Month: February 2020

rooi rose is proud to announce the commencement of season 3 of rrRADIO in February 2020!

rrRADIO, rooi rose and Caxton Magazine’s first, free Afrikaans podcast channel for women, is expanding its programming for a second time, since its launch in June 2019. rrRADIO offers clients a new innovative and cost-effective way to connect to the Afrikaans market and sought-after rooi rose audiences.  “Over the first 2 seasons, rrRADIO downloads and impressions have grown organically at an exponential rate and we foresee that, during season 3, it will rise to 40 000+ impressions per month”, says rrRADIO Executive Producer and rooi rose Deputy Editor, Hannelie Diedericks.

Some feedback & reviews from listeners from season 1 & 2:

• “Thank you for this enjoyable series.  I love every second of it!  At times I laugh out loud, and even cry a tear or two.  I only allow myself one episode each evening, so it will last longer.”
• “What a wonderful podcast series! I can’t believe it’s finished now.”
• “I adore this story immensely and have laughed and cried with the protagonist.  Elize Cawood is an excellent narrator.”
• “rrRADIO – at long last! Finally an Afrikaans podcast channel to listen to.”
• “rrRADIO is a stroke of genius. Thank you rooi rose, I love your podcasts.”

Season 3 will see the launch of two brand new series:

Lam in Wolfsklere

Lam in Wolfsklere is a new serial fiction series, which is based on the fun, light hearted novel written by popular Afrikaans author, Bernette Bergenthuin.  The story will be narrated by well-known actress and TV presenter Elma Postma (pictured).  New episodes will be released every Thursday morning from 27 February.

Ons diere & hul giere

Ons diere & hul giere is a new pet care series hosted by Ilse Salzwedel.  Pets are an integral part of our reader’s families’ and the show will focus on everything pet owners need to know about how to care for their pets.  We will interview various pet experts and veterinarians, and each episode will cover a pertinent topic for pet owners.  New episodes will be released every second Monday from 2 March.

The following popular series will return in season 3:

Tussen Ons 3

Tussen Ons 3 is a wellness programme hosted by rooi rose’s specialist journalist Mariette Snyman.  In this season we will focus on how people can help people close to them if they are experiencing a specific crisis, whether it’s divorce, death of loved one, terminal illness or any other life challenge.  New episodes will be released every Tuesday morning from 25 February.

Tee & Taai Toffies

This popular interview and advice series returns with a new cast of interesting celebrities who are interviewed by our veteran journalist and radio personality, Ilse Salzwedel.  In the second part of the interview, they attempt to give relationship advice to our listeners. We promise a listener’s experience filled with compassion and humour. New episodes will be released every second Wednesday morning from 2 March.

Ka-tjieng!

In the latest season of our financial advice series, specialist journalist Anet Schoeman, will talk to various experts in finance about everything you need to know and teach your child about finance. New episodes will be released every second Friday morning from 6 March.

rrRADIO can be streamed directly from rooirose.co.za and is also available wherever you listen to podcasts.  All the previous series from season 1 and 2 (Botox, Barbies & Bietse,  Dans met die rooi rok, Tussen Ons seasons 1 and 2) are still active. E-mail rrradio@caxton.co.za for more information.

 Photo credit Elma Postma: rooi rose

Over the past decade there has been significant advances in the advertising and marketing fields, not least of which is the advent of Evidence Based Marketing, the latest global movement in marketing. As an introduction to concepts including Behavioural Economics, Observed Consumer Behaviour and Cognitive Neuroscience, Kirsty Dugmore of SugaSpice will be hosting a “Modern Marketing Bootcamp” to bring together these principles of Evidence-Based thinking in a useful and inspiring workshop.

“The rise of behavioural science within marketing around the world is quiet staggering, and any business looking for longevity and brand growth should be adopting Evidence Based Marketing techniques,” she says.

The short two-day course will take a closer look at consumer behaviour, why brands matter and the principles for brand growth by bringing together fact-based learnings that draw from the disciplines of Behavioural Economics, Observed Consumer Behaviour and Neuro-marketing or Cognitive Neuroscience.

“Throughout the course we will also understand how consumers make decisions, and the role that brands can play in these decisions,” says Kirsty. “There are so many factors playing beneath the surface when it comes to the decision making process and we will touch on a few of these as we learn to establish and maintain strong brands.”

The course is a must for anyone in the marketing, advertising, communication and related industries and takes place on the 24^th and 25^th March and the 5^th and 6^th May in Randburg, Johannesburg. Interested parties can email Kirsty on kirsty@sugaspice.co.za

At the end of last year SPARK Media and Caxton commissioned international attention technology company Lumen to utilise its eye tracking software in qualitative research to measure attention on its local newspapers and lifestyle magazines. The results will be out in early March. It’s everything that was expected and so much more!

“Just because you can see something doesn’t mean that you will see it,” explains Mike Follett, Managing Director at Lumen. “Lumen’s eye tracking technology helps us understand what people look at.” The methodology also measures what is remembered or able to be recalled as the crucial metric. What you can’t remember you can’t act on.

