MarkLives.com • Page 531 of 579 • Independent industry news for marketing, advertising & media execs

Will graphic designers evolve design? #DesignIndaba

Harley-Davidson, IBM, General Electric, Coca-Cola and Nike. How is this for a client list? Delegates to the annual Design Indaba, which kicks off tomorrow (Weds 23 2011) at the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC), will find out when Dana Arnett, a founding principal and CEO of VSA Partners, takes to the stage.

As everybody’s attention shifts to social media and its impact on business, including the design business, and society, Arnett argues that the term is already becoming dated and asks “Will graphic designers evolve design?”

Bizcommunity: You’ve said design is playing an important role in bringing “clarity and authenticity” to a “media rich world.” A lot of brands are betting on design and I’m wondering how long design, in a world with lots of fantastic design, will manage to remain a key differentiator?

Dana Arnett: I think it was Oscar Wilde who once said, “The imagination imitates. It is the spirit that creates.” If you subscribe to his thinking, as I do, original design will be around for a long time, and hopefully appreciated forever. Differentiation most often is judged by what the public believes to be meaningful, unique and fresh at any given time. Certainly, the pervasiveness of media and visual matter will keep getting more robust, but I believe great design will always have an ability to break through and create a unique sense of worth and importance.

Biz: Do you believe people still view corporations and brands, even those who put a premium on design, as authentic, in this brand cynical day and age?

Arnett: We’re living in the age of transparency and the consumer also has the ability to decide who they wish to do business with. And because we have more access to information about products and the companies who make them, we’re setting a higher bar for everything we buy (including high priced goods). Corporations have always been a vital organ of society, and with cynicism running high, we’re now simply asking for more accountability, truth and better business behaviour. These dynamics lead me to believe that people will always pay a premium, especially if the company and their products stand for truth and authenticity.

Biz: How do you think social media is impacting on graphic design? In the newspaper world info graphics seem to be on the up as newspapers try to condense information (as social media often does).

Arnett: Your question, while relevant, reminds me a similar question I was asked years ago… “Will the Macintosh computer kill graphic design?” In my experience, medias and mediums have, and will, always evolve. Just as the Mac has become an indispensable part of design, so too will many forms of social media. Afterall, the use of the “social” proceeding “media” is already becoming dated. There will be plenty of bigger and better opportunities for graphic design as the digital age progresses…the question is, “Will graphic designers evolve design?”.

Biz: I’m interested in your views on the relevance of American pop culture on the global design stage – do think it’s diminishing in importance again now that the world/Obama honeymoon is over?

Arnett: Design is becoming more global by the minute, regardless of who is president of the United States. And while many of us are relieved that Bush is gone, the United States isn’t the centre of influence it once was. The US will always be a centre for design and creativity but we’re now competing on a larger stage. You’ll always still see pop cultural trends emerge from our part of the world, but other countries can now dominate the stage as well.

Read the full story on BizCommunity

[Design Indaba 2011] Glittering er design lights

by Herman Manson (@marklives) Fear not, glitter pork and cupcakes are not on the menu at this year’s Design Indaba Conference (23-25 February 2011), the annual design calendar highlight held at the Cape Town International Convention Centre. Instead, delegates will be treated to a range of fascinating characters from the design world, sharing global design best practice in areas as diverse as architecture, service delivery and advertising.

Wednesday 23 February opens with Michael Wolff, co-founder of design firm Wolff Olins and current head of Michael Wolff & Company. Wolff has worked on numerous global brands and, on his website, he says “developing a brand is more about revelation than positioning”. He sounds like somebody worth listening to (Bizcommunity.com will let you know in due course).

Dana Arnett, CEO of VSA Partners (whose client list includes Harley-Davidson, Coca-Cola and Nike) and prankster/improv artist Charlie Todd (most famous for the annual No Pants! Subway Ride event) are both on the billing for Wednesday, as is local design hero Richard Hart from disturbance design studio.

Thursday 24 February opens with what the promoters describe as lessons in creative entrepreneurship from Jody Aufrichtig and Nick Ferguson, the duo behind the development of Old Biscuit Mill in Woodstock and the Grand Daddy Hotel; Brad Armitage and Rui Esteves, co-founders of beer salon &Union; and Jen Bilik of US-based gift and stationary designer Knock Knock.

Kiran Bir Sethi, designer and education reformer from India and the woman behind the global “Design for Change” contest targeting schools and encouraging kids to help transform their communities, will hopefully offer inspiration to those seeking solutions to a dysfunctional education system. Dutch creative director and curator Renny Ramakers, meanwhile, “focuses on creating interaction with the public, new collaborations, tools and systems”, which is certainly something the local design community need to engage with to a greater extent.

