forecast analyst Dion Chang works on with his analysis of the fast-paced change the fashion industry is grappling with. He recently shared his findings at the Freeworld Design Centre in Cape Town as a guest of New Media Publishing.
Fashion a key indicator of business, trends
Apart from technology, fashion is a key indicator of tomorrow’s business and social trends today, argues Chang (@dionchang). For starters, he expects the value chain in the fashion world to become obsolete within the next 10 years, due to rapid change in consumer behaviour.
Traditionally, the fashion trade worked a year in advance to bring collections to market while its chroniclers’ and trumpeters (fashion magazines) worked on a three-month cycle. But, in a world, where instant gratification is a click away, the fashion cycle has sped up markedly.
Gone are the days of design movements. Hello to celeb-driven “get the look” fashion built on global production that turns a design into a sample garment nearly overnight. With geographic and time zones becoming increasingly irrelevant, and productivity, cost and speed becoming paramount, fashion labels such a Prada are starting to label products “Made by Prada” rather than “Made in China.”
Not that the Chinese market is to be sneezed at – Prada just showed its main line first in Beijing for the first time ever.
Also becoming seasonless
Fashion is also becoming seasonless says Chan, as the recession meant consumers’ purchasing decisions became less trend- or fashion-driven, and more value-driven. Brand name products that offer better fabric, higher quality and durability at a higher price reflect the “flight to quality”.
The Great Recession, says Chang, altered the value systems of consumers, and designers have had to adopt. Gone is the logo-splattered advertising featuring stars such as Madonna for Louis Vuitton that turned the brand into a commodity; new ad campaigns rather focus on the craftsmanship of the product range.
With the power to make or break fashion, brands are shifting away from the once all-powerful fashion editors and, with the democratisation of media, fashion brands are seeking direct access to consumers (and savings) through virtual fashion shows.
Not only can they track what consumers want (thanks to the ‘see, click, buy’ ease of online ordering), they get to bypass fashion editors that might give them the thumbs down. Fashion collections meet crowdsourcing. Designer Derek Lam puts his creations to the vote on eBay for consumers to decide what they would want to wear before he takes it to production. Fashion has entered an era of mass research and customisation, says Chang.
Read the full story on BizCommunity
The Prism awards, awarded to professionals in public relations and communication management, are joining their peers in the larger communication industry by implementing a more robust and accountable judging process. Along with the Loeries (for advertising communication) and the PICA awards (publishing), both already hosting their events in Cape Town, the Prisms will also join the party in the mother city for the first time in its 14 year existence.
Improved judging system
The improved judging system, which splits the entries in the 26 official categories into three clusters, sees a chief judge and five additional judges reviewing each entry, a significant improvement from the two judges on each entry in previous years. Richard Linning, International Public Relations Association (IPRA) president, gives an international perspective to the judging process.
Daniel Munslow, a chief judge on one of the entry clusters and involved in driving the changes at the Prism awards, says more people judging, and judges with greater expertise in the categories they judge, mean better debate and more credible winners. Entrants will also have access to judges’ comments on their submissions, should they request it.
So far the changes seem to be having the desired effect – entry numbers nearly doubled from last year to 166 this year.
In a bid to engage the broader industry, entrants have also been uploaded onto the Prism award site for peer review. This review does not influence the winning entries, though.
The judges rate work on five specific points, namely research, objectives, planning, execution, and measurement. Munslow says entrant submissions in background research and measurement sometimes fall short but that this is improving.
The entry requirements were changed last year to force entrants not to use multiplying factors (such as prominence, prestige of the media channel etc) with the Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) measurement method (which compares the cost of a paid advertisement with the same amount of space or airtime of an unpaid publicity item) for submissions. Only a direct 1:1 comparison of value can be used by entrants, in line with international standards.
Read the full story on BizCommunity