The revolution will not be televised; however, it will be broadcasted on youtube.

With the daily rapid growth of digital media, the advent of technologies like PVR decoders, ipod jacks and playstation 3’s/xbox’s that aid in avoiding all the “intrusive” advertising messages that pester you like a highly persistent Indian salesman. Is traditional media still having the impact that AMPS and all the other statistical bullshiters claim that these mediums are having? Because surely with the advancement of all these technological innovations that more and more people are getting access to, the number of people who are exposed to advertisers’ messages that are transmitted through traditional channels must be decreasing? 

If we had to assume that the numbers of germane consumers reached are decreasing, why the hell do we still get media planner’s bullshitting their clients into believing that their media selections, which for obvious reasons, more often than not don’t include digital media, are reaching their target audiences? Why are media planners still selling their crap using textbook words like “frequency” which translated into consumer speak, basically mean, seeing the same annoying advert every time you channel hop, or even seeing that ad that you love so many times that it literally starts annoying you like a song that you once loved but now loathe because it’s been overplayed.

Then on the other hand you have traditional media owners raising their prices supposedly because of inflation to reach an ever declining audience. Is this whole advertising game a bloody scam that the likes of Google and their precisely measurable methods of marketing communication are exposing?  Maybe the question to ask here is, will media planners, traditional media owners and that pesky crap they call amps still be relevant in a couple of years time when Generation X will be running this country?

I strongly believe that should we not see any progressive innovations from these people whom I’m convinced are colluding and coming up with nonsensical statistics and creating buzzwords for their own survival, there will be a large number of "advertising people" working at a Pick n Pay near you, scanning bread and milk while reminiscing about the days of the notorious 16.5% and telling their supervisors about the importance of  “reach, frequency and “lifestyle” appeals in advertising. While real marketers present real reports with real figures and not statistics to their smiling clients, of the outcomes of a recent campaign that entailed ppc and adwords.  

lazy marketers!!!

The marketing and communication industry is filled with lazy, non-lateral thinking marketers, yes i said it and this is why. Globalization and technological advancements has lead to market fragmentation and a paradigm shift in the manner in which marketing communications should be looked at i.e. mass has shifted to individual, marketers know all this yet they do not implement it because it requires a great deal of work so, they opt for the easy way out, which by the way, is slapping together a RAMS, TAMS, AMPS stats list and colourful pictures and vuala!!

Let me begin by making reference to multi-national brands such as L'Oreal who used to use standardised method of marketing (same strategy in different countries), which is the use of a beautiful looking celebrity such as a Halle Berry for instance who waffles on about what's the next best thing to use to hide your TRUE self according her. This strategy always worked for L'Oreal, and probably still does which is the root of the problem, because it always worked and probably may still work, marketers see this as a safe strategy to use and no longer see the need to innovate, if it isn't broken why fix it right? WRONG!!!
The application of this mentality leads to nothing else but laziness except in instances where one tries to polish a turd.

Innovation in this day and age is key and being ackowledged by the 'prestigious' Loeries without giving Mr Client a proper return on investement is as futile as trying to modernise a fossil. L'Oreal's answer to globalization is the use of a localised marketing strategy which is the use of SA's Halle Berrys which still fails to communicate to a Mam' Khoza from next door about her 'shubaba' skin problems. L'Oreal, like many other brands' marketers are too lazy and maybe even incompetent to create marketing solutions that specifically cater to ever changing markets hence they stick to the safe strategy because they have a frame of reference that it works, 'if it isn't broken why fix it huh'.

Marketers aren't the only one's to blame, Mr Client is also guilty. If you (Mr Client) is targeting black people living in skwatta camps, ensure that your marketing strategy shows that you know it by communicating in their language in their environment which leads back to the point of relevance Blank Thoughts covered extensively. Looking at SA's marketing industry, the lack of innovation is so monumental it fails to justify the amount of talented people we have in the country. Sunsilk recently did a big campaign using two deceased people namely Lebo Mathosa and Marylin Monroe, who if I may ask, within Sunsilk's target market believes that the above mentioned celebrities used Sunsilk? Even so, why use people who are no longer alive???

