Not even!

I think the title of this post should actually be “Why Cell C’s marketing team should consider a career in sales”. Now, I’d imagine Trevor Noah (tw) to be a pretty smart guy, but to be sold into becoming the face of a widely considered struggling brand, they must have sold him the world. Not just in payment, but in the overall strategy going forward. And well done to them.

I don’t recall Cell C (tw) getting as much exposure as they have over the past few weeks, ever. It started off with praise and applause, then the ‘it was all a scam‘ fiasco when everyone (particularly journos who felt like their little feelings were hurt for being betrayed) slated the campaign at every opportunity. Now the logo story. When will it end? It probably has. And all Cell C can do from here is improve, because they are, essentially, starting from the bottom. And I have a feeling that they will.

Why? Because what the’ve done is completely polarise themselves to the market. You get the people who love what they’ve done, and the people who absolutely hate it. Both sides have the same amount of interest in waiting for what they’ll do next, and both sides are so passionate about their standpoints that they will vehemently argue over any platform, live or online, to try and prove their point. The result: A conversation about the brand. Awesome. So now Cell C has the whole country focussing on their next move, and when you have that much pressure to perform, you work your ass off to make it happen.

On the other side though, what if they don’t? What if this all came too suddenly, they’re not prepared for it, and Cell C loses everything? What does this mean for their new CEO?

Trevor has become the face, the captain of this huge faceless ship. It’s a lot easier for us to blame individuals when things go wrong, because shouting at a large cold building never helped anydoby. It’s exactly what they wanted to achieve with the new campaign: Speak to an individual (Trevor) and he’ll sort you out. People buy in to that. But it has it’s disadvantages too.

Bottom line: If the brand you advocate goes down, you’re going down with them. It’s the captain’s duty. Let’s just hope the powers that be (unfortunately I don’t think Trevor is one of them) can steer this ship past the iceberg and sail it to greener pastures.

If you know us at all, you’ll know we’re very big into correct spelling and grammar (like, who isn’t?), so when I saw this Samsung animation while watching an Idols video on DStv.com (misspelling ‘tomorrow’), I thought it had to be shared (and hopefully fixed).

Text 1 (incorrect)

Text 2 (correct)

Oops! Someone fire someone (or at least give them a good spanking, then send us the video).

On a flight to Cape Town recently, I met a guy who is almost as passionate about South Africa as my mate Nic. This guy, Steve English, is a true believer in South Africans being good samaritans. He’s developed a system to show it off, and in the process, hopefully help people.

Reward-if-found – the honesty incentive – is a simple concept: Place a sticker on your worthy possessions, and if one of them ever gets lost, the person who finds it SMSs the number on the sticker to 33105. The back-end system then notifies the owner via SMS and email, the owner and finder are connected and make arrangements to do the swap. The name obviously implies that a reward will be given for finding, which is a small price to pay for data retrieval, buying another device, the hassle of claiming from insurance, etc.

I challenged him on a few things though:

Me: “This can’t obviously replace insurance, ‘cos not everyone is a good person.”

Steve: “It’s not an insurance replacement, it’s relying on the goodwill of your fellow South Africans. Insurance companies are interested in this because they see their customers’ claims being reduced significantly.”

Me: “So can’t I just stick something I made myself on my possessions and hope people will phone me?”

Steve: “Of course you could, people do already (like on their luggage), but the service which is easy to use by sending one SMS or logging on to the site is a guarantee to get the original owner in contact with you, and the name suggests you’ll be rewarded, which is only fair.”

Me: “But what if someone holds my laptop ransom and demands a lot more than the reward I want to offer them?”

Steve: “RICA enforces all cellphone numbers to be attached to a specific person with all of their details. Should someone want to take a chance like that, the owner can contact us and we will go the legal route, bringing in lawyers and the Police, because we have their details and they can be found.”

