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Fair Exchange: Reap rewards through inter-agency collaboration

by Erna George. Every now and then I cast my mind back to the days when I was a brand manager, and we worked with probably two partner agencies – one handling above-the-line work and the other our below-the-line activities. It was only every now and then that we made use of a specialist, such as a promotions or public relations agency.

Essentially, we would invest a massive amount of time and money to make that impactful television campaign, and all other elements flowed from this.

Fast forward to 2013 and the world has changed. Between social media, PVRs and many other distractions and channels, making that impact has become tougher. And the buzz in the marketing corridors is the need to move (quickly) towards greater collaboration and exchange across agencies.

Today, clients are looking for agency partners that can synergise with other partners. The new exchange is cross-collaboration, and the days of one agency as the only — or the core — partner is over. As an analogy, think back to when Daewoo was selling cars, washing machines and air-conditioners; consumers found it tough to believe one brand could be great at it all. Similarly, it is difficult for clients to believe that one agency can be specialists in every area.

Tech Law: Is your marketing strategy diabetic?

by Paul Jacobson (@pauljacobson) It occurred to me that what most marketers are doing is analogous to what I did for years. I see the big contributor to my diabetes onset as being unrestrained consumption. In a sense, this is what marketers active on the social Web are doing too. They work in a fascinating and engaging space and often do so with little regard to the legal consequences of their campaigns.

Mad Men to Math Men

by Herman Manson (@marklives) Mad Men to Math Men is where advertising has been heading for a while now, and the pace of transformation is only picking up Steven Plimsoll (@splimsoll), Chief Technology Officer at the WPP Data Alliance and at Mindshare Worldwide, told delegates at the recently held Acceleration Digital Ignition Symposium.

In case you don’t know, the WPP Data Alliance is a partnership between WPP companies “to connect diverse data to provide powerful, analytics-driven solutions for our clients.” This is where direct marketing meets media, says Plimsoll, who argues that the traditional adoption model used by many marketers is broken as consumers adapt communication technology at an unprecedented pace.

WPP, with its keen eye on shifts in marketing spend, and backed up by the findings of a 2012 Gartner report that says by 2017 the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) will spend more on IT than the CIO, is investing in building data partnerships, like the one recently announced with Twitter, and going into client data strategy.

For the WPP Data Alliance every consumer interaction, across the various channels they make use of, becomes an opportunity to collect data on consumers. “Insight opportunities” extend from store openings to tweets, call center activity, online ratings and reviews, media preferences and more. Data sources include traditional market research, owned activity monitoring (own website, call centre activity etc), social monitoring and media intelligence.

Marketers complicit in big data mischief

he snot really hit the fan last week when The Washington Post and The Guardian reported that the US had secret spying programs that are “tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies.”

It was inevitable that our industry’s obsession with Internet data collection would come smack up against questions of civil rights and individual liberties. But no one in the marketing or advertising industries seems to care about the consequences of our obsession with data, or the central role we are playing in this controversy.

It is an article of faith among the pundit digerati that the Internet has given us reg’lar folks more control over our lives. One of the mantras of marketing’s chattering class is that “the consumer is now in charge.” These people think that because we can tweet “the fries at Wendy’s really suck” we now have greater economic, social and political control. They are alarmingly insensitive to the trade-offs the web has presented us with.

On several occasions during the past few years I have taken the, ahem, contrarian position that not only are we not “in charge,” but the illusion that we are is masking the fact that the powerful are getting more powerful and that the individual citizen has less control than ever.

Louise Marsland & MarkLives launches TREND.

MarkLives and well respected marketing and media commentator and editor Louise Marsland have teamed up to launch an exciting new market intelligence resource to the advertising, media and marketing communications industry in Southern Africa.

TREND. brings together the research savvy of Marsland with MarkLives’ cool and sexy take on the modern advertising world. TREND. launched this morning at trendlives.info and will focus on trend forecasting, in-depth reports, insight and analysis relevant to the broader marketing industry.

The site will serve as a central curated resource for local and international marketing and media research as well as create its own unique in-depth reports that sources and charts influential modern trends marketers and their agencies need to note.

As with MarkLives, TREND. will will offer its content free of charge, and will be supported by site and report sponsors. Ornico, Quirk, Machine Agency, 60layersofcake Cape Town and John Brown Media are the founding landing page sponsors for the site.

