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[CARTOON] The Marketing Mice on SA’s public trust deficit

by Charlie Mathews. South Africans have suffered an onslaught of failure and disappointments from big public brands.

How the Eskom-Billiton pricing discount story was exposed

by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) One cannot overestimate the significance of Sake24’s recent PAIA win in the Bloemfontein Supreme Court of Appeal that forced mining giant BHP Billiton to reveal how much of a power discount it was getting from Eskom for two of its aluminium smelters.

This was a long court battle – almost four years’ long – and the outcome sends out a strong message that if a journalist – or a member of the public – requests information involving the state and a third party, the request cannot simply be refused on the grounds that the third party can expect some measure of privacy.

“The ruling shows that the public’s right to access information can trump commercial secrets,” media attorney Willem de Klerk, who represented Sake24 in the bid, told Grubstreet last week. “It shows that large corporations doing business with state entities may expect their commercial dealings to be placed under the spotlight.

‘Bring me my machine gun’ and other favourites down under

MarkLives recently featured a couple of ads by ad agency FoxP2 that originally ran in 2008 to promote the use of dairy yet still remains eerily relevant (they ‘feature’ both Malema and Mugabe). Here are three more ads, from the same agency but this time for Frisco, that could as well have been made today. One features the prez singing Julius’s favourite song, another feature that word favoured by the ruling party to tar any opposition with and the third celebrates the national treasure we have in Eskom.