So they’ve done their homework. But what I want to know is:

1. Would you use it?

2. If yes, would you pay a monthly fee relying on the honesty of others?

A few months ago I was introduced to Fiverr, a service where you can either sell or buy something, particularly a service, for $5. The administrators make a buck off every sale and you get to pocket the remaining $4. Simple enough.

The services range from promising more Facebook fans to positively reviewing products to listening to your life story on Skype, the list goes on and on and they range from very normal to very, very bizarre. To date I’ve only used it for small translations for work, but then I found this guy: The young, Canadian Alex Buckingham. He said that he’d write and record a song all about YOU for a mere $5. So I thought “Fuck it, why not?”

With the brief “Have a look at my website and some of my vids to get a sense of what I’m like”, I paid the 5 bucks and this is the fun (auto-tuned) result I got the next day, too awesome. Thanks Al.

Now go and get yours done! Tell him Don sent you.

Following a conversation that Rich…! and I had, we decided to design and print a couple T-shirts for a few like-minded individuals, guys mostly. Okay all guys. And, as usual, what started out as a fun ‘couple tees for a few peeps’ built into a lot more dudes on the list, for them to be packaged awesomely (including a very wordy and poncey tongue-in-cheek letter about taking this step to corporate clothing to align with our 12 intrinsic organisational values) and sent to their doors.

The idea and design of the shirt was a collaborative effort by Rich…! and myself for a (hopefully) ongoing project for Thunk!, but ideas without execution is nothing. Enter Trevor Mey.

Trev came up with the idea of how to package it, and he made it happen. We got some really rad exposure from guys like Mike Stopforth, Marc Forrest, Erik Vermeulen, Craig Rodney, Justin Spratt and mad props from some very influential people in the online space. Awesome. They thanked Rich…! and myself, but the real rockstar is Trev for the tough task of making it happen. He’s a legend, and you can’t have him, ‘cos he’s ours. Get your own.

I managed to get (read: wangled my way in) an open seat at Nokia’s The Way We Live Next 3.0 gig this morning, partly to give Rich…! some man-love should the media/blogger attendees not like what he had to say (this of course did not happen – he rocked out), and partly to see what Nokia has in store for the world.

I started writing a recap of the event, but Paul Jacobson beat me to it, and probably did a better job of it anyway. Overall, I’m lank excited about the Nokia Maps Player, and the Nokia Booklet 3G, which is one sexy little piece of equipment.

Read Paul’s post here. Awesome.

The ever-growing comments on my Free Advertising post from 2006 (702 comments to date, with only the 1st one being an actual comment to my post, thanks Peas) has generated some beauties, some real classics in terms of how people advertise. Every now and again, out of sheer curiosity, I’ll follow a URL to see if what each commentator posts is truly what you’ll get. Here is the latest:

Hi there we Specialise in web hosting and design
Websites From R99 A month.
R2250 for 5 page website design
R1250 for 3 page website design
R500 for 1 page website design
Monthly hosting R99 on any website
We also Specialize in Printing , signage, buisness cards , flyers , badges our current specials are:
500 full colour gloss business cards @349
5000 full colour flyers A5 gloss @1450
Badges R30 each
Magnet car signage A3 @ R190
Please contact us regarding any of these offers on
cell:0734569788
Best Regards
Riche’

Right. I’m gonna give you my thoughts before I actually give you the link. So where to begin? Ok:

As the site loads, an untreated, untrained voice welcomes you to his site (his name is not Riche’). The voice then proceeds to read, yes, read the text on the front page to you, just in case you didn’t like the sound of your own voice reading it to yourself in your head.

My best though is when he stumbles his words. Classic. No ‘Oh shit I buggered it up let’s re-record’, they’ll just use as is, because, who really cares, right? It’s only a website, and we sell website solutions, who will really judge us? I mean, really!

During two of the stumbles, however, and this really blows my mind, he realises that there’s a word missing from the text on the page, so he pauses, figures it out, and adds in the correct word. Apart from the re-record possibility mentioned earlier, what really worries me is that they haven’t added the words onto the page after realising that they’re missing. Because, who really needs those words to make the sentences correct? People will figure it out, c’mon!

