New for Gerety 2020, is an executive jury in multiple locations globally, whose task it is to choose agency and production company of the year from their country. Jacquie Mullany, Executive Creative Director at VMLY&R in Johannesburg has been announced as the ambassador for the South African executive jury.

The Gerety Awards is the latest global advertising award programme to recognise global talent who define and refine the standards to which their craft should be held. ‘South Africa has an incredibly diverse advertising industry, well known globally for producing award-winning work. I’m really excited at the prospect of working with some of my most respected peers to seek out the best we have to offer and share it on the global stage,’ said Mullany.

In addition to Johannesburg, executive jury sessions will be held in Bangkok, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Helsinki, Istanbul, London, Madrid, Melbourne and New York. Each city will bring together some of its most respected agency and brand leaders to choose the shortlist, which will be announced mid-June. Shortlists are submitted to an international grand jury of creative experts for final evaluation. Winners are determined based on scores achieved across the board, regardless of product or medium. Entries for the Gerety Awards 2020 open globally on 1 January.

VML SOUTH AFRICA
+27115553800
www.vml.com/southafrica

According to Michael King, Managing Director of Reprise Digital, an IPG Mediabrands company, in South Africa, financial industries, especially the top insurance companies, invest more money into Paid Search than most of the remaining industries put together.

In the digital world, it’s a given that Paid Search advertising is important, but only a few industries, except the finance and eRetail sectors, are capturing the true value this channel has to offer. Most brands are missing a trick by not tracking the full customer journey.

The reason for this is because these industries track the lifetime value of a customer and not just the initial sale value. Looking at profitability from a different angle allows marketers to see the true value of a ‘new client’. Car insurance as an example is one of the most expensive keywords globally and can cost advertisers upward of R650 per click, depending on how much they’re willing to pay to compete against other insurance brands. This is an astronomical amount of money – if brands wanted to truly compete in this space, they could be spending upwards of R150,000+ a day on Paid Search alone.

So how can it be possible that insurance brands invest 30% plus of their entire marketing budget on this channel? Simply put, it’s what companies call a P-Factor or Profitability Factor. This is a simple profitability equation that allows brands to measure the value of a sale over time. Let’s use car insurance as an example – if I’m insurance company A and I spend R5000 on Google Ads today, I’ll most likely generate quite a few visitors to my website who will either complete a quote online or want to talk to a sales advisor.

As a result of the quotes generated, I may sign up a new client who would hypothetically insure their vehicle at a monthly premium of R1000. At a glance, you might say that this channel is loss-making as the amount of ad spend far outweighs the sale value, but the inverse is actually true. Car Insurance is a service that consumers sign up for on a monthly basis, which means that as Insurer A, the company will be generating revenue from the initial sale over a long period of time. This is where P-Factor comes in. This equation helps us understand how long our new customer will need to stay insured with us before we cover the initial R5K adspend.

Ad Spend divided by initial sales value = P-Factor. So, R5 000/R1 000 = a P-Factor of 5. This means that our new client will need to stay insured with the brand for five months before it ‘breaks even’ on advertising spend. If we then incorporate the fact that the average insured person stays with their insurer for 12-18 months, the profitability conversation very quickly changes to a positive one. In this example, the company would be making money from our new client for anything between 7–13 months.

Every industry is of course different with their own unique challenges but the learning for marketers has to be that the future for brands is not only tracking a customer’s journey online until the sale is complete, but tracking the customer for the entire time that they’re associated with your brand.

REPRISE DIGITAL SOUTH AFRICA  
+27728721245
reprisedigital.com

Effie Awards South Africa replaces the highly respected APEX awards, held annually in South Africa. The Association for Communication and Advertising (ACA), the official representative body for the Communications and Advertising profession in South Africa, has partnered with Effie Worldwide to launch the annual Effie Awards Programme in South Africa.  

Brands and their agency partners will now have the ability to receive global recognition for their most effective marketing and communications campaigns, with the awarding of an Effie viewed by media agencies, marketers and advertisers worldwide as a respected global symbol of achievement.

Mathe Okaba, CEO of the ACA said, ’Effie’s mission is to lead, inspire and champion the practice and practitioners of marketing effectiveness and we take great pride in hosting the first globally recognised marketing effectiveness awards programme in South Africa in 2020. The ACA has championed effectiveness in marketing and communications and the incredible work executed in our market. It is with great excitement that we officially launch the 2020 season of Effie South Africa, and look forward to catapulting our local profession into the global arena.’

