Ban on booze ads ‘will cost SABC R400m’

Acting CEO says an outright ban on alcohol advertising on television and radio is one of the biggest risks to SABC’s revenue

THE cash-strapped SABC stands to lose R250m-R400m if a total ban on alcohol advertising is imposed by the government, the broadcaster’s acting CEO Robin Nicholson said yesterday.

"An outright ban on alcohol advertising on television and radio is one of the biggest risks to SABC’s revenue," said Mr Nicholson. "It’s a significant part of our advertising revenue."

The SABC has warned the parliamentary portfolio committee on communications that such a ban would see the SABC lose about 8,5% of its advertising income. The SABC is the only public broadcaster in the world that has to rely almost exclusively on commercial revenue to fund its operations, with 80% of its revenue derived from advertising and 17% from licence fees.

A discussion document being circulated among the departments of health, social development and trade and industry, contains various proposals aimed at reducing alcohol consumption. These include limiting trading, a ban on sponsorships, higher taxes and a ban on advertising.

The SABC’s financial problems have occupied headlines , with the broadcaster indicating recently it did not intend to borrow more than the R1bn it received through a government guarantee, after a R1bn loss in the 2008-09 financial year. The broadcaster will still have to shed 699 out of 3699 jobs in order to streamline the organisation and cut costs, according to reports.

Mr Nicholson was recently asked by Parliament to name the top 20 risks to SABC revenue. "Obviously there were the normal ones like risk to market share, the decline of advertising and threats like mobile advertising, but loss of alcohol advertising revenue was at the top of the list," he said.

Marketing analyst Chris Moerdyk has warned that a ban would have implications for all media.

He said of the R17bn spent on advertising last year, about 10% could probably be directly attributed to alcohol advertising in the mass media.

"Removing that from the advertising and media industries would achieve nothing but considerable job losses.

"So much so that one could easily argue that an increase in alcohol abuse created by unemployment as a result of an advertising ban would exceed any benefits resulting from the ban," he said.

Mr Moerdyk said legislation banning smoking in public, and changes in the acceptability of smoking, helped to reduce smoking — not a ban on advertising. US research indicated that advertising bans led to a 5%-8% drop.

Some have argued that the ban would have more effect on marketing and advertising companies than on alcohol producers, as ads are aimed more at switching brands than encouraging drinking. It is also not clear how much money would be lost to soccer, cricket and rugby, which receive millions in sponsorship deals.

Health ministry spokesman Fidel Hadebe said yesterday the debate was at an early stage. "The ministerial committee , chaired by Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini, drew up the initial documents. Everyone will be consulted, including the alcohol industry before it is submitted to Cabinet. Look, alcohol abuse is a serious problem," he said.

Last month Ms Dlamini said a survey had shown that alcohol and substance abuse was destroying families.

Vodacom, Cell C spat takes nasty turn

Vodacom’s advertising agency, Draftfcb, has accused its former executive creative director, Grant Jacobsen, of unethical behaviour over Cell C’s new advertising campaign and has warned it may sue him for damages.
The development comes as Vodacom and Cell C prepare to do battle at the Advertising Standards Authority this week over the latter’s latest campaign, which disparages the former’s brand makeover.

Now the tussle is getting ugly, with Draftfcb CEO John Dixon suggesting Jacobsen used confidential Vodacom information in Cell C’s advertising war with its bigger rival. Jacobsen has rejected the accusations, saying they have no basis in fact.
Jacobsen had been involved with Vodacom’s rebranding campaign — the operator changed its brand and colours on 1 April to bring it in line with parent Vodafone — while still at Draftfcb. Jacobsen left the agency at the end of December to join rival DDB SA as executive creative director.

DDB recently signed Cell C as a client. Its campaign for Cell C, launched last week, includes a television ad that disparages Vodacom’s decision to rebrand to red and took flight just five days after the latter unveiled its new brand identity to the public.
Dixon suggests Jacobsen used information he gleaned while working on the Vodacom account at Draftfcb to develop Cell C’s new advertising campaign and says the television ad had to have been produced before Vodacom took the wraps off its new brand campaign.

