by Johanna McDowell. NEW YORK CITY: Day 2 of the 2013 AdForum Worldwide Summit started off with a taped message from Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP in response to key questions we were asking regarding the WPP group, as well as the potential impact of the Publicis Omnicom Group merger.
Tag archives: native
Green Sky Thinking: Slow moves from fast fashion
by Colwyn Elder (@colwynelder) The recent Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh calls to question whether the sustainability movement has achieved anything at all. That such a tragedy can – and did – happen in these times of social audits and supply chain monitoring seems astounding.
Breaking now: WPP buys NATIVE, joins agency to VML network
by Herman Manso. Digital agency NATIVE, one of the last major independent digital agencies in SA, has been bought by WPP.
Saving NATIVE
by Herman Manson. NATIVE is correcting course after facing some difficult challenges following its entry into the market.
Rebuilding business trust in ad land
Arctic Circle, the maverick Cape Town agency run by Reghard Goussard, positions itself as a navigator in the changing economic and social contract brands are facing, promising to find a path out of the communication morass many brands and their agencies face today.
This under the radar agency famously lost 19 of its 20 retainers several years ago, only to rise again and reinvent itself, transforming from a design to an advertising and then a brand agency. Today it’s a business solution focussed agency with creative and production as value adds, says Goussard.
Goussard says even within the industry he is positioned as a business man rather than an ad guy, focussing on the business procedures of building a brand, and employing multi-skilled individuals with backgrounds in business rather than traditional agency people. Goussard says the role of his agency has evolved to a point where it is getting paid to source and translate market intelligence rather than just create ads.
The rise of Machine
So there is this online media sales house right, small fry really, just one guy selling space on a website at a time when internet advertising was fairly undeveloped in the South African market. It’s not really even a sales house, more like a sales guy with a bit of ambition.
The geeks have the floor
The fourth annual Bookmarks Awards, the digital industries awards evening and back-slap, was a vast improvement over last year’s chaotic event (read Award-show behaving badly), when several hundred hangers-on crashed the awards evening and the MC Don Packett lost control and his cool.
Gloo eyes expansion to Middle East
Digital agency Gloo is seeing budgets dedicated to digital going up by as much as 50%, says Gloo ECD Pete Case, as corporate South Africa keeps shifting budget towards digital platforms. And it’s going towards more than marketing in its traditional sense, says Case, who cites Spur as one client investing in digital as a means to manage brand material going out to franchises.
CREATIVITY interpreted by 10 ‘younger’ shops
AdVantage decided to give 10 ‘younger’ agency shops an opportunity to portray their interpretation of creativity in advertising today, by giving each one a letter from the word ‘creativity’ and asking them to portray it, on a first response basis… Visually. Graphically. Through words. Whatever. Carte blanche…
Jason Xenopoulos wants to win the advertising war
Jason Xenopoulos recently re-emerged as an important player in the SA digital arena through his role in facilitating and leading the merger of Brandsh, Stonewall+ and Cambrient,to launch Native.