Launched in 1968, Effie celebrates effectiveness worldwide with over 50 global, regional and national programmes across Asia-Pacific, Africa, Europe, Middle East, Latin America and North America. Effie South Africa joins the Effie network as the 49^th national programme celebrating and Awarding Ideas That Work. 

‘The opportunity now exists to benchmark against the most effective work from all over the world. We invite all agencies and marketers to enter the programme in order to expose and celebrate their work that worked. There is no strict definition of effectiveness within the Effie programme. Effie recognises all forms of effectiveness —awareness, sales, behaviour, etc. The determining criteria for measuring effectiveness will be considering how challenging the objectives were, and the significance of the results achieved against those objectives,’ concludes Okaba.

‘Effie is proud to partner with the ACA to launch Effie South Africa,’ said Traci Alford, President and CEO, Effie Worldwide. ‘As a global forum, Effie provides a platform for marketers to celebrate the most effective marketing around the world, while establishing benchmarks that will drive our industry forward. We welcome South Africa to the global Effie network, leading the way as our first national programme in Africa, and look forward to showcasing and learning from this year’s winners and finalists.’

Effie South African finalists and winners will receive points towards the Global Effie Index, which ranks the most effective marketers, brands, holding companies, agency networks, agency offices and independent agencies globally. The Effie Index will also determine the local rankings.

The Effie Awards South Africa Call for Entries will be made in the first quarter of 2020.  Entry workshops providing guidelines, tips on how to enter the awards, requirements, case study presentations and more will take place as follows:

• Durban – 28 January 2020 at The Hardy Boys
• Johannesburg – 29 January 2020 at Vega School
• Cape Town – 31 January 2020 at 99c

Booking will be essential for the workshops as space is limited. Email melanie@acasa.co.za or contact ACA.

ACA SOUTH AFRICA
+27117812772
ceo@acasa.co.za
www.acasa.co.za

KFC identified the need to turn the #KFCProposal story that begun at one of their stores into a positive legacy. By identifying the opportunity, they made it distinctive for their brand; they offered an experience and one could go as far as to say it was embedded into their ‘Add Hope’ initiative. Even if this was not targeted at kids per say, it still fits into that ‘bucket’, states Andile Qokweni, Business Unit Manager at The MediaShop.

This is after 8 November, where a man was spotted proposing to a woman at a KFC. The man was recorded on camera and his actions were very quickly shared on social media. The initial response to this noble action was very negative – one person on Twitter ranted, ‘SA men are broke they even propose at KFC…They have absolutely no class, I mean who proposes at KFC?? #KFCProposal’. 

But here was an opportunity for the brand to turn negative sentiment to positive because love is inherently free, it cannot be bought, sold or traded, even though the initial sentiment alluded to the fact that in modern times there’s a value associated to love. KFC as the brand to really bring all of this together, lived up to the principles above but in my opinion many of the other brands just wanted to jump onto the bandwagon. 

As soon as KFC saw the opportunity to reinforce some of these ‘love’ principles, the video went viral, and a nationwide search for the couple began with South African social media going into overdrive to find Nonhlanhla Soldaat and Hector Mkansi, the country’s newest sweethearts. Engagement offers went through the roof as KFC gave consumers incentives to help them find this couple.

McDonalds responded as the brand which ‘loves things’, offering an all-expenses paid trip to Cape Town for the Toni Braxton concert. Standard Bank offered to clear the couple’s debt – if they are Standard Bank customers. Audi offered the couple luxurious transport to their wedding destination. Puma offered clothing, Huawei gave the couple phones to take pictures on their honeymoon. KroneMCC would also ensure the newly-weds are toasted with some fine sparkling wine and many, many more brands got in on the action.

South Africans were now calling it ‘their wedding’ and by the end of the day, 30 brands had come forward to offer an additional experience for what had started as a negative tweet about proposing at KFC. So it’s clear, brands can mobilise and put aside rivalry or competition and do what is seen to be right by consumers and the general public.

This is where I’m going to flip the script a bit – at what point did this reach saturation? Was it after the tenth brand got involved, or was it after the third bank made an offer? Or maybe after the fifth FMCG brand offered the couple food? Don’t get me wrong, I would love the country and all its blue chip brands tripping over themselves to make my wedding a success, but as a marketer I did take a step back and ask some tough questions.

If I was a victim of the recent KZN hurricane and storms for example, would I not expect these brands to offer the same level of support for me and why that couple for that matter? Many South Africans will tie the knot as this is wedding season after all, so why are brands not lining up to assist them?

