by Herman Manson • Tags • Page 12 of 17 •

SA agency helps reverse milk category decline in Nigeria

by Herman Manson (@marklives) Here is a South African ad agency with just about its entire business sitting in Nigeria. Leftfield has some bragging rights for bagging (several jono swanepoeltimes) the advertising account of Nigerian dairy giant FrieslandCampina WAMCO – worth R100 million.

FrieslandCampina WAMCO (with its Peak and Three Crowns milk brands) is the Nigerian affiliate of dairy cooperative Royal FrieslandCampina of The Netherlands (with an annual turnover of 9 Billion Euro).

Leftfield founder, Executive Creative and Strategic Director, Jonathan Swanepoel (or just Jono in the office), has had quite a storied career in ad land, including a stint in South East Asia where he joined Leo Burnett, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, as ECD. It’s here where he helped the agency pick up the regional dairy account for Friesland Foods which saw it produce campaigns for markets in Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia and helped it grow from 45 to 150 people in three years.

Swanepoel built his reputation in the emerging markets of Asia and when he returned to South Africa he launched Leftfield with the FrieslandCampina WAMCO business. He was surprised to have to fight for the business only six months later in a competitive pitch but managed to retain it. Leftfield recently again successfully defended the account – now worth a R100 million – beating several well established Lagos based agencies.

MarkLives refused media accreditation to The Loerie Award shows (again)

by Herman Manson (@marklives) MarkLives (or to be more precise, me) have been refused media accreditation to the award shows at the 2012 Loerie Awards.

Lebogang Mohaule, Media Assistant at The Loerie Awards, confirmed that no accreditation to the two main award events would be forthcoming. Mohaule offered a single seminar pass for the rather grandiosely named International Seminar of Creativity taking place on Friday 21 September at Cape Town’s City Hall instead. I would also have access to “online press kits & official image gallery.”

Mohaule claims the Loeries “are following the same accreditation process used by the Cannes Lion Festival of Creativity” in which accreditation “is not based on the type of media you represent, rather [on] the planned media coverage.”

“Because we now receive more applications that we have availability, we have to determine the most suitable accreditation for each application,” wrote Mohaule. “If a media plan is not deemed of sufficient value, we do not provide accreditation.”

Kate Wilson of Women’s Health: “I’m not building a magazine brand”

by Herman Manson (@marklives) While her rivals are seeing circulation declines Kate Wilson, editor of Women’s Health SA, just saw the title’s total paid circulation rise 8.4% year-on-year to reach 78 791. Women’s Health has now overtaken both Cosmopolitan and Glamour’s total paid circulation figures.

But Wilson isn’t building a magazine brand, she says, instead she is building a multi-platform content brand. In fact the Women’s Health SA launched a website in the country before the physical magazine arrived and has built various digital content modules into the Women’s Health brand strategy. Extensions like DVD and booklet cover mounts often draw from other aspects of the business (so a booklet might contain extracts from a book you get to order from the publisher). Next year will see events drawn into the mix.

Of course the brand could also draw on the visibility of sibling Men’s Health which Wilson says helps double the facings of for her magazine.

But ultimately it is the service journalism in the health and wellness field particularly that has near universal appeal. Wilson says she won’t apologise for the ‘layer of superficiality’ in women (or anybody else) wanting to look their best. For Wilson looking your best translates into feeling your best and health, nutrition and weight-loss are all issues we have some control over in a time of great economic uncertainty.

Women’s Health also encourages its resident experts and columnists to maintain media visibility and this network keeps reinforcing the Women’s Health brand where-ever they go.

Brand Journeys: MWeb – not quite ‘just like that’

For many people MWEB is still the big black box, which it launched in 1997, the same year the business was established by MIH Limited (a Naspers company). The big black box, in case you don’t get it, was a box, and black, and offered wary South Africans everything they needed to connect to the Internet via dial-up modem, with the payoff line “Just like that” (I still hear the finger snap in the background).

The commercial Internet was new, exciting, and big business was getting in on the act. The first dot com bubble had yet to burst and MWEB was spending large swathes of money buying up rival ISPs before its 1998 listing on the JSE.

Today it is a friendly consumer brand wholly owned by Naspers. Its pay-off line has changed to Connect & You Can to reflect the growing acceptance and integration of the Internet into daily lives. It serves a user base of over 300 000 subscribers (which is not that much higher than figures available for 2005 – although it has had success in converting many of those to ADSL) of whom more than 200 000 sits on ADSL. They consume 4.5 petabytes (4,500,000,000,000,000 bytes) of bandwidth per month.

Video interview site Adlip relaunched, signs FNB as co-developer

by Herman Manson (@marklives) Adlip, the advertising industry site known for its video interviews with creatives and industry executives, has received a major upgrade after owners John and Sonja Culverwell inked a sponsorship and co-developer deal with banking group FNB.

The revamped site is positioned as a gateway for consumer engagement on advertising created and flighted locally, as well as a go-to resource for those interested in insights from senior marketers, brand owners and creatives involved in advertising communication.

Adlip launched three years ago after a conversation between John and Sonja on the lack of video interviews, and the word from the proverbial horse’s mouth, on John’s favourite sports websites. The conversation soon turned to the ad industry, in which both are employed, and three glasses of wine later a business was born.

Agency strategy insight: Managing 100% growth over 9 months

by Herman Manson (@marklives) You’ve just doubled your revenue over a nine month period and grown your staff by 60%. For any ad agency that is a tall order. Now you have to ensure the market doesn’t perceive you as having grown too fast, you need to convince existing clients that the attention they are receiving won’t diminish and that the core of senior agency personnel won’t be over-stretched, all while joe publicplanning new business units and international expansion.

The team at Joe Public are juggling all of the above, with some success it would seem, while remaining true to their people centric growth philosophy. It’s a philosophy that have taken the business to new heights, as their growth figures show, in a tough market, and made them stand out in an industry where most of the recent buzz has centred on Cape Town agencies.

Joe Public MD Gareth Leck says this year has been a break-through year for the agency after it won the Jet ATL business earlier in the year. The agency name also keeps popping up on shortlists for important pitches.

The agency is managing the rapid growth through owner managed subsidiaries, like its brand and design studio, Shift, launched in January. It already employs a staff of 10. The agency has a stake in the business, but the culture remains entrepreneurial, and the team manageable in size. Similarly its BTL specialist agency, Ignite (which employs 8), has signed up clients such as such as Anglo American, SAB, Colgate Palmolive, Foodcorp, Jet and Unilever, and also houses a team of ten.

The agency blueprint that rocked the ad market

Two years ago the scene was radically different for Mike Abel, who had just returned from a stint in Australia, to start his own agency. As any agency person departing that market for these home shores will tell you, the market instantly starts talking tail between the legs, didn’t cut it, running for home wounded stuff.

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