“With attention at a premium in our multi-device dominated world, it’s more important than ever to understand the reality of visual attention on memory and the ability to recall messages,” says SPARK Media’s Marketing Services and Research Director, Debbie McIntyre.

“We know that we’ve created an efficient media shopping mall for consumers with all the relevant ads and inserts in our newspapers every week and we know they’re well read,” she says. “But our recent research findings from Lumen have also confirmed that times are incredibly tough for our readers and getting tougher so it’s crucial that we understand exactly where their attention is when it comes to our platforms.”

Eye tracking according to Lumen allows the company to ‘see exactly what people do, not what they say they’re going to do’. By measuring automatic responses and questioning respondents afterwards, Lumen can utilise this information to gain incredible consumer insights.

Results will be shared at industry presentations in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town. Interested parties are invited to email bs@sparkmedia.co.za for more information.

SPARK Media

Established in 2015, SPARK Media, a division of CTP Ltd, are experts in retail and location-based marketing solutions. The company owns and represents an arsenal of print products that deliver locally relevant, effective audiences for advertising clients. SPARK Media are Strategic Partners in Audience Research and Knowledge and offer ‘Insights that Ignite’.

Simba Hozo, Digital Specialist at Reprise Digital looks at the evolution of mobile in the consumer and branding space.

We all remember the first telephone we ever used, connecting with the person on the far end of that dialling tone. It was amazing to be able to connect like that no matter the time or distance (remember the girls hogging the phone for hours?). Years after this an even better bit of tech evolved. A telephone you could have on you all the time, one you could walk around with and connect to with more than just voice.
But did you know that hand held phones had been in the making since 1918, in trains and automobiles? This and many other lightbulb moments helped Motorola and its peers to introduce the world to the future telephone that would colloquially be known simply as ‘the mobile’.

It is argued that South Africa is the foremost mobile-first nation in Africa, maybe even the world, similar to America being the world’s foremost computer-first nation. These are probably two of the worlds’ grandest means of connecting businesses and consumers globally a.k.a the desktop and the mobile. According to ICASA (Independent Communications Authority of South Africa), South Africa’s smartphone penetration today stands at a whopping 84%, doubling in the past two years.

It is at moments like this I remember what one of my marketing mentors used to say: “fish where the fish are, and if you can’t find fish where the fish are, change your bait.” This was a simple analogy for the modern-day market place where quality leads have evolved from walk-ins to platforms.

Our world is a smartphone market place and it seems the only thing that matters these days is, ‘is it mobile ready?’ ICASA recorded smartphone subscriptions at 46.9 million as at 30 September 2018 and taking this in context of South Africa’s population, July 2018 Statistics South Africa reported the mid-year pollution to be 57.7million.

That is a staggering figure for any business wishing to connect with its consumers. Smartphone penetration has also seen a surge in application development, because what are people really doing on their smartphones apart from connecting and transacting? It goes without saying that it’s critical that brands are playing in the mobile space today more than ever. But, how are brands standing out? Who has mastered their ‘fishing’?

For a business to thrive, with more than just a shift in mind set, I believe the following three approaches are necessary.

– Look deeper and understand the type of audience you want to attract.
– Understand how your type of audience connects and converts as they sometimes don’t relate to the same thing.
– What device is your audience using to engage and at what time.

Mobile has in no way become the be-all and end-all of connecting with customers – that would be a dangerous assumption. There is however something to be said in constantly connecting with customers. Imagine serving a print ad, then serving the same ad via desktop or TV and then later re-serving it directly to the same customer’s mobile phone. Sounds a bit stalky and nonsensical doesn’t it? What if we could just re-purpose the same ad and serve it in three different appealing ways at three very convenient times, directly to that same customer? This is the impact smartphones and where the power of the technology lies.

The technology behind mobile phones means that businesses have the ability to study their customer’s engagement and lifestyle patterns. After all, mobile has propelled today’s fastest growing industrial stack – digital marketing, where the global online spend has grown 3% year on year since its inception.

Over the past three decades it remains, without a doubt in my mind that the biggest lesson for marketers throughout mobile’s incredible changes, is that the fundamentals have remained the same. It is still vital to reach the right customers, with the right message at the right time. Technology is accelerating at a tremendous pace and it pays to keep moving with the times. Mobile more than any other platform has become the world’s premier, and competitive, marketplace. So really, it’s always #MobileFirst

Reprise Digital SA DNA

Reprise is a digital-first agency, and everything we do is rooted in understanding how consumers interact across apps, sites, IOT-devices, bots, search engines, and social platforms. We uncover your audience based upon their digital fingerprints – and build a media approach to help transform your business digitally. Reprise has the ability to fuse smart digital approaches for our media agency partners in smart and sophisticated ways.

As part of the launch of Caxton’s exciting new locally produced video-on-demand platform, Hive Digital Media presented Spectrum to a few select agencies from November 2019 to January 2020.

As part of the initiative a lucky draw competition was run among the agencies, where two prizes were up for grabs, namely a free Spectrum pop-up channel and a 50% discount of a Spectrum channel, both valid for three months.