“Producing a TV ad has a long lead time,” Dixon says. “There is no way that ad could have been produced in response to what they saw in the public domain. The timeline makes us suspect that confidential information has been shared with Cell C.”
He says the timing is “of concern” to Draftfcb. “Grant developed all of the Vodacom ‘red’ stuff that is in the market at the moment. He didn’t produce it — that happened after he left — but he had intimate knowledge of all the scripts and the use of the meerkat and all of the Vodacom characters in the campaign,” Dixon says.
“He knew how simple and central the initial rebranding was — namely, that ‘Vodacom is red’. He understood that and, by implication, could make it appear that [the red rebranding] is insubstantial and that is what he has done.”

But Jacobsen says Cell C’s campaign was produced at very short notice, with three television ads featuring Cell C “chief experience officer”, comedian Trevor Noah, being shot on the same evening Vodacom officially took the wraps off its new brand.
He says Cell C first became aware of Vodacom’s new brand image days before the official launch through marketing material that was already available in community newspapers. Vodacom was also painting its banner at the top of the Ponte tower in Johannesburg red. And websites, including TechCentral, published details of the redesigned brand several days beforehand.

“We shot the ads on Friday, 1 April,” Jacobsen says. “It was one of the most rushed shoots I have done in my career. I was writing scripts on the set.”
Radio ads that form part of the campaign were recorded several days later. “If I was using preexisting knowledge, why didn’t I write and shoot this campaign in February?” Jacobsen asks, adding that he’s prepared to share corroborating evidence showing schedules and bookings for the shoot and edit.
“If I was going to use my knowledge to get one up on Vodacom and Draftfcb, the last thing I’d be doing is shooting in the middle of the night in Cape Town, on Friday, 1 April, and editing on Sunday, 3 April, and post-producing frantically through the night on Monday.”

Jacobsen says he can state “categorically” that he shared no confidential Vodacom information with Cell C executives. He says he continues to “love and respect” the Vodacom brand, which he helped nurture for five years.
“The last thing I want is for a real conversation about network and technological leadership to turn into an in-house fight between a couple of ad agencies,” he says. “That has no benefit for consumers at the end of the day.”
But this is a fight that seems far from over. Draftfcb and Vodacom have written a letter, by way of their lawyers, to DDB asking for answers, Dixon says. He says the agency may sue Jacobsen for damages.

Jacobsen says neither Dixon nor Vodacom has approached him for his side of the story.
Meanwhile, the Advertising Standards Authority is considering a complaint lodged by Draftfcb on behalf of Vodacom against Cell C’s latest campaign. Vodacom has objected to Cell C’s television ad, featuring Noah, in which the operator claims to have SA’s “number one network”. — Duncan McLeod, TechCentral

Steve Jobs Official Biography Arrives in Early 2012

It’s official: the first official biography of Steve Jobs will be making its debut sometime in early 2012.

The book, iSteve: The Book of Jobs, is being penned by Walter Isaacson, famed biographer and the former CEO of CNN and managing editor of Time. While very little is known about the contents of the book, Isaacson did manage to obtain unprecedented access to Apple, Steve Jobs and even Jobs’ family. Simon & Schuster will publish and distribute the book.

This will be Isaacson’s fourth biography, following Kissinger: A Biography, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, Einstein: His Life and Universe.

“This is the perfect match of subject and author, and it is certain to be a landmark book about one of the world’s greatest innovators. Just as he did with Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, Walter Isaacson is telling a unique story of revolutionary genius,” Simon & Schuster Publisher Jonathan Karp said in a statement.

Apple’s CEO is famously secretive about his personal life. Some of the details of his past have been unraveled in unauthorized biographies such as iCon: Steve Jobs and The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, but none of them paint a complete picture. Isaacson’s book should hopefully provide some concrete answers to unresolved questions about Jobs’s life, along with some new insights into how Jobs runs the world’s most valuable technology company.

Will you read the book? What do you hope his authorized biography reveals? Let us know in the comments.

HOW TO: Optimize Your Content for Social Discovery

David Sasson is the chief operating officer of Outbrain, a content recommendation platform that is based in New York. You can follow him on Twitter at @davidsasson.

