You have developed an online web conferencing and meeting tool. You need to build a brand for it and get people to use it. Fair. You then shoot an ad campaign to show how people can use the technology. How about a storyline about how a bunch of disparate people can come together to solve a problem … in Africa. That’s the GoToMeeting brand strategy across digital and traditional media with this ad campaign above.
I know we’re already seven days into March, but visual artist Michael Paul Britto’s request for ‘an extra day to be black’ in mainstream media outlets, still holds. (For those in the dark, he is ripping into Black History Month.)
The Rupert clan of South Africa owns a few businesses that make a lot of money: Cartier, Dunhill, Montblanc and Piaget, etcetera. Their fortunes began with Anthony Edward Rupert, who could not finish medical school “due to lack of funds,” but thanks to apartheid magic (and business smarts) he began manufacturing cigarettes in his garage. He eventually built this into the tobacco industrial conglomerate The Rembrandt Group, which made him a billionaire. In the late ’60s (think the time of the Rivonia Trials), a scion of the family purchased the L’Ormarins wine estate in Franschhoek in the then Cape province. The family’s fortunes continued, with the addition of another wine estate, La Motte. One could say that Franschhoek’s current stature is probably owed in large part to the efforts of the Ruperts to promote the district as a little corner of France, replete with cheeses, fruits, herbs, mushrooms, nuts, olives, coupled with the exotic appeal of the bush: ostrich and crocodile steaks. Of course, there’s also the poorly paid coloured labour, but that’s not in brochures intended to lure visitors.
No, they’re not Africans. It’s just a great TV ad campaign for The Guardian newspaper.
Pepe Reina, Liverpool and Spain’s national team goalkeeper, is a spokesperson for the Spanish multinational insurance company Groupama Seguros. In a new TV ad, Reina lands up in a jungle where a blackfaced chief claims Reina as his wife. You get the joke: it’s supposed to be a play on Reina’s last name which translates as “Queen”. Haha. After complaints about its offensive nature, Groupama Seguros pulled the ad, but denied it was in any way offensive. As OBV reports, Groupama Seguros released a statement saying it “… does not consider that this advert contains either offensive nor any discriminatory content.” As my man Davy Lane asks: “It’s all animals and cannibals and wild shagging in Africa. Racist, small minded fools all over the shop in Spanish advertising and marketing circles? A reflection of racist Spanish society?” It also makes you wonder what goes on in the club house at Liverpool Football Club. I’ll refrain from commenting on the comments on Youtube where viewers are asking how this could be racist.
That was the question asked to people in Cape Town, South Africa, by the Prison Broadcasting Network (PBN), “a non-profit rehabilitation programme that teaches prisoners the skills to become employable when they are released.” I found the responses unsurprising. But the video has a twist.
The new Reporters without Borders’ campaign reminds me of this International Society for Human Rights campaign (same ad agency?), but their appeal is clear. And so is their message. More here.
Surfing as leisure and a sport has historically been associated with whites in South Africa, though that’s not necessarily true in practice. In fact a few documentary films (for example, “Taking back the waves“), the new feature film “Otelo Burning” and the work of photographer Richard Johnson (scroll to the right) have pointed to a long tradition of surfing among young black people in South Africa’s coastal cities.* So, I always wondered when some creative director would pounce on the idea to commodify that history and struggle for recognition. Well, Cell C, a mobile/cell operator has done so now as part of its “Be Now” campaign targeted at young people with an ad focusing on”budding” semi-pro surfer Avuyile Ndamase from the Eastern Cape province.
* The recent documentary, “Whitewash,” interrogated similar themes in surfing in the United States.
In what some see as innovative advertising and others as a publicity stunt, a South African burger chain has a bright idea for a campaign to woo blind customers: serving them burgers with words in Braille spelled out on their buns with sesame seeds.
