by Herman Manson • Tags • Page 11 of 17 •

The embedded Agency

by Herman Manson (@marklives) The founders of ad agency Derrick, Livio Tronchin (ex-Jupiter Drawing Room Cape Town), Mark Stead (former CD at KingJames RSVP) and Myles Hoppé (former brand manager at the company behind the Joule), late last year packed up their office and moved in with the launch team of money management service 22seven.

The brainchild of Christo Davel, best known for his work on 20Twenty, the ground-breaking online bank that folded alongside Saambou, the Derrick team had been commissioned to move into the new start-up for a two week stint that made them feel like part of the start-up (and worked them just as hard!) rather than an agency apart.

22seven needed things to happen fast, in real time, and the procedures and processes in place at ad agencies was going to be a hindrance. So it all got tossed out the window. And while it was an exciting ride it did highlight vulnerabilities on both sides of the client/agency divide.

After group buying shake-out CityMob changes direction

by Herman Manson (@marklives) CityMob, the group buying site started by three entrepreneurs in Cape Town in early 2011, has made a significant change in direction as the shake-out in the group buying market continues.

Although profitable at the time the trio – Luke Jedeikin, Claude Hanan and Daniel Solomon, had decided to move away from the mass discount, quantity over quality focus in much of the group buying space. As their competitors closed up shop, including the Naspers backed Dealify and the Avusa backed Zappon, the CityMob founders had already identified their key differentiator and were planning the relaunch of their business as an online design retailer specialising in ‘flash sales’ (time-limited sales).

It was a natural evolution for the business which had specialised in sourcing high quality deals with top brands in its group buying days. Self funded to date, it didn’t have a massive database of users as some of its competitors had, and very little marketing budget, so all that was left was to compete on was product.

The entry of Groupon into the South African market shortly after the launch of CityMob helped the team up their game and taught them so hard business lessons as well, says Jedeikin, the MD at CityMob. As questions were raised as to the sustainability of the group buying business model, the entrenchment of Groupon as the dominant player in the market and deal fatigue starting to set in amongst businesses, CityMob needed to not only differentiate itself but also needed to find a position with a much higher barrier to entry, hence the move into selling products rather than vouchers.

Amarula – the elephant in the global liqueur cabinet

by Herman Manson (@marklives) Amarula, the cream liqueur owned by Stellenbosch based Distell, has in recent years emerged as a global brand name that is achieving ongoing growth in numerous key markets including Brazil and Angola. Few consumers would guess that the brand launched in 1983 as a clear spirit with an alcohol content closing in on the 40% mark.

Distell was looking for indigenous ingredients with which to compete in a market which had just gone crazy for fruit flavoured liqueurs which ranged from strawberry to peaches to litchi. It picked the fruit from the Marula tree. The clear spirit was of middling success.

Six years later the cream liqueur we know today was launched. The lower alcohol content produced a softer taste and opened it to a wider audience. By 1991 it was being exported to the Netherlands and given an international brand focus. Today it’s exported to over a 100 markets.

Drinks International, a magazine devoted exclusively to the global spirits market, this year ranked Amarula as one of its fastest growing global brands at a time when rival Baileys (the biggest selling cream liqueur brand globally) experienced “sluggish growth” as did the number two cream liqueur brand De Kuyper which experienced a decline in its main US market. The Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay triangle makes up its second biggest market for Amarula after South Africa and is followed in turn by Angola.

Value of mobile overestimated in the short term, underestimated in the medium term says marketing technologist

by Herman Manson (@marklives) South African born eMarketing technology specialist company Acceleration (not to be confused with Acceleration Media) recently made international headlines when WPP Digital announced it had acquire a majority stake in the business.

The company, launched in Cape Town in 1999, had expanded to offices in Buenos Aires, Dubai, Johannesburg, London and New York and employs 160 marketing technologists. A hundred of them sit in Cape Town. Audited revenues for the year ended 31 December 2011 were US$16.8 million (R141.45 million calculated on an exchange rate of R8.42 to the Dollar).