If we refer back to The MediaShop’s Media Landscape series where Maggie Pronto, Isla Prentis and I looked at what type of content works, we touched on the importance of relevance of content produced by brands for consumption and we arrived at five key things, which distinguish great content.

• Move at the speed of culture.
• Be distinctive.
• Offer an experience.
• Embed your purpose.
• Invest appropriately.

At the recent AMASA Awards, one of the judges, Wandisile Nkabinde, mentioned that for brands to be successful it’s not just about arriving, it’s about how you arrive. Julio Rodrigues then went on to say it’s not just about pushing performing metrics all the time, it’s not always about reach, frequency and impressions, and this is exactly how I feel about some of the brands that joined the party very late. It’s not for me to say who those brands are, but the only questions that need answering now is ‘Who is flying me to the wedding and who will pay for my accommodation?’

THE MEDIASHOP
+27112584000 
www.mediashop.co.za

Four top creatives from South Africa (SA) are amongst the 200 top creatives from 35 countries who will judge work from around the world for the One Club for Creativity – the world’s foremost non-profit organisation celebrating creative excellence in advertising and design.

The four jury members fro SA and disciplines they will judge are: 

• Bridget Johnson, ECD, The RiverBed Agency, Johannesburg (Film)
• Keith Manning, ECD, TBWA\Hunt Lascaris, Johannesburg (Intellectual Property)
• Tammy Retter, group head, Ogilvy, Johannesburg (Radio & Audio)
• Grant Sithole, CCO, Avatar, Johannesburg and Cape Town (Radio & Audio)
  

The complete list of The One Show 2020 juries can be viewed here.

Kevin Swanepoel, CEO, The One Club for Creativity said, ’The quality of jurors has long been a hallmark of The One Show. This year’s juries consist of the industry’s top tier of creative thinkers and doers from around the world.  They judge work through the lens of creativity of ideas and quality execution, and use our robust judging platform featuring proprietary, state-of-the-art voting and scoring technology.’

Work can be submitted now to The One Show 2020 at http://www.oneshow.org, deadline for entry is 31 January 2020.  

THE ONE SHOW 
oneshow.org

More and more companies from developed countries are outsourcing to South African marketing agencies to run their campaigns, due to tightening margins from competition and the increasing cost of employing local talent, says Justin Lester, owner of Ruby Digital and co-founder of Smart Marketing Podcast.

The biggest digital marketing trend we’ve seen recently is a shift by English-speaking first-world companies towards South Africa. Ruby Digital has seen a five-fold increase in enquiries from abroad over the past 12 months. Specifically, we’ve seen the most enquiries from East and West Coast America, the UK, Israel, Australia and New Zealand. 

Initially, companies from those countries were faced with two choices: they could use local marketing agencies or outsource to, typically, South-East Asian countries. Their home countries produce excellent content, but their prices tend to be exorbitant. In contrast, South-East Asian marketing companies, although much cheaper, tend to produce lower-quality output, particularly when it comes to creating good English content. These agencies tend to be found wanting when it comes to taking on more competitive campaigns.

But now these companies have a third option: working with a South African agency. South African marketing agencies offer high standards of work, but at a much lower cost – sometimes up to 50 percent less than what these companies would pay locally.

What is causing this trend?

There are multitudes of factors at play when it comes to any digital marketing trend. But for foreign companies choosing South African agencies, we can expect the causes to be as follows:

The weakening Rand

As of December 2019, $1 is worth R14,58. This time last year, it was worth R14.00. Therefore, the fact that the rand continues to depreciate against other currencies means that foreign companies can take advantage of the exchange rate, and use their higher buying power to get more value for what they spend on advertising.

Ease of communication

South Africa is located in an advantageous time zone. For example, South African agencies are able to communicate with Australian clients in the morning. Then, during the course of the day, they are able to liaise with clients in the UK and Israel, followed by American clients towards the end of the day.

Additionally, the fact that South Africa is largely an English-speaking country, and shares many cultural similarities with other Western countries means that communication is effective and both parties are able to understand each other well.

International recognition

South African agencies with international recognition will more easily attract foreign clients than those without.

How have South African agencies reacted?

South African agencies have certainly caught on to the fact that there is a large segment of the international market that they should focus on, and have reacted accordingly. Several agencies have begun to target Australia in particular, and have become quite well-established there.

South African agencies are focusing on Australia and not other countries like America, because there is a lot of saturation in those markets. There are many more competitive companies that are already established there, making it harder to gain a foothold.

There are a lot of opportunities for South African marketing agencies looking to expand their operations – though they may want to look beyond South Africa for potential clients.

RUBY DIGITAL
www.rubydigital.co.za