If anything, I say it shows just how DEAD the creatives who did it and MR Client who approved really are. Let us not just use the word innovate, let it manifest in our marketing and advertising strategies so that we can show the world how Mzansi do!!!!

When is it time to call it quits?

The marketing communication industry, generally perceived to be an industry that has young people running the show, because of the creativity and relevance that it demands is actually overridden with old men and women from yesteryear, some are even well past the recommended age for retirement. Before you start making a noise about the vast “experience” that these individuals have, ask yourself…is that experience still relevant today? Many things have changed and continue to change daily from the days when “LSM’s” were seen as a breakthrough in the communication field by segmenting consumers according to their material possessions and salaries that they earned, the days when having a washing machine placed you up there with the Jones’. Today some people are trying to keep up with the Mofokeng’s while the Jones’ fade into obscurity due to their ever declining collective disposable income, but guess what? The old guard present in the marketing communications industry seem oblivious to this fact and many other consumer trends in the country, as they carry on persuading brand custodians to throw large sums of money on campaigns directed at the wrong people at the wrong time using the wrong channels, and getting the wrong results, much to the brand custodians dismay who entrusted the old guard with millions of rands to use his/her experience in generating the desired consumer response, which more than often, is to get the consumer out there and buy something. 

The brand custodian is then presented with figures and percentages of the amount of “awareness” that the campaign has generated, however, the brand custodians handlers are not really concerned with “awareness” because that is not the mandate they had given to the custodian, they, in a nutshell had requested higher profit margins, a return on the investment that the custodian had been entrusted with…the poor custodian now has to go to the executive committee or the board of directors and sell them the same story that the old guard has sold him, how people are now more aware of the brand than they were before, how advertising and marketing communication efforts usually take about 6 months (or any other number they think of) to generate the desired result, or how the budget allocated was not enough to penetrate the market effectively etc etc. 

The old guard and his team of “experts” will continue to come up with “creative” concepts that are nothing more than pretty pictures really, pictures and words that will not elicit any action from consumers because they are either irrelevant or because the majority of the market that they are targeted at has long been saturated and cannot be milked anymore. The cycle continues on and on because of  “experienced” marketing communication practitioners and brand custodians who make foolish decisions that ensure that they never really meet their KPA’s but are retained as custodians of the brand for Lord knows why. The old guard continue to be “experts” in a market that they are experiencing for the first time like everybody else, being exposed to new mediums which they more often than not are resistant towards, because their divine “experience” has taught them about print, radio, tv and outdoor. 

Yes experience can help in certain instances within this field, but experience is too overrated in this industry, If we were talking about engineering or financial sciences it would be a different story. What we are essentially talking about here are a group of people who work as a team to get pretty pictures out to the public or businesses usually with the ultimate objective of generating an uptake of something. It doesn’t take 10 years to train a person how to write properly and effectively using different tones and appeals etc for different different mediums including audiovisual productions (at least it shouldn’t), It doesn’t take 20 years for a person to know how to scribble scamps and later transfer their “creativity” onto a computer screen (at least it shouldn’t), It doesn’t take 2 years for an individual to learn how to distribute relevant information to relevant people within a company (at least it shouldn’t) It doesn’t take more than a year for a confident individual to be able to act as a company interface for its clients and subsequently put to paper what the client wants. 

Managing a business is probably the hardest part, but depending on the individual, managing finances, relationships, people and expectations shouldn’t take that long either. So, this brings me back to my question, when is it time to call it quits in this industry? When is it time for the old guard to hang up their pencils and “mice” , How do you tell the old guard that they have lost touch with the reality that currently is, and their ideas are stale and fast becoming irrelevant, considering that most crappy campaigns are reviewed by the old guard before they are let out of the system. 