Initially Acceleration started as a media planning and buying business but thanks to an early relationship with ad server DoubleClick got into the technology solution supplier business while also building a strong knowledge base in analysing and interpreting data. Today the business works not only with Google DoubleClick, Test&Target and are a global platinum Adobe partner

Services on offer include analytics and business optimization, management consulting, marketing campaign support, outsourcing and system integration. For publishers the company offers advertising system architecture, advertising system implementation and integration and related strategic and technical services. Their client list includes The Economist, Sky, UEFA, Fox News, AT&T, Safeway, Standard Bank, ABSA, the Mail & Guardian and many more.

The media business, known as Acceleration Media, was spun off in 2005 in reaction to major media agencies investing in digital capacity and sold to Kagiso in 2008.

Richard Mullins had opened Acceleration’s Johannesburg office in 2000 and today serves as Managing Director, Middle East & Africa (MEA) at Acceleration.

Acceleration opened in Dubai four years ago and it’s become a big growth market for them says Mullins. This is because most major companies active in the Arab world has a presence there. In Africa Kenya and South Africa are the major markets.

The ugly truth about advertising (as told by David Nobay)

by Herman Manson (@marklives) After all the rah rah of the last couple of weeks around the annual advertising backslap it was nice of David Nobay, Creative Chairman at Droga5 in Sydney, to sit us all down and share some of the harder truths of advertising.

He had five of them in fact.
1. Not all clients want great work.
2. There are too many of us.
3. We lost our exotic
4. We’ve forgotten how to sell
5. We reward mediocrity

Chris Moerdyk eat your heart out. As everybody grabbed for their iPhones to check in on Twitter and see which ECD would be first to denounce Nobay an ‘enemy of the creative industry’ the man himself happily droned on in the presentation that made the seminar worth its 500 bucks.

That would be the grandly named International Seminar of Creativity hosted by the Loerie Awards in Cape Town City Hall as part of Creative Week.

Nobay, noting an arrogance in the trade when it comes to ‘creativity’ and ‘advertising,’ or at least what creative types in advertising consider creative work, says clients often have practical reasons for not implementing your potentially Loerie winning idea.

This is also the problem with award shows said Nobay – they oversimplify what is considered ‘creative.’ Awarding winning work has become a matter of looking at a piece of work and having an immediate reaction to it before moving to the next piece.

“We are in this business to make money,” Nobay told his stunned audience, “Or we would all have become artists.” Great work, according to Nobay, is really a moving target, isn’t really tangible and lots of clients are running businesses in maintenance mode, while ‘award winning creative’ has become all about the new.

Creativity isn’t an advertising ghetto

by Herman Manson (@marklives) It all started well before the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival became the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. It was probably inevitable – advertising has spent the past two decades evolving at such a rapid pace that what we thought of as ‘ads’ then certainly won’t hold ground today. The ad industry solved it by replacing the word ‘advertising’ with the word ‘creativity.’

With ads no longer du jour industry award shows are positioning themselves as being about ‘creativity’ that’s lead by ‘creatives’ producing great ‘creative thinking’ and big ideas. Marketing, advertising and creativity have been nicely bundled together and not only changed our lingo but also excluded a lot of stakeholders in the process.

Yet communication today is about a lot more than a Creative Director’s definition of creativity. It’s very much about speed, authenticity, information, accessibility and a host of other factors.

Neil Parker,writing in Fast Company, notes that it’s “a truism that making a brand succeed today requires a bazaar-like variety of skills, that go way beyond strategizing, copywriting and art directing. You need product development, coding, social, customer service design, internal culture transformation and a raft of other crafts… Which means the industry has a problem in its structure, not just its name.”

Radio not converting on air audiences into online audience

In light of the recent online radio listenership scandal MarkLives wondered how offline radio stations are viewing internet radio. We caught up with Attila Bernariusz, divisional head of Kagiso Digital, for some insight into where Kagiso sees online radio headed. Kagiso owns majority stakes in Jacaranda FM and East Coast Radio, minority stakes in OFM (Free State), Gagasi 99.5 (Durban) and Heart 104.9 (Cape Town) and an economic stake in Kaya FM (Johannesburg).