Read the full story on BizCommunity.com

Bafana Bafana belongs to the people

The South African Football Association (SAFA) is investigating a name change for Bafana Bafana. While a lot of talk and opinion is being bandied about regarding the colloquial context of the name, SAFA is on record as to why it is planning to throw out the name three Sowetan sports writers coined in the early 1990s and adopted by the nation. It’s about money, plain and simple.

The trio tasked with bulging SAFA’s pockets even further investigating a name change to the benefit of the team and the country consists of SAFA president Kirsten Nematandani, vice-president Danny Jordaan and chairman of the referees committee Alpha Mchunu.

Jordaan recently told the Financial Mail that “The NEC [of SAFA] decided we should look at what the legal impediments are to maximising revenue opportunities from licensing and merchandising. This could include us considering an alternative name. Our job is to do an objective evaluation.”

SAFA owns 50.1% of Slam, the company that owns merchandising rights to Bafana’s name. A local businessman owns the other 49.9% through his company Stanton Woodrush – apparently after it registered the trademark for Bafana Bafana on clothing well before SAFA thought of doing so. The joint venture combined SAFA’s and Stanton Woodrush’s rights into a single company.

Having made a super profit after South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, the countries’ sports administrators seem to have soured on sharing the spoils.

Nobody has ever betted on the administrative competence of SAFA and last week journalists Bareng-Batho Kortjaas and Kgomotso Mokoena suggested on Times Live that, before the creation of Slam, SAFA had not bothered with merchandising.

The Times Live story also claims that Stanton Woodrush had approached SAFA last year to sell its share in Slam back to SAFA. Having done well out of the world cup and foreseeing that the company might well be worth as much now as it ever will in the medium term, coupled with growls from Parliament about the Slam deal, this would make perfect sense. SAFA apparently failed to respond to the offer.

Rebranding a national team, especially after their brand recognition has gone global as happened during the world cup, is an expensive exercise, not to mention a controversial one. If SAFA can acquire the remainder of Slam at a fair price, it should take the deal. A fair deal would compensate Stanton Woodrush for its contribution to building the merchandising business and would probably be less costly, financially and politically, than finding a name all South Africans can relate to and which will be enthusiastically adopted by SA soccer lovers.

Clint Roper, the editor of local soccer bible Soccer Laduma, says 67% of his readers voted “No” in a poll asking whether Bafana Bafana’s name should be changed. Roper, and his readers it seems, doesn’t see money as sufficient reason to tamper with a national treasure.

The name Bafana Bafana is loved by the nation and nobody screaming the name at the top of their lungs during a game would consider it derogatory, argues Roper. Roper asks the right question when he says: “Would they have changed the name if they owned all the merchandising rights?” The answer is almost certainly “No.”

The possibility of a name change for Bafana Bafana hasn’t hit home yet, and SAFA will face a backlash from the nation should they proceed, warns Roper.

Irvin Khoza, the chairman of Orlando Pirates Football Club, is quoted in City Press as saying, “There is so much brand value, essence and emotion involved with the Bafana name. Doing away with it won’t be worth it. There is a need to engage with the people involved and if they come up with a reasonable fee, then pay it.”

It seems like sound advice SAFA would do well to take note of. Bafana Bafana belongs to the people. SAFA are merely its administrators.

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

The world’s best-designed newspaper looks like a magazine

Portugal, that other country that used to sell itself as “more than you can imagine” (today it’s “Europe’s West Coast”), is home to the world’s best designed newspaper, i. Short for informação, i launched in 2009 to critical acclaim, and the newspaper has just been judged the World’s Best-Designed Newspaper by the Society for News Design.

The judges declared that “many publications we saw are clearly operating at the top of their game, and have been tenacious and intelligent enough to emerge stronger from the economic battering of the last few years. But Portugal’s daily newspaper, i, stood out for its ability to take the best of the visual language of newspapers, magazines and other publications and create something new that is more than the sum of its parts. It’s compact. It’s fresh. It’s consistent, yet full of surprises.”

The newspaper feels and reads more like a magazine, sized 250 x 345 mm, than a newspaper, and is also saddle-stitched. The judges felt its format supports “the kind of flexibility that lets it focus on hard news one day and features the next” and that “paper delivers traditional newspaper content with new, engaging presentation.”

The six-day-a-week paper obviously values good design and the judges liked the fact that the designers considered how opposing pages worked together, even if the content weren’t related. The paper was complimented on its structure, fonts, use of colour and info graphics and headlines.

Social media and the web are rapidly changing how readers engage with content. It was quite insightful, then, when the judges noted “we found colour on every page, yet it is used purposefully, with smart pacing. It’s as though the designers are using a highlighter to clue the reader in to what’s important. One judge called this ‘print search optimisation.'”

