Luckin, who has been at the agency since 2003, says her departure has nothing to do with the February arrival from Draftfcb Johannesburg of Neo Mashigo as her co-ECD, a position she  previously held alone.

She had been considering the move for some time. “When Neo joined, it was a good thing because it meant there was someone to take over the reins. I didn’t want to leave Ogilvy in the lurch.”
Luckin was appointed last year to the O&M Worldwide Creative Council after building a reputation as one of SA’s leading creative talents. At Quirk, she will head the “Create” team with responsibility for concept, copywriting, design, art direction, programming and user experience.

She says the move to digital marketing is a natural progression that will allow her to learn new skills. “I would never have  moved to another above-the-line, traditional agency,” she says, “but I needed to see if I could create stories from the other side.”

Luckin, who served with Quirk CEO Justin Spratt on the FM AdFocus jury in 2011-2012, says she knew early last year that Quirk was looking for a creative leader. “I knew Justin would have liked me to join but I didn’t know I was the right person,” she says. “This year I took stock of what I should be doing and felt the need to move. I need to learn a lot but look forward to seeing how interactive digital can be.”

Late last year Quirk’s Cape Town agency hired former JWT Cape Town creative head Conn Bertish as its executive creative director. Spratt says the employment of traditional creative skills does not mean Quirk is turning into a traditional advertising agency — even though their skills increasingly include digital.

“More of our clients are asking for ideas that can launch across platforms,” he says.

Mpufane, who joined the agency in October 2012, says: “Jupiter has set a clear growth target beginning this year.” Besides the Disney success, it has been invited to a couple of pitches. In general, though, “there are lean pickings out there in the market”.

The agency  appointed Andre Redelinghuys as its head of strategy this month, in the latest boost to its leadership team. The former strategy director of branding agency HKLM says his new role will include new business acquisition and influence with other departments within the agency.

“We can’t continue on the same model with the ebbs and flows that agencies tend to go through,” he says. “The business needs to offer creative capital that goes beyond advertising. Strategy also needs to play a role in finding new clients.”

Apple remains the world’s most valuable brand in 2013 by some distance, with a value of US$185,1bn – though it has grown by only 1% since last year. Google improved one place to second, after growing 5% to $113,7bn. It leapfrogged IBM, which fell 3% to $112,5bn.

The rest of the top 10 was McDonald’s $90,3bn; Coca-Cola $78,4bn; AT&T $75,5bn; Microsoft $69,8bn; Marlbobo $69,4bn; Visa $56,1bn; and China Mobile $55,4bn. The biggest improvement was Visa, up 46% and six places.

MTN made the top 100 for the first time in 2012 and remains the only African brand to have dome so, Its 23% rise in brand value, to $11,4bn, was the biggest 2013 rise in the BrandZ telecom sector. According to MillwardBrown, it enjoyed strong revenue and earnings growth following a 15% increase in subscribers and a 58,5% rise in data revenue. derived from data.

Group marketing executive Jen Forrester says the ranking improvement “is particularly exciting and timely as we embark on our new vision to lead the delivery of a bold, new digital world to our customers”.

Technology and Telecom brands together make up the largest segment of the BrandZ Top 100, both in the number of brands represented and in their aggregate value, with six in the Top 10. The combined value of the top 100 brands has grown by 77% since 2006. They are now worth $2,6 trillion.

AT&T, ranked sixth in the overall BrandZ table, is the most valuable telecoms brand, at $75,5bn, followed by China Mobile, at $55,4bn. They are followed by Verizon $53,0bn; Vodafone $39,7bn; Deutsche Telekom $23,9bn; Orange $13,8bn; Movistar $13,3bn; MTN $11,4bn; MTS $10,6bn; and Airtel $10,1bn.

In the automotive sector, Toyota overtook BMW with a 12% improvement to $24,5bn, while the German carmaker dropped 2% to $24,0bn. They were followed by Mercedes-Benz $18,0bn; Honda $12,4bn; Nissan $10,2bn; Volkswagen $8,8bn; Ford $7,6bn; Audi $5,5bn; Hyundai $4,4bn; and Lexus $3,5bn.

There was no place for SA products among top beer brands. Bud (weiser) Light was worth $10,8bn; Budweiser $9,5bn; Heineken $8,2bn; Corona $6,6bn; Skol $6,5bn; Stella Artois $6,3bn; Guinness $4,5bn; Aguila $3,9bn; Brahma $3,8bn; and Miller Lite $3,1bn.

Ask Ogilvy & Mather (O&M) Johannesburg. For years, the advertising agency has collected trophies by the armful at local and international awards shows. But the pace has slowed a little recently. In 2012, it was the Cape Town sister agency that carried the O&M banner highest into battle, topping the SA Creative Circle’s annual ranking. O&M Johannesburg was third, behind TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris.

O&M Cape Town — which won most recognition for its integrated Be The Coach campaign on behalf of Carling Black Label lager — enjoyed further success last weekend when a Volkswagen SA campaign bagged gold and silver at the One Show interactive awards in New York.

