By Kerryn Le Cordeur

Nazeer Suliman, Microsoft consumer and online lead, welcomed delegates, saying that Click to Connect was a celebration of the past twelve months – a year in which Microsoft’s alliance with Kagiso Media saw the launch of Howzit MSN, which has become the number one portal in South Africa as a result of its relevance, content, integration and ease of use. He noted that Howzit MSN’s vision is to change the online world for both users and marketers, and said that brands must embrace digital to fully engage with consumers. With this in mind, he said that the conference’s presenters would offer perspectives and best practices for the ‘hottest’ online trends and insights.

First up was Nitzan Tal, entrepreneur and former MD of BidorBuy.co.za, who shared the BidorBuy success story. He began by stating that in 2011, the site has 700 000 registered users and a market capital of R450-million, and feels this is because he started with a plan to be number one in the market, which only has space for one successful player – if you can get good service from one provider, why would you look anywhere else?

Taking delegates on BidorBuy’s journey to success, Tal explained that he put his target of being number one into play in November 1999. However, he also put smaller targets in place along the way, with the first being to reach 20 000 registered users by 14 February 2000. Looking at the distribution of the number of visitors to the site over a 24-hour period, he noticed that the peak was between 08:00 and 09:00, when people had just arrived at work. To catch these users and more like them, Tal decided that making use of radio would be most effective, as the same users would be travelling by car to get to work before 08:00. So Jeremy Mansfield performed a live read on 94.7 Highveld Stereo, and although he made several errors the first few times he read the ad on air, BidorBuy still saw a significant increase in users. Thereafter, other radio stations wanted a piece of the action and offered Tal good deals for live reads.

Tal also explained that email and banner advertising was used because as a website, BidorBuy was just a click away from these calls to action. And, while he had originally shied away from TV advertising, e.tv also gave him a good deal, which saw him paying R200 000 for 600 slots of five seconds each. He mentioned that this was enough time to put across a simple message that, for example, TVs are now available on BidorBuy.co.za. It was also a simple message that Tal elected to include in the billboard campaign, because he noticed that text-heavy billboards were impossible to take in as a driver.

All this communication resulted in significant results for the company. BidorBuy.co.za hosted successful and innovative online auctions for the likes of Siemens, Gold Reef City and Netcare, which resulted in the company being awarded two Apex Awards in 2002 for the value it provided advertisers, as well as for its use of media planning, which saw it being 14 times more cost effective than its closest competitor.

Next up was Ian Drummond, sales manager at DigitalMark, who stated that the world is evolving, and DigitalMark and Microsoft Advertising offer possibilities to connect with consumers in unique ways, in areas where they are engaged, to drive brand awareness and direct response. Howzit MSN has allowed for South African brands and marketers to operate in an innovative way in our market, by offering opportunities to create emersive media experiences on the Howzit MSN portal, as well as to ‘take over’ the Howzit MSN home page, which allows for brand dominance. Brands can also make use of the portal to run interactive competitions, and can even take advantage of the social aspect of the portal – Windows Live – as a means to interact with users while they’re communicating with friends, thus promoting viral marketing. This is particularly beneficial for brands as Howzit MSN is the largest portal in South Africa, with a significantly higher click through rate than any other site. Drummond noted that Howzit MSN is more than just a digital portal, it’s about people and companies who refuse to stop growing.

MSN executive producer for the EMEA region, Alexandre Michelin, addressed delegates next, looking to the future of digital media. He said media is increasingly digital, connected and fragmented, meaning that connecting with consumers is much more complex, but also much more exciting. Advertising is now more than simply a 30-second ad, and emerging ad models, such as online videos, mobile ads and targeted ads, are growing.

So there’s a new world of opportunities, said Michelin, with social networks having changed the way we communicate and new devices creating new opportunities to engage with consumers. He feels that portals such as Howzit MSN are still relevant in this new world, because they help consumers make sense of an increasingly complex world, allowing them to aggregate multiple tasks and overlap better content, search and social networking activities. From a marketing point of view, it allows advertisers to connect with large audiences (reaching 46 markets in 27 languages and a total of 450-million consumers per month), who can be targeted depending on which area of the portal they’re interested in and already engaging with. Michelin said that MSN provides a ‘glocal’ experience, being a global provider of local programming and combining original and licensed content in differentiated user experiences, and it wants to be everywhere, connecting the people.