Read the full story on BizCommunity.com

Pete Case – finding heart in digital

Pete Case needs little introduction to the larger creative or digital community. His name is intricately linked to that of the multi-award winning digital agency Gloo, AdReview’s Digital Design Agency of the Year for the past four years running, where he serves as founding partner and Executive Creative Director.

Case acknowledges that his agency catches a lot of flak for winning creative awards (and lots of them), but he says, he has never believed that it would benefit the digital industry to be perceived as dry and mechanical, obsessively focussed on measurability, when in fact it has a lot of heart and potential in telling brand stories.

“We actually believe that relevant great ideas, strategy and creativity in turn create higher engagement,” says Case. “This has been proven when over the past 2 years our work has topped not only Loeries but also the Assegai awards (with its focus on measurement).

Case believes the digital industry will be better served by achieving a balance between creativity and measurability – creating ’emotional work’ and linking it to great technology. Failure to do so might result in digital teams getting side-lined as well as the industry not attracting the right mix of new talent.

If students perceive digital as all techie, companies like Gloo would miss out on a lot of creative talent, says Case, who highlights the failure of students from creative colleges to enter the industry as a challenge that needs to be addressed. To this end he regularly speaks at colleges to convince students that digital is much more than coding websites.

Case sees the key challenge for brands as translating the work they do on digital networks into “real life social networks.” The messages created online is spread by people networks, in offices, at parties and between friends, as the hugely successful Lonely Finger campaign for 5FM proved a couple of years ago. The online/offline discussion is not one the industry has sufficiently engaged with, says Case. Marketers (and their digital agencies) need to look into worlds that already exist if they want to find value to their messages.

It’s focus on balancing creative storytelling with technology has seen 2.4 million unique users engage with SA Tourism, prior to and during the World Cup, while Fifa attracted over 145,000 unique visitors in the first 2 months of a viral campaign created by Gloo.

Cases’ award tally includes founding partner and 2 Cannes awards, South Africa’s first gold at Echo, 2 Emmy’s, 44 Loeries, including 2 grand prix and recognition at D&AD, Promax, CLIOs, The New York Advertising Festival, The Design Indaba Awards, Assegai, Caples and The Bookmarks. He is also on the committee of The Loerie Awards, The DMMA and The Creative Circle.

Originally from London, where he completed a Graphic design honours degree and launched his first agency, Hard Drive in 1990, Case landed in South Africa by following his heart. The South African girl that convinced him to move to Cape Town is today his wife.

Case initially teamed up with Marc Caplan to start a digital agency called bandwidth. The partnership worked with various international clients until Caplan’s sudden death in a car crash five years later. Bandwidth would then merge with 33 degrees, Network#BBDO’s small digital arm in Cape Town, to give birth to Gloo Digital Design.

The new stand-alone worked across the industry and with various agencies, prompting the decision to exchange partners with someone more independent than BBDO. Case picked empowerment firm Kagiso Media in 2009, though Gloo (Digital Design was dropped after Case decided SA’s online audience had reached a level where the agency could show its “strength in integrated ideas as a strategic and ideas based agency”) is still based on the BBDO premises at 30 Chiappini Street in Cape Town.

Gloo’s drive to balance creative storytelling with technology is proving effective with clients and the agency started 2011 on a high note after winning the hotly contested Brite Blue Project account (a company and vision created by the ex-founder of 2020 bank). Other recent account wins include BMW, Mini, AVIS, SA Tourism and SES Astra.

Read the full story on Squeezeback.com

MSN SA tries to regain traction with upgrade as Nielsen restates stats

MSN has always been the biggest invisible brand in South Africa’s digital content space. The default home page for millions of Internet Explorer users, local Hotmail and Window Live Messenger users have also received significant exposure to the content portal. It had become, according to MSN senior editor Justin Zehmke, little more than a compulsory stop on the way to another online property.

This Zehmke and his team hopes to change in the year ahead since Kagiso Media took over management of the site last year. A name change, to Howzit.MSN.com, and a redesign have been the first steps in a strategy Zehmke believes will turn default traffic into a real readership. Howzit is a popular greeting in SA.

Content is once again being localised and the user experience improved with the integration of Facebook, Twitter and Messenger into the site. So far, page views of the news channel have grown from 250 000 to 3.8 million a month between the time of the Kagiso takeover and January 2011. Page views on the business section have increased from 25 000 to 800 000 and the local celeb channel, ZAlebs, has gone from zero to 300 000 page impressions a month.

It’s a small team of three driving the site, which relies heavily on wire copy, but Zehmke hopes more top-line content by a network of freelancers will lift the quality of the site. He expects to launch a number of new channels in the year ahead, including a dedicated cricket channel plus ones covering travel and motoring, among others.

