By Adam Wakefield
Proceedings were opened by Association for Communication and Advertising SA (ACA) CEO Odette van der Haar, who said the idea for the Master Class emerged from
Apex Awards, which is “a process that enhances collaborative relationships between client and agency during the compilation of an entry process”.
“Today we start with six captains of industry, thought leaders, talking about a very specific discipline,” Van der Haar said.
Journalist and media personality Jeremy Maggs, who said the over 100 attendees were about to experience a “warp speed brand MBA”, acted as facilitator, with the first speaker being director of media and digital insights at consultancy Millward Brown, Monique Claasen.
Claasen took the audience through the journey she had gone through as digital advertising and the tools used to measurement it evolved. What Claasen’s experience taught her was three lessons, which were:
- "Not everything that can be counted should count”;
- “Not every online result is necessarily driven by online advertising”; and
- “We measure digital in the short term but we very rarely look at digital as a long term brand building term.”
Following from these lessons, as a rule of thumb and the essential point Claasen emphasised, when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of advertising, in particular digital, what really mattered “in any campaign or measurement metric is the purpose of the creative and the objective of the campaign”.
Enver Groenewald, CMM director Africa at Unilever, took the stage next, with his presentation, “#thumbsup”, and covered thoughts on building brands in a world they cannot control and how brands cannot become invisible and irrelevant.
Groenewald compared the “good old days” of advertising, where everything was predictable and marketers could understand where the audience was going to be at a given time, to today, being digital mobile, which Groenewald called “the greatest equaliser and disrupter that the world has ever seen”.
“People are simply no longer where we need them to be, when we need them to be there, doing what we need them to be doing,” he said.
The modern environment was unpredictable, and to help makes sense of this world, Groenewald talked about five rules of thumb”
- The big dogs don’t rule;
- Stop, collaborate and listen;
- Be relentless media agnostics;
- Go back to basics; and
- Content is king. Context is queen
Next was Ivan Moroke, the CEO of strategic insights firm Co-Currency, who up front noted how the acronym VUCA was his favourite, because it explained the challenging environment that brands do business in, standing for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous.
To face this uncertainty, strategy is critical.
“We all love brands that are well executed, but especially when they win in this kind of environment, we admire them even more,” he said before noting that in the story of David versus Goliath, David won that duel because he had a clear strategy.
David knew about the density of the rocks in his area, thought about his opponent’s weaknesses and, even more importantly, leveraged his own strengths, being agility and nimbleness.
He then quoted Sun-Tzu from the Art of War, stating; “Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat”. This offered a useful comparison to the noise people endured from brand marketers on a daily basis and brands who were dying a slow death because they were executing with tactics in mind instead of a strategy.
“Strategy is about making connections and at the heart of strategy is creativity,” he said. It took a lot of creativity to bring all the data and insights together and summarise them into a creative brief.
Alistair King, chief creative officer and co-founder of the King James advertising agency, followed. He espoused the importance of surprise in advertising, with it being the one word “that you actually amplify when you say it. It’s a word that polarises everyone”.
The best advertising in the world did that very well, kept its audience in suspense until it offered that release at its climax.
What bothered him about the state of the industry at present, a “great contradiction”, was that “we tend to celebrate anyone or anything that defies convention and bucks the trend”, but day-to-day the industry gravitated to their comfort zones.
“We’re an industry that is grappling with what we do. We’ve built in the mechanisms that fundamentally make us ploddy. We think we can go half way to brilliance,” King said.
“In no other creative industry is process so engrained and institutionalised.”
The very best ideas were the ones that crashed in and took everyone by surprise. They were never assembled but rather conjured. King noted how certain brands put their best creative work online, while labouring with standard fare in traditional forms of media.
“Why is some of the best ideas taking place outside the system and not inside the system? Maybe something is wrong with the system,” he mused.
The second last speaker was executive business coach Dawn Klatzkow, who spoke about how contact marketing can trump content marketing.
Using several case studies to emphasise her point, Klatzkow said the first step was relevance, where that experience needed to be relevant in the moment. It was about ensuring that the client leaves with more knowledge than they arrived with, and associated that with the brand in question.
Second was the art of conversation, because if you can get your client talking, you were receiving valuable feedback and interacting with them, making the experience more memorable.
The other two facets were ensuring a true brand experience and getting the client to believe that the product is not for other people but for them.
“To win the conversion to sale battle, you need to turn your brand promise into a meaningful, engaging brand experience. Make contact. Listen, learn, engage,” she said.
“If you don’t’ offer the consumer memorable, meaningful engagement, they will not chase your brand but more importantly they will not allow you through that overload of content into their hearts and minds.”
Last but not least, there was Lögn Falsk, a designer from Switzerland who headed up a company called Invision.
Falsk spoke about how modern design was awful, that being a designer never stopped, and that designers should be central to the creative process instead of just executing it, with Falsk pointing towards Apple’s constant revisions of the iPhone as an example.
He then showed the crowd a video, before revealing what he claimed to be the most beautiful design in the world, the Lope, a small, smooth shaped circular device with a gentle gradient.
When later fielding questions from Maggs, Falsk argued that aesthetics came before functionality, that the Lope was so beautiful it would just sell itself, and that it was no good having something functional when it was “ugly as sh*t”.
Asked by Maggs what Lope’s actual function was, Falsk obfuscated, stating “it is inspiration”. Upon a few of his questions being ignored, Maggs promptly and bluntly told Falsk to get off the stage as he was adding nothing to the morning’s session.
However, Maggs called Falsk back, the two shaking hands as their scheme began dawning on the audience. It turns out that there is no person called Lögn Falsk or Invision or a device called Lope, rather an invention of Joe Public. It was all a demonstration that “if doesn’t work, it won’t work”, and won't sell.
The audience stood up the applaud the short con,for lack of a better word, that Maggs and Falsk pulled on them, ending in rousing fashion what had been an excellent session for those in attendance.
Given the success of its first edition, the second session would be eagerly anticipated next year.