Nausher Rahman, digital strategist at Net#work BBDO, shifted focus slightly to look at creative agencies and their digital futures. He began by showing a clip from BBC Horizons in 1964, where Arthur C Clarke predicted the future surprisingly accurately. However, Rahman said that he can’t predict the future and would instead look at some of the current trends, because how we approach these will dictate how successful we are in the future.

Rahman gave the example of Michael Jackson’s death, which first broke on the pop star’s website, saw Wikipedia edited thousands of times while details remained unclear, resulted in Twitter crashing and saw online sales of his albums soar. He noted that 20 years ago, this would have been very different – we would have had to rely on traditional media to source and verify the story, and music sales would likely have been lower because it would have taken much more effort to drive to a music store and purchase an album, and the momentum would have been lost.

So, the challenge for media players and marketers now is to realise that radio, TV and print are no longer good enough on their own. In 60 online seconds, there are 79 000 new Facebook wall posts, 510 000 new comments and 700 000 Google searches, and next year it is predicted that the collective online population will be storing information equating to 1.7 zeta bytes; so there’s no question that online is the place to be to speak to consumers. And, with increasing technological sophistication, it is more possible than ever to speak to and engage with them in a crafted and targeted way to meet their needs and add value to their lives – which is necessary considering the increasing fragmentation of media, meaning there are more eyeballs on more media for less time; it takes more than just a quirky marketing message to retain consumers. Rahman said that the digital challenge is for creative agencies to become idea agencies and conceptualise channel-agnostic ideas for delivery on multiple platforms.

Gloo Digital Design’s executive creative director, Pete Case, took over from Rahman to discuss ‘creating cut-through and engagement among the growing noise of the internet’. He said that although we don’t have big budgets or enough bandwidth in South Africa, a lot is already happening in the digital space, and that quality is more important than quantity – meaning that a few high-impact ads are more effective than many mediocre ones. What is most important is to create a relevant message, targeted at a relevant audience and to use relevant measurement tools to evaluate the results.

Case shared some examples of good local work on the Howzit MSN portal, including MWeb’s Spam Filter, which showed a video of actors dressed as a porn star, 419 scam and poker card seemingly trapped behind a glass barrier when users moused over the ad block; and the launch of the BMW 5 series, which showcased the innovative features of the car by, for example, turning the screen dark and picking out the faces shown on the site to illustrate the car’s night vision ability, which makes the driver aware of pedestrians in the dark. Case said that these examples show that a lot of what we think is ‘make believe’ is already available if we find the right partners.

To end off Click to Connect 2011, Neil Garner, Microsoft’s digital marketing platform group SME, provided a glimpse at where we’re heading, using words such as engaging, dynamic, personalised and integrated. He said that a website is now a web channel that reinforces what your business or brand is about and therefore needs to perform and be attractive and compelling. This points to the need to consider customer experience, targeting, engagement and the social lifestyle of your target consumer, and above all, to keep it fresh. He ended by saying that the Middle East and Africa is a hotspot of digital and mobile growth, and asked delegates where their businesses fit into the equation and what they’re doing to improve their position.

Following the conference, Garner; John Western, manager of the digital marketing platform group – Africa; and Felix Honigwachs, product marketing manager – South Africa, all from Microsoft, hosted a roundtable discussion to explain the use of Microsoft’s SharePoint software for brands to create interactive websites that can be updated easily according to consumer needs and changes to the brand. This is important to keep the brand fresh and continuously use digital as a means to communicate effectively with consumers.

There’s certainly a lot happening in the digital space in South Africa, and Click to Connect 2011 shared tangible and relevant ways to leverage it so that we no longer have to look internationally for trends and best practice, but have the tools to reach the top ourselves.