According to Kevin Bierman, Head of Digital Signage Solutions at Moving Tactics, technology moves really fast, so retailers and franchisees need to make an effort to keep up.

In order to ensure that you have the most up-to-date digital signage network in place that offers the best in technology, content and features, you need to ideally replace the network every three years, once the equipment warranties have expired. The positives are that you will experience minimal downtime and be able to introduce the latest technological advancements such as self-service touch kiosks or weather-based menu boards as part of your new network.

Digital signage networks, like any other technology investment, need to be maintained and updated. It doesn’t take long before systems start looking outdated and performance suffers. But how often should digital signage hardware be replaced?

A digital signage network can be compared to a retail store. It looks and operates at its best when it first opens but with time, and as technologies and trends change, the retailer needs to update his/her offering by introducing new products, promotions and up-to-date infrastructure and technologies or the store will start looking dated, perform poorly and put customers off. An old digital signage network will also impact on the bottom line as its look and feel is linked to the brand as well as to advertising sales and promotions. 

Replacing a digital signage network every three years is costly, especially for smaller businesses such as independent retailers and franchisees. Another negative is that once your equipment becomes too outdated, it’s much more difficult to get back up to speed.

What options are there? Other than laying out a large sum of money to purchase your digital signage network outright, more and more businesses are choosing to finance their technology investments to preserve cash flow.

‘Over and above the explicit advantages of effective cash flow management, you also get to have up-to-date technology that is always under warranty and replaced every three years,’ said Sam Dippenaar at Moving Tactics’ Finance Division.

MOVING TACTICS
+27118070094 
chris.day@movingtactics.co.za
www.movingtactics.co.za

Copywriter Carina Coetzee and Art Director Amri Botha, both from 99c advertising and communication agency, will represent South Africa at the 2019 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, taking place in France from 17 – 21 June. This follows their powerful ad winning the Cinemark Cannes Young Lions competition.

According to UNICEF, half of the world’s teens experience peer violence around school, and about one in three students aged 13-15 have been involved in physical fights.

To help address this, the 2019 Cinemark Cannes Young Lions competition asked entrants to create an ad that tackles the issue and inspired an effort to make schools a safer place for students.

The competition was open to creatives under 30 across the country, who were given 48 hours to film, edit and produce a one-minute commercial for UNICEF South Africa, using the hashtags #I’veGotYourBack and #ENDviolence.

Coetzee and Botha’s treatment is a depiction of a young boy preparing for school and wondering whether his day would be a good day. ‘Will they teach me a lesson I’ll never forget?’ he wonders. ‘You’ll know by my marks.’

The 99c team’s ad for UNICEF calls for an end to the epidemic of violence in South African schools and their video commercial about violence in schools won the Cannes Young Lions competition.

Coetzee and Botha will fly to France where they will again race against the clock to fulfil a new brief. This time, they will compete against the best young talent from around the world in the Film Category of the Cannes Young Lions competition.

Botha said, ‘We are extremely excited and honoured. We really enjoyed the challenge, since it’s a cause we really believe in – for a brand that does such amazing work. We’d like to thank Cinemark for this huge opportunity and we hope to make South Africa proud in Cannes.’

UNICEF South Africa Chief of Communication and Partnerships Sandra Bisin said that the competition, a partnership with Cinemark, was an excellent way to help address the problem of violence in schools. ‘Through this joint campaign, we are encouraging young people in South Africa to raise their voices and to tell us how they are working together and what solutions they are using to #ENDviolence in and around schools once and for all,’ said Bisin.

Cinemark (+27 11) 700 5446 www.cinemark.co.za

99c Advertising info@99c.co.za www.99c.co.za

Jennifer Tietze, who works in Brand Solutions at DCMN, suggests that you think of your brand as an iceberg. There is a small part that is entirely visible, but the larger part is hidden below the surface.

If you’ve thought of a great idea for a business and have done initial market research in the ideation phase then you should feel comfortable that you can start building a minimum viable product (MVP). Although this is the phase where the real hard work begins and you need to clearly define your business strategy, it is important to remember that you also need a brand strategy that is closely linked to that business strategy.

