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Unbalancing the ad industry

Can you have a great job and a great life in the ad industry? Maybe, Mark thinks. By Herman Manson. Reprinted from Mark magazine.

Advertising is pretty dumb for an industry that thrives on the creativity and diversity of lots of smart people, particularly when it comes to nurturing its own. Just mention “work/life balance”, a term which describes a balance between an individual’s work and personal life, and many ad agency execs fall silent. Momentarily that is, until they stumble across a “sell” soon enough.

Is working in the ad industry or at marketing agencies an awful job? Not at all. But few are playing it smart when it comes to the well-being of their employees even though the benefits of healthy living is well documented and work/life balance is far from being a new idea.

Tracy*, a young creative in Cape Town, worked in advertising for three years. At her first agency, life consisted of working overtime followed by drinks with colleagues at the bar. Taking lunch breaks was frowned upon, and if she left the building at 5.30pm she was accused of working half-days. “I burnt myself out, had a nervous breakdown and ended up in a clinic for two months,” she says. Her new employer, Ogilvy Cape Town, is an altogether different experience says Tracy, and she feels looked after.

Mark Deuze, author of Media Work, argues in an interview with website Influx Insight, “The problem is that media workers are a special breed of people – they tend to be more interested in getting their own creative voice across and receiving peer acknowledgement than securing benefits or a steady pay check. That makes them more vulnerable to exploitation (of labour), and the consolidation of agencies certainly can be understood in this context.”

What he is saying is that you are now working harder for less reward than ever. That means more stress and less time for family. It can’t be healthy.

While few agencies have formalised work/life balance policies, there is innovation in this sector. Y&R, for example, closes the agency at 2.30pm every Friday afternoon and invite speakers, artists and businesspeople in to teach staff (note: not just creatives) and keep the agency on the cutting edge of communication.

According to Mediaedge:cia’s Chief Talent Officer in the US, Laura Agostini, her company is establishing policies to support employees during the current economic crisis by offering access to a 24-hour Employee Support Programme that covers support on everything from mental health to elder care to tax advice. It has also implemented a flexi-time policy, a concierge service to collect dry cleaning, pet care through discounted dog walkers and much more. “Finding the right work/life balance is not just an employee issue, but an employer one too,” says Agostini.

Vladimir Jones, the oldest agency in Colorado, has gone as far as adopting its positioning to “An agency of exciting minds”. Company president Meredith Vaughan says work/life balance is “not just a way to prevent burnout in our often intense industry, but rather a way to truly foster creativity and innovation”. The firm allows employees time off for outside interests, whether it is training for a marathon or playing in a bluegrass band.

The secret, as Vladimir Jones and a selection of other agencies have discovered, is that it’s often the interesting things people do outside the office that fuels the interesting things they do inside.

* Name has been changed.

Herman Manson is the editor of Mark and blogs at marklives.com

Think before you print

Lowe Bull Joburg was one of only seven international agencies to win a Cannes Dove at this year’s Cannes Lions 56th International Advertising Festival.

“Printer”, the agency’s campaign for non-profit greening organisation, Food and Trees for Africa, took top honours in the “Favourite Film” category.

Filmed from above, an office printer shoots out printed pages showing aerial views of a rapidly dwindling forest. Once the encroaching desert fills the page, the printer keeps churning but nothing comes out, as the paper has run out. The tagline reads: “Think before you print”.

Football on the Coke Side of Life

The Client: Coca-Cola
The Agency: Am I Collective
The Brief: This is part of a global campaign to celebrate Cokes involvement in soccer. Cokes design agency, UK based Attik, approached Am I Collective to give the campaign an African feel.
The Solution: Am I provided the basic design elements that ultimately take the shape of the African continent. The logo is currently being rolled out across the globe at POS, on Coke cans and billboards.
Creative Team: Am I Collective

Sidestepping interconnect fees, South Africans show innovation

The South African cellular market reached a milestone of 50-milion connections at the end of 2008 – but only 68% of these represented individual users.

This is the first key finding from preliminary research conducted by World Wide Worx for its 2009 annual Mobility study.

The research shows that the average number of SIM connections, or active cellphone accounts, per cellphone user in South Africa began to grow steadily after pre-paid accounts were introduced in 1996. It grew from an average of 1 SIM card per phone user in 1997 to 1.2 per user in 2003 and to 1.47 per user at the end of 2008. The gap between users and connections is expected to continue to grow as both consumers and businesses find more innovative approaches to cellphone usage.

“This gives the impression that every South African has a cellphone, but that is obviously not possible,” says World Wide Worx MD Arthur Goldstuck, who is leading the Mobility 2009 project. “It’s become clear that many pre-paid users have a SIM card for each major network, to avoid incurring the interconnection fee charged for calls between networks. The low cost of new SIM cards – as little as 50c for a starter pack – also gives anyone the ability to have more than one number.”

