Tag archives: telkom

Media Future: Switchboard in your pocket

New services from Neotel and Vodacom bring closer the ideal of bringing together a landline and mobile number, writes Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee).

It is one of the great tragedies if telecommunications in South Africa that the number of landline phone users in the country has declined every single year since the beginning of this century. From a peak of 5.5-million users in 2000, it declined to below 3,9-million at the end of 2012. Telkom has always refused to acknowledge that there is a direct relationship between this slide and the fact that line rentals have been increased every single year since 2000.

There are other factors at play as well, of course. During this period, the cellphone user base has exploded from around 5-million to 40-million South Africans. Conventional wisdom, for those of traditional bent, has been that the landline is the first choice for making calls, because the cost of a landline call has always been below half that of a mobile call.

That has changed, though, as mobile call rates have plunged and per-second billing has become common. Now, it is a fairly easy decision to dump the landline and only have a mobile phone as a home number. After all, it can be carried everywhere the user goes.

(Not quite) Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios: Eish! Telkom – what a headache

The scene opens in a futuristic type tunnel, where nattily dressed man steps out from a computer generated symbol that appears to be part of a logo. As he starts walking closer towards the audience he’s saying: “When it comes to staying in touch, staying in one place isn’t an option.”

There’s a network of neurons adjacent to him that glow, and almost appear alive. Words flash in Google-esque type frames and a dynamic red orb appears and rotates around the man, who’s wearing glasses because he’s intelligent – you see? But a T-shirt under his casual suit which means he’s smart, yet accessible. Trendy, yet timeless.

The erudite protagonist continues amidst orbs that become liquid, and then immediately resume their more firm form: “Wherever your day takes you. From talking business to catching up on the home front, you need all your devices – laptop, desktop, smartphone and tablet – to work together. Keeping you connected – anytime, anywhere. It’s not complicated. It’s the journey to convergence.”

If you don’t know which brand this ad belongs to, would you be able to guess?

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.

New normal quite good at Y&R

by Herman Manson (@marklives) One year ago Y&R looked like a mess, at least from the outside. No they won’t say it, but after the exit of Frasier Lamb, and the disastrous non-communication strategy it employed, coupled with a mini-guerrilla war inside the agency that was playing out quite publicly, the broader perception on the state of the agency wasn’t good. And in this industry perception counts for quite a bit.

The agency brought in as CEO Andrew Welch, a brand expert from Landor Associates in London, to set things back on track, and working closely with ECD Graham Lang, the agency has been reorganising its business to the extent that it recently landed the Telkom account, meaning it now handles two of the big 5 advertising accounts in the country (the other being Pick n Pay).

Welch, who joined in May a year ago, quite likes the new normal at Y&R, having helped the agency transition to what he calls Y&R 2.0.

Considering the internal goings on at Y&R at the time, bringing in somebody with an outside view was probably the best thing the agency could hope to do. Welch realised the need for change, while also acknowledging the positives built up over the past 35 years by the company, if the business was going to go to the next level. It needed to expand its strategic thinking, create more compelling creative and transition from ATL to through the line, says Welch.

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