DDB South Africa has lost its deputy MD, Michael Udell, and one of its two executive creative directors, Matt Ross, to King James in Cape Town.
Tag archives: alistair king
Ad award success no longer sole arbiter of agency and industry respect
The 2011 Loerie Awards are done and dusted (no pun intended), with Cape Town agencies grabbing three of the top five (first, third and fifth) spots on the official overall ranking table. Two of the three Grands Prix were awarded to Cape-based agencies.
King James makes good
King James, one of the country’s most respected ad agencies, is full of good news. The Cape-Town-based agency, named after its founders Alistair King and James Barty, has been winning business and accolades and has just moved into the stately building it bought, the historic Roodebloem Manor, in Woodstock, Cape Town.
2010 hit the reset button in Cape adland
In spite of some turbulence, post Great Recession it turns out that 2010 wasn’t such a bad year for Cape Town’s adland after all. While big account moves in Cape Town were rather limited, agencies are taking the initiative to reinvent their internal processes, in some cases shedding staff and departments, while looking for work coming out of Johannesburg or internationally.
AdVantage magazine’s execs Cape Town’s execs most admire
AdVantage magazine set out to discover which agencies, agency bosses and creative directors other Cape Town agency execs most admire. Twenty one of Cape Town’s agency leaders were invited to nominate their most admired agency in Cape Town, the most admired creative director in Cape Town and the most admired agency boss in Cape Town. Finally they were asked to nominate the agency with most success in integrating digital into its offering. Obviously nobody could nominate their own agency or staff. All the nominations were then tallied up to see who Cape Town’s adland most admire. @marklives did the tallying.
S’HOT 2011 review: Worth waiting for
The Client: Allan Grey
The Agency: King James
The Brief: Remind consumers that Allan Gray is a South African investment company that has always focused on long-term investing.
Creative Solution: The longer you give something, the more you nurture it, and the more patience you have, the more it will grow.
Creative Team: Alistair King (Creative director), Karin Barry-McCormack (Art director), Paige Nick (Copywriter)
Ad Agency business model not innovating or evolving
Loeries 2009: Apocalypse Now? With Loeries 2009 looming Herman Manson asks if the ad agency business model remains sustainable.
Giant quilt turns into a great billboard
Hot off the heals of their Gold Loerie-winning Billboard of last year in which they built a billboard out of 6000 puzzle pieces over a four week period, Allan Gray and its ad agency King James have once again pushed the boundaries of outdoor media with their latest billboard that was erected at Cape Town International recently. In line with Allan Gray’s ongoing strategy of “anything worthwhile usually takes time”, over a three month period a giant three metre by twelve metre quilt was stitched out of twenty four different fabrics, with over nine hundred individual squares. The message ‘Patience is our virtue’ is patterned into the design. This quilt was then literally hung on the billboard.
King James gets Unconventional
Taking an ad agency into media ownership might sound odd to many executives but Alistair King from King James explains it was born from a personal and professional need not to come stuck in a single medium and from frustration with the general state of the ad industry.