Since the rise of search over the past decade, few obsessions have run deeper in the world of online publishing than search engine optimization (SEO). In an attempt to grow their audience and gain exposure for their content, publishers have increasingly focused on keeping Google’s crawlers well fed with tasty morsels of meta data, keyword repetitions, internal linking and more. But designing websites for crawlers often has a downside; namely, it can lead to a poor experience for flesh-and-blood users. How often have you actually used a keyword tag like the one below to navigate a site and discover new content?


Probably never. It’s wasted space cluttering the page, used only to help Google instead of actual readers.

Luckily, this mentality is beginning to change as the sources of traffic into publisher content diversify. While search may have constituted the majority of referrals to a publisher five years ago, we now see it giving up ground in favor of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and through the recommendation of other content creators and curators who link out more frequently than ever before.

This development is great for publishers. Not only does it mean they can return to their emphasis on structuring content for humans instead of crawlers, but the audience engagement levels from these sources is much higher. For instance, across the hundreds of major publisher sites where my company operates, we see that bounce rates (meaning people who consume only one page on a site before surfing elsewhere) from search traffic is generally 14% higher than from other sources. Similarly, time spent on site from search traffic is lower by about 16%.

These changes aren’t totally surprising. After all, someone accessing content from search is usually looking for an answer to a question. If Google does its job perfectly, then the person should never need to go deep into a publisher’s site to get what they came for. Meanwhile, how do people find great, original content using a search engine if they don’t even know it exists? They can’t. Search provides wonderful answers to directed inquiries, but it is not the natural starting point for discovering new, interesting content.

This changing landscape, however, means that publishers need to refocus on the larger question of content discovery: How do you create content that will find its way to people who are in browse mode? And equally important, once people come to your site, how do you help them discover great additional stories so they stick around longer? Fortunately, a lot of the tactics required to improve discoverability are a return to common sense principles.

1. Write Better Headlines

Your headlines need to be interesting and feed people’s curiosity, not simply focused on keyword density and repetitions. Good titling boosts clicks, especially from social networks like Twitter where users won’t see a blurb or image.

For example, print publishers like Cosmo have known for years that people love lists. This translates to digital, too: “The 9 Reasons We Love Fatty Foods” will pull in audiences, even if you’re boxed out on Google for the keyword “foods.” (Interesting tidbit: Research on the publishers in my company’s network indicate that odd-numbered lists will net you a 20% increase in headline click-through rates vs. even numbers.)

2. Make It Visual

Add an engaging thumbnail image representing your story. Just as photos draw people into content in newspapers and magazines, a great image goes a long way online. Now that sites like Facebook automatically pull in your thumbnail when people share your story, it’s more important than ever to designate engaging images in your page structure in order to capture audience attention from outside and within your site. At my company, we find that when we add thumbnail images as part of an article headline, we see a 27% increase in click engagement and content discovery.

3. Hold On to the Readers You Have

Use your page’s real estate wisely. We tend to focus on tactics for drawing new audiences into our content, but it’s equally important to think about how to ensure those people quickly find additional great reading material once they arrive. This means analyzing the real value you’re getting from each navigational device on the page. Are people using them and clicking deeper into your site? Or are you simply cluttering the page with links that have diminishing returns? Avoid the notion that you can spray paint your way to a work of art. If you’re not getting at least 1% engagement on a navigational module, junk it and keep the page clean.

4. Create the Best Possible Content in the First Place

Write great, original pieces. Easier said than done, of course. But now that content discovery is moving more and more into the hands of real people who are sharing it, recommending it and reading more of it once they come to your site, there’s a limit to how far you can get through repurposed or aggregated content.

The tactics used to optimize for overall content discovery continue to evolve. While making sure your content is well represented in search will always play a role, SEO should be seen as just one piece in a much larger puzzle. It’s now more important than ever to design your content for humans, not just crawlers.

7 Million Fans Like Leo Messi’s Facebook Page in 7 Hours

Seven hours after Argentine soccer player Leo Messi started a Facebook Page, he has almost 7 million Likes as of Wednesday afternoon.