The cherry on top, and yes, I waited for it, is that the voice is repeated. Over. And over. And over again. I just don’t understand.

Also:

- The Our Services page reads Our Serviecs.

- How we work is riddled with spelling errors.

- Recent designs doesn’t have links on the thumbnails.

- About us is exactly the same, barring two spelling corrections, as How we work.

- Contact us produces a ‘404 not found’ error.

- Their 3 packages (Starter, Premium and Business) have a ‘click to order’ button below, but all 3 go to the same email addy, with no defining subject lines, not making it as easy as possible for the consumer to order what he wants, so he has to fill it in himself. Now, more than ever, you need to make it super-crazy easy for someone to give you their money. And it’s not a difficult thing to do, it’s a tiny bit of code, which even I could do, and that’s saying a lot!

The whole site is a bit of a ‘mare really.

So maybe I’m being horrible. I know there are plenty of sites out there which are just as horrid as this one, but I still can’t get over this one little fact:

If you are selling something, no matter what it may be, you need to be absolutely sure that you, yourself, portray the ultimate in what it is you do.

How can you expect people to trust you to deliver on a professional, effective product if what you have created for yourself is far from up to scratch?

If you don’t look after yourself, why should I believe you’d look after me?

I’ll never get it.

Oh, link here.

As spotted in SAA’s Sawubona mag earlier today:

This explains a lot. Apparently Eskom’s all the rage in Greenland…!

The Loeries deserve this…!

Got sent this link to Eyeballs earlier, and not too sure how I feel about it yet.

Eyeballs doesn’t work with HTC yet, but I’m really intrigued at to how it all works. If anyone else is keen on giving this a try, and your phone is compatible, let me know what it’s like.

I haven’t seen it on TV yet, if you haven’t either, here’s Neotel‘s first SA TV ad.

Am I the only one, or does this visual look a lot like someone about to blow their brains out?

Hardly surprising really when you consider the state of the economy and the 15% interest rate raping…!

SA has a lot of competition as far as low-cost air travel goes. I spent 2 hours watching Extreme Home Makeover and Ellen on the Series channel before this 1time ad came on again so I could tape it.

They take a big dig at, not only the airlines who add airport tax and the rest of it afterward, but specifically at Kulula.com, by the uniform of the check-in lady.

Awesome.

Okay, so it looks like we’re becoming a billboard review blog. Last one for a while, promise, but this Town Lodge set made me laugh out loud.

It’s on the corner of Malibongwe…

(the text in brackets reads “if you don’t mind the walk”)

…and Republic.

Like I said, I laughed out loud. Here’s the pig picture:

Much respect…!

I didn’t see this myself, but spotted the release on BizCom:

Nicely done…!

See, I like my eggs hard and broken.

Twits…!

A big hat-tip to Virgin Mobile for their Bransonesque up yours to Vodacom this week. Here’s the deal.
Late last year pensioner Hendrikus Wessels ran up a bill of R48, 000.00 trying to win a blue BMW by sending a shit-tonne of premium priced SMSs (approx 320 p/day). After Vodacom let him know the ammount he owed, he confessed that he couldn’t pay and was cut off and given terms to pay – terms that apparently still would have him in the poor house (oh, and he didn’t win the car – but you guessed that, right?).

This is where Virgin Mobile come in – in a great example of a big company thinking small, they announced this week that they’d pay his debt in full… directly to Vodacom. From IOL:

Now no-one will believe that this is pure philanthropy from Virgin, and you have to think that it’s a R50k cheque just to give the finger to Vodacom, either way though it’s very well played, and a good laugh to boot.

I would kill to see the Vodacom execs’ faces when they get that cheque…!

…that this prime location in Sandton still has a billboard for a show that happened over 2-months ago?

What’s more, I still don’t want to go…!

The toffee flavour is the business…!