Johannesburg MD Julian Ribeiro is not used to trailing Cape Town but says there is no jealousy. “There are 14 units in the O&M SA group, so ebbs and flows are inevitable. There is a sense of healthy competition between all of us but we are pleased when anyone does well.”

By O&M Johannesburg’s standards, 2012 was a relatively quiet year. Internationally, there was some success at the Clio and D&AD creative advertising awards but Cannes brought only a bronze. The local Loeries resulted in gold, but only in the TV trailer category, and for a second year, there was silver at Apex, the effective communications awards that the agency has dominated in the past.

While acknowledging that his agency’s awards flow has slowed in the past couple of years, Ribeiro says it is not a concern. “There is an element of luck with all awards. It depends on the juries and what they are looking for that year.”

Consistent success, he says, is more important. “What matters is your performance over a period of time.”

In any case, the true measure of successful advertising is its effect on the product and client. “We don’t work for an ad agency, we work for brands,” says Ribeiro. “It’s their success we are working for.”
Clients seem to be happy with what O&M Johannesburg is doing for them. Ribeiro says his agency has enjoyed annual double-digit income and profit growth every year bar one since 2008 (as with most global advertising groups, Ogilvy subsidiaries aren’t allowed to disclose figures to back up earnings claims).

What he finds most pleasing is that most growth is organic. Though the agency won the Hollard insurance account late last year, additional work also came from existing clients like Castle Lager, Philips, Siemens, Sun International, GlaxoSmithkline, Kimberly-Clark and Unilever. There was the added bonus of retaining the Cell C mobile phone account after it appeared to have been lost to a pair of Cape Town agencies.

A lot of the organic growth came from group consolidation that allows O&M agencies to offer group services in digital, public relations, social media, activation and customer relationship marketing.

“It’s the One Ogilvy concept,” says Ribeiro. “We promise clients an integrated solution. Each of our disciplines is a true specialist and must be in the top three in its category.”

He describes the SA marketing environment as “challenging” but says there is a mood of cautious optimism among many clients. “There are definitely opportunities to grow and develop. Those that do will be the ones that integrate and innovate.”

She says an investigation into transformation at Media24, Times Media Group, Independent Newspapers and Caxton revealed similar shortcomings. Last year the PDMSA created a task team to investigate transformation and possible anticompetitive activity in the industry.

Early this year Caxton and Times Media temporarily pulled out of the hearings when the competition commission launched its own investigation into industry collusion. All four media houses eventually concluded their submissions to the task team at the end of April.

Louw says a report, including recommendations, is expected by the end of June. She says: “I have no doubt that transformation has taken place but we’ve noticed a common thread with the publishers.

They performed well in externally focused BEE elements but were weaker in internally focused ones.”

There are seven BEE “pillars”, of which three are considered external. These are corporate social investment, procurement and enterprise development.

The four internal pillars are skills development, employment equity, management and ownership. “These are the areas that need some kind of new strategy,” Louw says. “One of the issues that has come up is the pace and level of transformation.”

FNB is among those to take its media planning and buying in-house. Media head Lynne Diab says the bank has been doing its own media strategy for six years. It added planning and buying in the second half of 2012. “Having innovation as one of the key drivers of our business, the in-house route has helped us build better relationships with media owners,” she says. “These have led to a better end product — better campaigns.”

Diab says the strategy has given FNB improved access to information as well as quicker turnaround times. “We interact daily with the business, which makes the communication process easier,” she says. “The possible long-term risk is that there could be an element of narrow focus as the team does not have the interaction with teams working on other clients.”

The Telesure insurance group has developed an in-house media agency, Upstream Advertising. It employs 80 people and manages R300m of annual media spend.

Agency executive head Carl Louw says that combining media spending for its brands — which include Auto & General, Budget Insurance, Dial Direct, 1st for Women, Hippo and AA Insurance — gives Telesure market advantages.

“If we appointed a media agency we would give away discounts,” he says. “We aggregate all the spending into one pool and achieve better bargaining power. Also, we are able to place each brand meticulously for the correct target market.”

MediaShop group MD Chris Botha argues potential savings do not justify the move. “They will be marginal,” he says. “The media agency model is built on bulk and economies of scale. We buy media and research cheaper because of our size.”

Some companies may take media in-house if they don’t feel they are getting value for money from their agency, he says. If agencies provide strategic insight, differentiated thinking and added value, clients won’t need to move.

RMS Media director Rob Smuts says it makes no commercial sense for a client to set up its own in-house buying and planning division.

“Beyond the added overheads, one must consider the working environment,” he says. “A  strategist working in corporate isolation may not be exposed to the blue-sky innovative thinking that a team of media specialists brings to the communication mix.”

Grey Spain made outdoor signage in which a little boy’s face stares at passersby. Only people under 1,35m tall, the approximate height of 10-year-olds, see the cuts and bruises on the boy’s face with the secret caption, “If somebody hurts you, phone us and we’ll help you.”