On the revenue front, ad spend is growing, thanks to the help of Kagiso’s sales agency DigitalMark.

Read the full story on BizCommunity.com

A royal wedding without lobola? You must neva.

Budget airline’s latest marketing stunt is to plan delivery of a herd of cows to Buckingham palace in celebration of the wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton. For every flight booked from 14 February kulula “will make a contribution to the cost of a herd fit for a royal lobola (a symbolic payment to the bride’s family from the groom).” The cows will be sourced locally in the UK. The Sunday Times are reporting the couple has already decided not to accept gifts from corporations. Maybe they will be swayed by the plate & mugs? They do seem like collectors’ items.

The evolution of FoxP2

You and two mates decide to go it alone and launch your own ad agency. You need to come up with a name. Simple. Hit Google and type in ‘creativity.’ Whoa, information overload, but as you wade through the entries something about a creativity gene catches your eye. It’s called FoxP2.

From start up to flat-broke, to a remarkable revival in fortune for one of South Africa’s most creative young agencies, read all about FoxP2 (PDF file).

First published in AdVantage Magazine, September 2010,

Derrick wants to save the world

Big thinking lies behind new Cape Town agency Derrick, which hopes to combine business sustainability with environmental friendliness, a collaborative approach to communication and media neutrality. It has been launched by Livio Tronchin (ex-Jupiter Drawing Room Cape Town), Mark Stead (former CD at KingJames RSVP) and Myles Hoppé (former brand manager at the company designing SA’s first electric car, the Joule).

Its laid-back style requires first-time visitors to squeeze Livio’s cock (a plastic rooster that crows, thankfully), before exiting the trio’s studio office at the Old Castle Brewery in Woodstock. It’s all quite refreshing.

Like most agency entrepreneurs, the guys at Derrick wanted to escape the siloed thinking still prevalent in many ad agencies and marketing departments. Tired of endless meetings, of having to spend a clients’ budget before year-end simply for the sake of it, and had lost enthusiasm for what they were doing, says Hoppé. Derrick sees a return to their passion for advertising as it should be rather than as it is.

Big-agency systems stem from a bygone era, the Derrick founders believe. Ad agencies no longer lead, they follow, says Tronchin, putting the agency business model and relevance in doubt.

Change will be driven by a strategic consulting model that blurs the line between agency and client, says Tronchin. Research should be play a foremost role in crafting communication, not kick in after the strategy has already been completed and placed in production, as often happens.

The agency has already won pitches for the City Of Cape Town’s Electricity Savings Campaign, Oakley South Africa and Act II Popcorn, though Stead concedes the biggest challenge has been getting into the room with marketers. The first viral ad for the electricity campaign saw the implosion of the Athlone cooling towers rewinding to make it appear that the towers are being reconstructed rather than destroyed. Dozens more then dot the landscape to bring the point home that wasting electricity has a real-world effect on their environment.

It’s all part of hitting the reset button on how clients and agencies approach communication and client/agency relationships. Derrick sees a sustainable future, for its own business, that of its clients and ultimately the planet. It’s big thinking from a small team.

Find the City Of Cape Town’s Electricity Savings Campaign at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyN8oCgyN8Q

First published on Squeezeback

Clickthinking bought by international network

South African Internet and SEO agency Clickthinking has been purchased by Aegis Media, one of the world’s leading media communications and market research groups, for an undisclosed amount. Clickthinking is set to become the wholly owned South African office of the Aegis Media’s international iProspect network.

Clickthinking employees a staff compliment of 24 and is based in Cape Town. Clients include Mercedes-Benz, Johnson & Johnson, e.tv, and Vodacom. Aegis owns various well-known media brands including Carat, Isobar and Synovate.

The iProspect brand focuses on search engine optimisation, paid search advertising management, online display advertising management, shopping feed management, global search engine marketing, web analytics/attribution modelling, reputation management and related services.

Clickthinking MD Peter Stewart says Aegis Media’s understanding of and leadership in the digital space attracted him to the deal, which he expects will benefit Clickthinking through access to international best practice and specialist technology. Stewart expects little operational change as the management team is locked into the business for the next five years.

Clickthinking will become the first iProspect office on the African continent and is expected to expand the groups’ footprint into Africa beyond SA. Jerry Buhlmann, CEO of Aegis Group, said in a media release on the acquisition that “Clickthinking’s tools and knowledge will complement iProspect’s search engine marketing expertise, as well as giving iProspect a presence in Africa, one of the world’s most exciting, fast growing regions.”

Robert Murray, iProspect Global CEO, added that the acquisition will enable the group to speed up expansion in southern Africa and “will offer key expertise for our globally-reaching client campaigns”.

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