To put that number into perspective, it’s nearly 40% as many Likes as U.S. President Barack Obama has on his Facebook Page and about 30% as many as Justin Bieber fans have contributed to the pop star’s Facebook Page — but Messi’s Likes were gathered in hours, not years.

Messi, who plays for FC Barcelona and is considered by many to be the best soccer player in the world, wrote in a translated welcome message on the page, “Hola! Welcome to everyone. Thank you very much for the great number of messages that I have received. I am so excited! From now on we will be more closely connected … through Facebook.”

Lady Gaga beat Obama to 10 million Likes last summer, but we can’t remember another celebrity nearing the milestone so quickly. We’ve reached out to Facebook about whether Messi has set a Facebook record.

Update: Some commenters have suggested that Messi may have automatically transferred fans from his unofficial pages to his official page. While Facebook allows businesses to merge place pages with fan pages and to turn personal profile pages into fan pages, there’s not a public option to merge multiple fan pages. We’ve reached out to Facebook about whether Messi’s page administrator negotiated a merge with a Facebook representative.

How To Convert Facebook Profiles Into Business Pages

If there is one question I get asked every single day of the week it is how to change Facebook profiles in to business pages. I get phone calls, I have people email me and friends ask me if I can ask somebody in Facebook. It’s a very common problem that many people have especially people who joined the site early and thought the right thing to do was promote their business via their own personal profiles. Many people have as many as 5000 friends (the maximum limit according to Facebook) that they can’t move over to business pages. Complicating the matter further is the fact that Facebook strictly forbids anybody from doing any marketing from personal profiles and has even been known to shut down personal accounts acting as businesses in recent months. Well today it is as if Christmas has come early for all those people because Facebook have just launched a new tool which you can find here that allows you to convert your personal profile in to a business page.

The Problems
There are some very serious downsides to doing this though namely that if you have set this up as your own personal profile and use Facebook on a daily basis you are going to lose all your information like likes and personal info. The friends that you have on the personal profile will however be converted in to likes and you’ll have a brand new legal business Facebook page. If you have any other problems or are not sure about making this move the help page on Facebook should help you with this.

Perfect Solution
This really is the perfect solution because it means that people who have had no solution for the last couple of years can now finally migrate their friends over in to likes. The only solution up until now was posting a link or message to all friends and hoping they would head over an like a new Facebook page. For most this is not going to be a huge deal but for many this tool is a life saver!!

Twitter Reverts to Old Interface Amidst Technical Woes

Hours after rolling out a new version of its homepage, Twitter suddenly took a trip back to its past.

The microblogging service disabled the so-called “New Twitter” (though it’s not really all that new at this point) and reverted to a simpler time when users had to check their @replies from a text link on the right-hand navigation menu.

In a post on its status blog, Twitter writes, “We’ve temporarily disabled #NewTwitter. Our engineers are working on re-enabling it and will update you shortly.”

Update: New Twitter has returned for many users, several hours after the outage.

During the outage, a number of users noted that they appeared to be seeing entirely different Twitter feeds from the ones they’d signed up for — many in different languages.

Ironically, it was just last week that Twitter co-founder Evan Williams wrote that “the dark days of imminent technical meltdown are over” in a blog post about his transition to a smaller role at the company.

Foursquare Makes Discovering Brands Easier

Foursquare has launched a new web page to showcase top brands on its network in an effort to make it easier for users to find and follow them.

You may not know it, but there are hundreds of brands using Foursquare (1,323 brands to be exact), but most people don’t follow them, mostly because they aren’t easy to discover. Foursquare is trying to address that issue with Pages Gallery.

Pages Gallery, as the name suggests, is a gallery filled with the different company Pages on Foursquare. Through it, you can follow everyone from MTV to Zagat (or even Mashable) to get tips and other content.

The feature also includes a simple tool for searching through pages and browsing by popularity, whether they’re trending or whether they’re new. Pages Gallery also suggests pages that are popular with your friends.

Lots of brands are hopping onto Foursquare in a big way, but the additional exposure should help boost brands’ follower counts, which could be vital to Foursquare as it tries to monetize its millions of users. While it still desperately needs a way to discover brands within its mobile applications, Pages Gallery is a good start.