The visible part is your overall visual identity and your company name and the invisible part is your brand identity. It might seem less fun to start with the invisible part, but strategically you need to define your brand identity (e.g. your vision and mission) to inform your visual identity.

Having a well-defined brand strategy early on (and including as many stakeholders as possible in those decisions) will act as a roadmap for growth and will prevent you from having to spend a lot of money and time later redefining your brand. 

But what is a brand strategy? Branding is so much more than putting your logo on things. According to Simon Sinek’s famous model called ‘the golden circle’, and a theory that DCMN’s Brand Solutions team believes in, it is important to think about the WHY, HOW and WHAT – this is a good starting point to understand where you are going with your brand.

Why are you doing what you do? What is your purpose? Having a true purpose is relevant to the company’s overall success. HOW do you achieve your goals? WHAT is your offer to the customer? What problem do you solve?

When thinking about the ‘how’ and ‘what’, make sure you know your unique selling point (USP). Know who your competitors are and what they are best at, understand your target audience and their needs, think of the emotional and rational benefits your brand offers and find the clear point of difference that meets the customers’ needs. These answers can all be gained from doing proper market research and competitor analysis in the early stages of your business and also understanding your own product or service and its benefits to your target audience.

Vision: describe where you are heading

A vision statement is a clear and inspirational roadmap of your company. It sets a defined direction. It is a catchy, one-sentence statement that clarifies the ‘why’ of your company. What are you trying to achieve? If everything goes according to plan, the vision is how your brand will have changed the world. Make the vision as short and clear as possible, be ambitious and focus on success, make sure it’s future-oriented and keep it specific to your business.

Mission: define how you reach your goal

A mission statement focuses on today and what the organisation does and how you do it. Your mission statement drives the company, it is the core of the business, and from it comes to your objectives and finally, what it takes to reach those objectives. It can also shape your company’s culture. Keep the Mission short and concise, be specific, focus on the customer and align with core values.
 
Brand values: what do you believe as a company?

Values should answer the questions: what do you stand for, what do you value most and what do you believe as a company? The brand values are at the core of the brand and can influence other elements of the visual brand identity.

Make sure your values are memorable, meaningful, actionable, unique and timeless.
 
Brand personality: put yourself into your brand’s shoes. The brand personality is the set of characteristics that are attributed to a brand. It gives an answer to the question: ‘If your brand was a human being, how would you describe him or her?’ The brand‘s personality drives how the brand looks, acts and sounds and makes your brand unique. It attracts the target audience and creates a connection. Limit the number of characteristics that best describe your brand to no more than six, be unambiguous and align with the brand values.

Tone of voice (TOV):  this will inform all written copy

The ToV is the expression of your brand’s unique personality and values. We know that the same thing can be said in so many different ways, so clearly defining your TOV will set a framework for how you communicate with stakeholders (what words and phrases you use, in which style you use it, etc.). By promoting consistency, it helps to maintain a high quality of communication. ToV contributes to differentiating yourself from your competition and building relationships. Make sure the ToV reflects your values and personality, use unambiguous and actionable terms to define your ToV and draft examples.
 
Brand name: one of the most important decisions

A name can be descriptive, evocative, invented, lexical, acronym, geographical, contain the name of a founder, etc. When choosing a name, consider that it is (almost always) for life and it needs to work in the future too. Also, do your homework before deciding on a name – check domain availability and make sure the name isn’t already registered. Keep in mind that certain names have specific associations among your various target groups and cultures and the name should also be internationally suitable. And equally important: be distinctive to be memorable.

Colours: don’t underestimate the psychology of colour

Colour increases brand recognition by 80%, and 84.7% of consumers cite colour as their main reason for buying a particular product (University of Loyola, Maryland study). Think about the following: what personality and/or values do you want to express? What kind of feelings do you want to evoke? What are the trends in the industry and how can you be different within the known visual codes that come for specific industries? 

Shape

Similar to colour, shapes have a psychological effect. Something as basic as logo shapes can convey emotions and each shape triggers a different emotion. Colour can also amplify the effect of the shape. These are examples of associations that your customer can have with different shapes:

Round – soft; positive emotional message; community, friendship, love, relationship and unity and commitment.
Rectangular – stability and balance; safety; strength, efficiency; comfort; professionalism, boldness.
Triangle – strength; speed; direction and movement, substitute for letters ‘A’ and ‘V’; science, religion and law.