The interconnect fee adds R1.25 to the cost of every call, and has prompted new approaches to cellphone usage in South Africa. Mobility 2009 will also reveal further innovative approaches taken by both consumers and business users to make their cellular lives more effective.

“UJ is so much more than just University”

The Client: University of Johannesburg
The Agency: HKLM
The Brief: This campaign was commissioned by the University of Johannesburg as an on campus/outdoor campaign to help reposition them as a place where students can embrace learning and knowledge in an engaging and fun manner that will appeal to university students as well as school leavers.
The Solution: “UJ is so much more than just University.” It ran on campus.
Creative Team: Ross Ventress (Creative Director), Rudolf Janse van Rensburg (Writer), Illustrator/photographers: Am I Collective
For more see the June issue of AdVantage magazine!

London is great ‘cept our burgers are better

The latest TV ad for Steers by King James Joburg features two friends Skyping . “The idea came to us when we were discussing how we all have those annoying friends overseas always rubbing it in about how great it is over there,” adds Mike Wilson, creative director. “But they all, to a man, really miss great SA products like Mrs Balls, Marmite, Pro Nutro, biltong and, of course, our amazing Steers burgers.”

Creative Directors: Greg Cameron and Mike Wilson

Bruce Lee 3 stopframe animation video

A short stopframe animation video promoting Bruce Lee Issue 3 due instore next week.

The Show is Over: Michael Jackson tribute ad

This tactical Michael Jackson tribute ad for South African entertainment retailer Musica was created, produced and on air in less than 24 hours by The Jupiter Drawing Room.

Creative Team
Creative Group Head – Saadique Waggie
Creatives – Keenon Daniels, Johan de Bruyn, Yumna Sadan, Shameema Isaacs
Account Management – Timothy Young, Yumnah Dawood
Production House – Masters and Savant
Audio – Big Leap

Hillbrow the new Highbrow

This range is called Highbrow and is elevating the original Love Jozi brand up a notch. “I’ve always wanted to shoot in Hillbrow – the inner city regeneration is doing so well but many people don’t know that Hillbrow is also on its way to recovery,” says designer Bradley Kirshenbaum. “With the help of organisations such as MES and Madulamoho [we shot some of the pics on the rooftop of a Madulamoho residence], the JDA and the Rea Vaya, the city seems to be coming back with a vengeance, exciting times are ahead. We may even be hanging out in Hillbrow again like we used to. This t-shirt cynically reminds us that back then, Hillbrow existed as a result of our rotten political past, so we shouldn’t dwell in the nostalgia of the old hood from the 70s and 80s too much. It will become something else.”

Other good news is that Love Jozi will soon be opening the first ever store, and its going to be in the city at Arts on Main in the new Maboneng Precinct. Opening early September.

How the crisis changed giving

CSR will become more a matter of who you are and what you do, rather than how much you give. By Mandy de Waal. From Mark Magazine Pages 14 & 15

“How do we create a way of living together on the planet that actually has a future, because the one we have right now doesn’t really have much of a future? How do we create a truly regenerative economy that, like other living systems, creates further conditions for life?”

If questions are more important than answers, then those that Peter Senge asks are the questions for our time. The top scientist and director of the Center for Organizational Learning at the MIT Sloan School of Management recently authored the best selling Necessary Revolution, a book that looks at the woes facing us and what must be done to create a more sustainable world.

This new management thinking is a remarkable departure from Nobel economist Milton Friedman who in his famed article The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Profits stated that all business needed to do was to avoid corruption and to make a profit.

It is this “money before all else” mantra that has inspired a century of greed in modern capitalism which hopefully will now expire with the current recession. What is certain is that the world will not tolerate another century (or less) of the kind of greed that has brought wide-scale poverty, environmental degradation and a consumption-based world.

The talk is no longer how to give, but how to change. In the face of this, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is no longer an off-shoot of a brand, but it must become the brand defining a new conscious capitalism that will rebuild the world rather than destroying it.

For the most part CSR has been the means of easing corporate guilt while greed, consumption and reckless business has continued unabated. That in itself has been part of the problem. It is not that business must do good; rather that business should be good: to contribute, uplift and develop the environments and communities it operates in as part of its daily operations. The change in focus here is a shift in CSR from being an adjunct to being the brand lens through which business is built.

This thinking is eloquently expressed by Tex Gunning, former president of Unilever Bestfoods Asia, who when asked whether big business could change the world, said: “I don’t want to live a life creating an illusion of meaningfulness while deep in my heart I know that every five seconds there is a child dying. None of us can pretend anymore. We cannot.”

Mandy de Waal is an Associate Editor with Mark Magazine.