Parents and other adults only see the unbruised boy with the message, “Sometimes child abuse is only visible to the child suffering it.”

Lenticular printing is a technology in which lenticular lenses (a technology that is also used for 3D displays) are used to produce printed images with the ability to change or move as the image is viewed from different angles.

A report by Echo Research, commissioned by Internet specialist Howzit MSN, suggests the number of adult online readers surpassed 10m in 2013. This, it says,  is the same number of newspaper and magazine readers as measured by the SA Advertising Research Foundation (Saarf) for its All Media & Products Survey (Amps).

Both sides dispute the other’s findings. Howzit MSN GM Marcus Stephens claims the Amps measurement of Internet penetration doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. “It doesn’t measure mobile, which means that its figures for digital are hugely understated,” he says.

Ingrid Louw, CE of the industry umbrella body Print  & Digital Media SA, takes a different view. “Saarf shows that daily and weekly newspapers account for 49% of local media consumption, making them the preferred source of news and information in the country,” she says. The remaining 51% is shared between TV, radio and online.

Analysis from international business consultancy Frost & Sullivan shows that though SA has witnessed an uptake in digital media, it is not at the same level as in First-World countries.

Louw says: “The SA digital media sector has been undermined by the low penetration rate of the Internet, which stands at about 10%.”

Citing Echo research, Stephens claims measurement of print media readership — by Amps and the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) — is inflated.

“We are seeing declining circulations across publications but [Amps and ABC] show actual readerships are increasing, which I question,” he says.

Saarf technical manager Michelle Boehme says anyone using the two sources to calculate readership numbers should be careful. “These are two different sources and sometimes the time periods don’t match,” she says. “Our print readership figures are derived from a survey sampling 25000 respondents and the ABC takes data from publishers’ statements of the number of copies printed.”

Bronwen Auret, digital GM at BDFM Publishers, which produces the FM and Business Day,  says group readers are shifting online. “Print has been in decline around the world since 2005,” she says. “It is feeling the effects of audiences moving to digital options.”

She says the number of unique users on the Business Day Live website has more than doubled to 500000 since August 2012. Saarf reports that 59000 people read the daily print issue.

That’s not all good news for online publishers, says Auret. “While audiences may be shifting, I don’t think digital advertising is going to make up for the loss of print advertising.”

Figures from researcher Nielsen show digital accounts for 3% of total SA advertising spending, compared with print’s 30%.  Stephens predicts print will lose R2bn over the next three years and digital will more than triple.

New Media Publishing strategic director Helène Lindsay says in some cases digital readership of publications has already surpassed print.

“But this does not mean their print markets are migrating to online,” she says. “We have found that the readers of the online products differ from the print products, with very little overlap. We see the audience growing larger rather than moving from one channel to another.”

The SA ad industry traditionally punches well above its weight at major overseas shows like Cannes, D&AD, the Clios and The One Show — but mainly in well-established categories like TV, radio and outdoor. When it comes to digital, they mostly fire blanks — though the 2012 success of Ogilvy Cape Town’s integrated Be The Coach campaign for Carling Black Label suggests SA is learning how to use new technologies.

Part of the industry’s low success rate may be down to the idea that digital and traditional advertising campaigns need separate creative processes.

TBWA\SA group digital executive creative director Clint Bryce says agencies seeking the  “big idea” that will make their digital reputation often try too hard. The idea may be big but making it work should not be complicated.

At a Digital Media & Marketing Association seminar last week, advising SA agencies how to produce award-winning work, King James II agency cofounder and executive creative director Rob McLennan advised creatives not to start off by trying to win awards through big ideas.

Besides “scam” ads created specifically to win awards but of little or no value to clients, “the campaigns that genuinely win are simple ideas for big brands and those that change society, regardless of the medium”, he says.

Few know better than Ogilvy & Mather Johannesburg executive creative director Fran Luckin, who recently served as a judge in the integrated and earned media category at the 2013 D&AD Awards and will judge the outdoor category at Cannes. She says entries can’t  rely on fancy packaging if the idea is weak.

“Simplicity is the thing that always wins,” she says. “If you try to make something out of nothing, it becomes very obvious.”

Quirk Digital executive creative director Conn Bertish says while simplicity is the key, a good idea needs to take advantage of as many different platforms as possible to reach its true potential. “Things are changing all the time and categories are blending together,” he says. “This allows for more innovative work. To win bigger you have to do more with your simple idea.”

“We’ll open offices in East and West Africa in the next few months,” he says. “We are talking to several people in Nigeria and Kenya and want to be a dominant player in those markets.”  Cape Town will continue to serve Southern Africa. The three centres will be the base for services in their regions.

De Kock says Saatchi will begin by offering group affiliate status to local agencies, then buy into them.

“We are taking a medium-term approach,” he says. “We will start with affiliates but intend to invest in these offices in the next year or two. In the long term we want to have a hand in running them. I believe you must have a stake in the business. You can’t hold hands forever.”

In a reversal of the usual routine, he says the new agencies will probably start life as digital agencies, then bring in traditional advertising skills later.