MarkLives: Are all your stations streaming online?
Attila Bernariusz: Yes.

MarkLives: What value and functionality does digital streaming add to radio brands?
Bernariusz: With 20% of Jacaranda’s online streams originating from outside of South Africa’s borders, digital streaming broadens the stations reach. With 93% of Jacaranda’s online visitors also listening to the station via another mechanism other than online, digital streaming broadens the stations frequency with its core listeners.

MarkLives: How are you integrating social media into your offering?
Bernariusz: Readers are able to share Jacaranda’s website content socially. Jacaranda’s DJs are able to post content to Jacaranda’s social pages. Jacaranda launched Ja.fm. Ja.fm uses crowd sourcing to allow online users to vote songs up and down the Ja.fm playlist, thereby determining which songs play next – enabling full participation from the audience.

MarkLives: Your digital radio audience is still quite small – what are the barriers to mass adoption and when do you expect them to be overcome?
Bernariusz: Most radio stations in South Africa have not been able to convert more than 10% of their on air audiences into online audience (online audience divided by on air audience). Of their total online audiences they have converted, not all of them listen online. The challenge is access to the internet, and the cost of doing so. As more South Africans start going online (for more than just email and chat (BBM, WhatsApp, Mxit, etc…)) so too will radio stations grow their online audiences.

SA EXCLUSIVE: Euro RSCG network rebrands as Havas Worldwide

Havas is rebranding its Euro RSCG network, including its agency in South Africa, as Havas Worldwide.

The Havas group will now operate under two primary brands, Havas Media for its global media agencies, and Havas Creative for its communications agencies.

The 316 Euro RSCG offices are all renamed Havas Worldwide. Euro RSCG South Africa will now become Havas Worldwide Johannesburg, Euro RSCG 4D South Africa will become Havas Worldwide Digital Johannesburg and Euro RSCG Worldwide PR becomes Havas PR.

Pendoring Awards more competitive than ever

by Herman Manson (@marklives) The Pendoring Awards, established in 1994 to promote and award Afrikaans language advertising, is coming to the Cape, one of the two provinces in South Africa where it is spoken by the majority of residents. It’s been warmly embraced by the city and its ad agencies.

The Pendorings have joined Cape Town’s Creative Week and the award ceremony takes place the Friday before the Loerie Award ceremonies (which happens on the Sat & Sun evenings of Sept 22 & 23).

Pendoring General Manager Franette Klerck says the move to Cape Town has reenergised the award show which has been run as a Section 21 (not-for-profit) company since 2010. This year saw over 500 entries – a jump of 40% on 2011. Entries from ad schools increased from 62 to 94 this year while entries from agencies jumped from 283 to 384.

Most categories saw increased entry levels although numbers for Outdoor were disappointing, Klerck admits. Digital entries grew well and, in a departure from judges comments on the crop reviewed in 2011, were commended for a dramatic increase in quality

SANEF statement on Loerie media accreditation issue

MarkLives doesn’t normally publish press releases in its main content feed but since this joint statement by SANEF and the Loerie Award relates, at least in part, to the issue of limited media accreditation that was initially raised on these pages, we are making an exception.

The statement, reprinted in full below, follows a complaint to SANEF by BizCommunity.com on the matter of media accreditation to the Loerie Awards, and the terms and conditions attached to it.

MarkLives had previously raised the issue of the partial accreditation of its editor, Herman Manson, which we felt was the result of an unfair and biased accreditation system that was applied with no consistently (some journalists had to submit a ‘media plan’ others did not), and was open to abuse to discriminate against specific journalists. Our case is set out here and we stand by it.

MarkLives welcomes the announcement that the Loerie Awards will be revamping their media accreditation procedures for the 2013 event. We have serious reservations about how the process was handled this year and any improvement that makes the current opaque procedure more transparent is positive news and a step in the right direction.