A brand is more than just a logo. Everything you communicate and display to the audience, even if you don’t consider it consciously to be ‘branding’, has an effect on your brand. Your visual language needs to reflect the identity and core of your brand. It is very important to know your competition as well as understand your target market. Always know your why and make sure you stand out.  In short, do your homework properly in the early stages of your business so that it can be your roadmap for future growth and success. 

As you move to the next stage in your start-up journey, consider how you will incorporate your brand strategy into the communications and marketing strategy that you need to develop next. Keep a holistic view of your business strategy and understand which marketing activities fit in where.  

DCMN South Africa www.dcmn.com

Bradley Cooper, Technology Editor for DigitalSignageToday.com, says that dynamic content has the potential to engage audiences in a deep way. This is after Jetstar, an airline operating in Melbourne, Australia, tested out dynamic content with a Digital Out-of-Home campaign managed by JCDecaux.

Jetstar deployed displays in Melbourne to track user’s eyes to deliver content, and dispense dream vacations. This campaign had an extra layer of interactivity as it invited customers to look at certain parts of the screen, for a chance to win vacation packages.

The displays pulled in audiences using the line, ‘Your eyes could win you a gift’. The audience could stand on a backlit section on the ground and the display would show a quick set of instructions, like – removing hats and glasses. The instructions also featured a pair of ‘googly eyes’, which would respond to customer’s eye movements.

The display would then show four images from destinations around the world. The display would slowly zoom in on whichever image the customer was looking at, and would potentially reward customers with a gift card.

This article was sourced from: www.digitalsignagetoday.com

According to Anne Dolinschek, Founder and Chief Strategist at Nfluential, influencers play an integral part in a brand’s reputation as well as creating awareness and in some cases sales.

If you are a marketer who expects influencers to participate in campaigns for the product alone, unless the said product is of considerable value, ask yourself if you would offer the same compensation for a radio or TV spot? The fact is, influencers are just another marketing channel to reach target markets.

The myth that influencers, unless they’re macro or bigger, should work for free is still making the rounds. This might have been true when influencers first got on the scene, but it’s a ridiculous notion in this day and age.

Back in the day, brands would send a couple of desk drops (products) to bloggers or influencers and their brand would be all over social media. Unboxings were a big deal a couple of years ago. Now of late, only certain niches still do unboxings, but most have found that their audiences aren’t as interested in unboxing videos as they are in actual reviews or just hearing more about the product.

Although desk drops have their place, especially to introduce new products or keep brands top of mind with influencers, they don’t cut it anymore in terms of getting them to be part of campaigns. Fair enough. Influencers are part of a brand’s marketing team for the duration of campaigns, they create content to subtly promote products and services (which isn’t free and takes time); and, if chosen correctly, they speak directly to target markets. That type of marketing is priceless.

Why then do some campaigns fail and sometimes marketers feel less than impressed with the money they spent on influencers? The key is selecting influencers that are right for the brand and who will be best suited to achieve campaign objectives. These influencers need to share brand values, already like a brand’s products or services or be a voice in the industry in order to be authentic.

So often brands are blinded by the wrong numbers when it comes to choosing influencers. They want those with huge followings, no matter what their campaign objectives are. Numbers can be deceptive. I would like for brands to shift away from this mindset and start becoming obsessed with engagement numbers and actual, not perceived, influence.

Macro and mega influencers are great for creating awareness, but we find that they don’t have highly engaged audiences, which means that their followers see brands on their timelines, and that’s where it stops most of the time. Nano and micro influencers, even though they have smaller followings, are much better to drive brand love and purchase consideration because their followers and social circles trust and value their recommendations and opinions.

Truth is, if the right types of influencers are used in the right way, they can bring immense value to brands. They can be the difference between consumers loving or hating a brand or choosing competing brands; and thus, they deserve to get paid.

NFLUENTIAL
+27109002021
www.nfluential.co.za