The first in-depth Dissect report to be published on TREND. focuses on socialising the enterprise. Compiled by Marsland and sponsored by Quirk, the report, which runs to over 11 000 words, sets forth the effects of a socialised consumer base on the modern enterprise. Content is broken in readily digestible pieces for the busy executive.

Social media is not about a suite of social networks and tools writes Marsland. “It is now about the social enterprise, the brand that integrates social across all platforms of engagement. It is about living social.”

Crowdsourced recruitment hits adland as Hiring Bounty teams up with MarkLives

Agencies and marketing departments now have access to innovative crowd sourcing recruitment platform Hiring Bounty through its partnership agreement with MarkLives.com Careers.

Hiring Bounty taps into networks of friends to bypass recruitment agents and crowd-source candidates for positions in the marketing and technology industries. The sites gives a cut of the recruitment ‘bounty’ set by employers to those recommending successful candidates as well as the candidates themselves.

It incentivises friends who already know the skill sets of one another as well as important considerations such as culture fit and personality to recommend friends for jobs. It also incentivises candidates to throw their hat into the ring, since there is a cash pay-out for both themselves and their friends, should theirs be the successful application.

The service has already successfully landed hard to find candidates for companies such as Woolworths, Urbian and World Wide Creative.

MarkLives was the first to report the news of the recruitment start-up in June, and is pleased to be associated with a category disruptor. Here Greg Schneider, MD of Hiring Bounty, describes the business model and some of the success it’s achieved since its launch.

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.

Abdulla Miya: bridging business goals and communication outputs

by Kim Penstone When Abdulla Miya resigned from Net#work BBDO in October 2011, he didn’t have a job lined up at another agency. In fact, on the morning that he was due to meet with agency heads Keith Shipley and Mike Schalit to put in his resignation, he heard that his tentative plans for a new business venture hadn’t panned out. But he resigned anyway.

At the time of his resignation, he was MD of Net#work BBDO, and over the previous 14 years at the agency, had played an integral role in the agency’s phenomenal success and growth. He decided the time was right to go it alone, and announced that he would start his own strategic consultancy in 2012. He did not have a firm business plan or even one client to his name.

Maybe Miya is an eternal optimist, but he puts it down to faith. Partly external, because he is and has always been, a very spiritual person. But also internal, because after 23 years in the advertising industry, he had earned a solid and outstanding reputation as that rare breed of advertising man who could bring together the often opposing worlds of business strategy and creative communication.

Springleap – design crowd with marketing muscle

How do you turn a T-shirt company into a powerful marketing play? You provide access to your pool of 17 000 designers to brands needing beautiful and relevant content (through design) and utilise your social media skills and significant global crowd source loving fan base of course.

That’s just what Eran Eyal and his team at Springleap.com has been doing and so far the results have been positive.

The Springleap team has been proving their concept using the best possible case study – themselves – having grown Facebook their fan base 6000 to 193 000 in less than a year (it’s now closing in on the 200k mark). Eyal says at one stage he was testing 600 different Facebook ads to figure out best practice and what achieves the most success.

At its core sits 17 000 designers who submit designs to Springleap.com – these designs are then voted on by its community and as many friends as the designers can pull through their own networks to the site. The winners receive a cash prize and royalties from the resulting product, usually a T-shirt. Sales are handled by Springleap. Eyal looked at this talent pool and their social pull and realised it could be a powerful asset to activate design and brand fans.

EXCLUSIVE: HiringBounty.com disrupts recruitment industry with social power

by Herman Manson (@marklives) I often receive emails from friends with links to job posts and a note that says “this will be perfect for you” (just in case your business goes belly-up or you actually want to afford that new car – though that part goes unsaid). Greg Schneider, a rising star at digital agency Quirk, has launched a start-up that taps into networks of friends to bypass recruitment agents and crowd-source candidates for positions in the marketing and technology industries.

Schneider’s new recruitment platform, Hiringbounty.com, allows businesses to place recruitment positions on the site alongside a bounty. The bounty, should a position be successfully filled, is paid out in thirds – 1/3 to HiringBounty, 1/3 to the person recommending the successful candidate and 1/3 to the person finally appointed.

So if the bounty next to the position says R5000 the cost to client is R5000 x 3. It pays HiringBounty and HiringBounty pays the other two parties. If you applied for the job without a recommendation from friend you are set to pocket the bounty x 2 (as referrer and successful candidate).