The most ironic part in having the old guard who might think that their concepts can still do the job is the fact that, most marketing communication efforts are not targeted at an age group that they can relate to, excepting for products like Viagra, Elvis Presley ring-tones, Golden oldies’ cd’s and the like, so! Considering that marketers just don’t talk to the old guard, wouldn’t it make sense if the old guard relinquished their positions once they cross the rubicon and took up something like writing for columns in advertising and marketing magazines about how things have changed since their heydays when marketing communication was about drugs, alcohol and Ziggy Stardust. These columns will enable the old guard to talk about their expertise in the industry, compliment and criticize other people’s creative executions and tell us about how consumers buy things because of “emotional appeals” (consumers buying dishwashing liquid because they are emotionally drawn to the brand etc etc), these publications will become the domain for old guards when being put out to pasture, at least they will still be able to provide commentary that they deem as invaluable, It’s just a simple question..when is it time to call it  quits?                    

Mr Client: Please read between the lines…….

Advertising, Media and the Marketing industry at large is a competitive field where those that are good at selling ideas are always a step ahead from their peers. Media and especially media sale is a ruthless facet of the general marketing sphere – Media sales resonates the saying “the survival of the fittest”. Advertising on the other site is about selling ideas and concept. The greatest bull-shitters are the one reaping great rewards. Marketing is all about out moving units.

I’d like to tie or marry the link between the Advertising and Media, how that has subsequently ended up producing campaigns that don’t make much sense expect to those who conceptualized or sold the media space behind the campaign. But where is the client (marketing bloke) in all the mist? The process of linking marketing, media and advertising is quite an easy one, marketing bloke briefs the advertising and media blokes, the advertising and media blokes draft what is often referred to as a “strategy” and revert back to client (marketing bloke) who if happy, approves the concept.

In more ways than not, the “strategy” document is a self-serving concept filled with bullshit aimed at sweeping client off the feet. The media bloke is just there to sell his media space; he’ll say anything to achieve his course. A canny marketing bloke should be immune to such practice; he should see a bull-shitter a mile a way. Unfortunately this is not the case in most instances. When I see a TVC, I sometimes ask myself – how on earth did the marketing bloke approve of such bullshit? Which brings me to my nucleus point regarding this post?

Shell Petroleum is known to have a PR crisis of greater proportion in the Niger Delta region but for some reason, the marketing head-honcho at Shell Petroleum were sold a sponsorship deal on MTV base, Shell even copyrighted the programme dubbed “making of the video”. This sponsorship campaign started with a teaser when gun were blazing in the Niger Delta region. My initial reaction was what’s the logic behind sponsoring the “making of the video”? But then it hit me that this was a classical case were the advertising and media bull-shitters saw an opportunity and pounced on it. The opportunity? Shell has a PR headache, so let’s find a quick fix for them. Let’s sell them a sponsorship deal on MTV and hopefully the problem will go away. Because client (the marketing bloke) couldn’t bear the excruciating Niger Delta headache, he opted to buy the quick fix in the form of “making of the video”.

Six months later the advertising bull-shitter will commission his research bull-shitting buddy to run a post-campaign research on the “making of the video” campaign. The research bull-shitter will survey a sample of 100 people in the Niger Delta and up weight his sample to 100 000, then the research bloke will release his so-called “findings” on a platform provided by the media bull-shitter. The “findings” will read something like: 80% of the people in the Niger Delta voted Shell as their first choice Petroleum station, bear in mind it’s 80% of 100 people “up weighted” to represent views of 100 000 people.

After the research is conducted and published, the bull-shitter will use the “making of the video” and it’s “results” as a bullshitting mechanism often referred to as a “case study” to further bullshit other unsuspecting marketing blokes.

As the marketing bloke you must read between the line before you approve a campaign that will leave a great dent on your marketing budget and yield less admired results on your bottom line. In closing “read between the lines, you might be able to tell who’s trying to sell you a lie” Author Unknown.