To date this roadshow has been a resounding success as agencies are eager to hear of the successful integration of Spectrum across 73 Caxton-owned local news websites. The agencies visited were: Mediacom, Mediaology, Dentus Aegis, Phd and Publicis Group.

Spectrum seeks to create a fair value ecosystem for local content producers. To this end the platform aims to provide relevant content to connected individuals, on a hyper local level; ensuring that South African advertising spend stays within our borders and funds locally produced programming and journalism.

Speaking to the value of local content Amber Valentine (Biddable Specialist, MediaCom) noted, “I would probably trust somebody more from a local blog just because they have similar experiences to me”

Spectrum’s stats already prove that the demand for local video is abundant. Between its launch in December 2018 and January 2020, the platform has seen over 9.7 million plays, almost 2.5 million unique browsers, and enjoys an outstanding average dwell time of 3 minutes and 48 seconds.

Another key differential noted by the agencies is that South African consumers can now discover local content in a brand safe, contextualised and non-intrusive video environment. Brand and data safety are central to clients concerns and all content on Spectrum has been curated, and advertisers have power over the context in which their communications will appear.

Emphasizing the importance of brand safety to his clients Bryce Betha (Digital Campaign Manager, Publicis Media) asserted that, “The most beneficial thing about the product is that the client will be able to tell what content is around the adverts.”

Designed and built by local tech company Tysflo (Spectrum’s software development partner) the data compression technology used by the platform ensures a maximum data consumption rate of 1.2mb/s, 40% less than competitors. This ensures that a diverse range of viewers can access its HD channels and video-on-demand content in an exceptionally data-friendly way.

Discussing the significance of Spectrum and the value of a channel affords clients Hive Digital’s CRO, Parmeshan Moodliar said, “Spectrum represents a defining moment in video-on-demand platforms. We want agencies to be part of Spectrum’s revolution and experience the value of the brand safety and the sustainable reach that the platform can offer.”

Hive Digital Media wanted agencies to experience the platform first-hand, which was their motivation for running the lucky draw competition among the agencies that they visited. Phd and Mediaology were the proud winners of the Spectrum channel prizes.

Moodliar enthused about working with the winners, “It is going to be mutually inspiring working with the winning agencies as we discover the potential of developing local content for a local market.”

To be part of the Spectrum video revolution which offers effective brand awareness, brand safety and ensures that South African media in all parts of the value chain benefit equally, contact Hive Digital Media’s Team on info@hivedigital.media/+27 10 492 8391.

For further insight visit our new website www.hivedigital.media.

Search Engines are finally putting the user first – enhancing zero click searches, local searches and understanding content better than ever before. This is according to Marcus Matsi, Head of SEO at Reprise Digital South Africa, an IPG Mediabrands company.

Search engines are getting better at understanding content that is crawled. This enhances the user experience by only serving content relevant to the query’s intent.

Take for example Google Featured Snippets (structured data), Google’s Local Packs, Knowledge Graphs, and so on, that result in more than half of all searches being ‘zero-click searches’. This means that the user’s query is answered on the search engine results itself, without the user having to click on any links.  Ahrefs research shows that if brands rank first in a search and has what is termed position zero (the featured snippet), they gain 31% more traffic compared to just having the first position without the featured snippet.

A second trend in terms of search engines is the proliferation of Local Search. We’re seeing more and more people wanting to find information that is geographically relevant to them. For instance, users want to find food delivery services in their neighbourhood. If a brand’s website isn’t optimised for the user to find that information, chances are high that they’ll move on to one that is.

According to Google’s Consumer Barometer, Local Search is a crucial component, with up to 78% of local-intent mobile searches resulting in an offline store visit within 24 hours.

Effective local search means having hyper local content, augmented for voice and mobile search – brands must always focus on the intent of the user. Does the person want to purely find information or do they want to make a transaction? Interestingly, searches including the words ‘near me’ increased by 590% during 2018 and 2019 searches.

Thirdly, Google is spending a lot more time understanding content. The search engine has released an algorithm update named BERT affecting complicated search queries that depend more on context.

Yes, content remains king but most search engines still don’t understand the content ‘in front of them’ so to speak. There are a lot of cultural nuances, and local pricing references that search engines need to learn by country, by region, by suburb. For instance, using the South Africanised word ‘couch’ instead of ‘sofa’ can go a long way in assisting search engines to learn about geographic-specific data.

Ultimately content needs to be relevant, fresh, trustworthy and authoritative. But hosting sites need to adhere to Google Best Practice and have a fast loading time. In fact, 53% of visitors will leave your site if content doesn’t load in 3 seconds or less. That’s why it’s so important to optimize websites and content for mobile conversions. Also, the better that brands write content and spell out as much detail as possible, the better search engines will learn and the better the overall user experience for the consumer will be and ultimately for brands too.

Reprise Digital SA DNA

Reprise is a digital-first agency, and everything we do is rooted in understanding how consumers interact across apps, sites, IOT-devices, bots, search engines, and social platforms. We uncover your audience based upon their digital fingerprints – and build a media approach to help transform your business digitally. Reprise has the ability to fuse smart digital approaches for our media agency partners in smart and sophisticated ways.