Author: Mark

Globally, the video gaming industry is seven times the size of the music business and three times the size of Hollywood. In South Africa, the gaming industry is expected to bring in revenue to the tune of R3.6 billion by the end of 2019. So why are brands not taking advantage?

Michael King, Head of Reprise Digital, an IPG Mediabrands company, says that despite the massive audience that makes up gamers in South Africa, only a tiny portion of brands are getting involved. “In the last couple of years the gaming industry has grown to half a billion people globally with the industry showing a 30%-50% growth year on year for the past three years. In 2020, streaming of games is expected to reach the same viewership as the NFL. That’s massive! I’m predicting that within the next two or three Olympics, there’ll be a competitive gaming section included.”

Consider a couple of gaming tournaments that have just concluded at a global level. The International, a Dota 2 Competition, had a prize pool of $30 million! That’s an event ten times more lucrative than the Tour de France. To put it into perspective, if you were one of the players in the winning team you would’ve earned more money than Djokovic or Halep for winning Wimbledon in 2019.

“There is a great opportunity for digital marketers in South Africa to reach one of the biggest growth industries in the world tied to one of the hardest to reach audiences – Generation Ys and Zs. We know that this market does not respond to traditional ‘push’ methods of advertising. Rather, they respond to friend reviews, suggestions and online ‘word of mouse’ to shape their decision making processes. This is why influencer marketing is so successful in this space.  According to BigCommerce.com, nearly 90% of all marketers find that ROI from Influencer Marketing is comparable to, or better, than other marketing channels.

Its commonplace to see gaming related brands like Xbox, Playstation, Razer etc dominate the advertising space to this market on platforms like YouTube and Twitch but more recently the likes of Red Bull and Gillette have entered this space on an international scale.

“Sure, eSports in South Africa is currently tiny in comparison to the global market but R3.6 billion in South Africa is nothing to sneeze at. The local gaming industry is offering huge opportunities to reach the younger audience and gives brands the opportunity to get in early. Vodacom for instance is the headline sponsor for the annual rAge expo in September this year and there are so many more opportunities for brands outside of the gaming category to capitalise on this market.

The future is bright for eSports in this country and we’re excited to watch it develop and grow over the next few years. Brands that are brave enough to jump into this category will absolutely reap the rewards of their investment.”

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.

According to IPG Mediabrands’ specialist digital agency Reprise, South Africa’s ecommerce industry, while still in its infancy, is showing strong growth thanks to high mobile penetration, secure payment options and changing spending habits.

Natasha Courtney, Social Media Manager at Reprise South Africa says: “Currently only a quarter of South African retailers are spending through digital channels but with more of the population shifting their behaviour and budgets to online shopping, more retailers are making their products and services available online all the time.”

Women especially prefer interactive and easy-to-use options that allow them to share their shopping experiences with other users, and to get feedback and user ratings about the products or services they’re interested in purchasing. “Out of the 39% of women who are actively shopping online in South Africa, there was one predominant reason they enjoyed shopping this way – convenience,” says Natasha.

Digital shopping platform ThinkOver says that 89% of women will wait for an item to go on sale before purchasing. More than half of respondents (55%) said they continuously check a retailer’s website for sales while 58% monitor their inboxes for sale alerts. What’s more, 75% of women said they get upset when an item they wanted to buy went on sale and they weren’t aware of it.

When it comes to preferred payment terms, 54% of South African shoppers like to pay cash on delivery. When asked about debit card payments, 52% of consumers preferred this method – quite an even split. “Loyalty programmes are a big part of a woman’s shopping experience with the study finding that 80% percent of women belong to store loyalty programmes,” she says. “And we’re spending a lot of time online – the majority of female shoppers spend an average of an hour a day looking for great deals before we buy.”

For South African female consumers, the three most popular categories of online purchases are clothing, entertainment and education, and tickets for events. Over 75% of women stated that they go online and choose what they want to purchase before they go out, suggesting that most purchases are pre-meditated and not a spur of the moment decision.

“Pick n Pay’s integrated annual report for 2018 showed a 70% increase in its customers visiting their website from a mobile device since they launched their online grocery shop,” says Natasha. “But there are some down sides too – when purchasing clothing online, some women say that the clothing sizes are incorrect on delivery and the return policies and overall service turnaround times are the areas that need attention from retailers.

Poor user experience on websites is another deterrent to online shopping.

Mobile technology is transforming e-commerce in Africa, and consumers are actually more likely to have a mobile device than a bank account,” she says. “South Africans are also becoming more comfortable with mobile shopping due to, for example, easy-to-use apps for ordering car rides or food becoming more commonplace.”

This research shows that the online shopping industry is growing and is set to grow even more in the coming years. It is also clear that consumers will choose online payment partners they can trust, and that provide peace of mind that the security of their financial information will be a priority.

“For now, traditional shopping habits still dominate in South Africa but with almost half the population set to make an online purchase in the next year, it is clear that the ecommerce market has huge potential and will continue to grow year on year. It’s hugely exciting for retailers and consumers alike!”

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.

Caxton Magazines has evolved the publishing strategy of two of its oldest brands, Living and Loving and Your Family, in line with the changing media environment and the way in which the modern reader is consuming niched content.

 Living and Loving is to be repositioned exclusively as an online parenting information portal but through its digital platform will still provide selected areas of its quality content in print through a bumper parenting section entitled Smart Parent which will be incorporated into Your Family. These changes will come into effect from October this year with the September issue of Living and Loving being the final print edition to go on sale.

Living and Loving magazine has, for nearly half a century and 588 issues, been regarded as South Africa’s most-loved parenting magazine, having provided generations of moms and dads with trusted advice on pregnancy, birth, and raising children from new born to five on a monthly basis. This service to readers will continue but will be more frequently updated and be at reader’s finger tips all the time

Editor Sonya Naude says: “In the last two years, our online audience has grown from strength to strength while, in line with international trends, print sales continued to shrink. Our audience is still interacting with us, but they’re doing it online on www.livingandloving.co.za and through our social media channels. We understand that consumer media consumption habits are changing and we’re adapting with them.”

A core Living and Loving team made up of its editor Sonya Naude and digital editor Xanet Scheepers, will continue to source and produce content in line with what ‘parennials’ (a new generation of Millennial moms and dads) want and need i.e. convenient and accessible information that is reliable and trustworthy.

Adding credence to its decision to embrace the digital model is the news that Living and Loving has just been voted the number one ‘SA Kids and Parenting Blogs, Websites and Newsletters’. Selections were based on Google reputation and search ranking; influence on social media sites; and quality and consistency of posts by the Feedspot Blog Reader editorial team and expert reviews.

Smart Parent, available in a new look Your Family magazine from October, will deal with parenting concerns that affect children at different ages and stages. This special 16-page section will have its own cover, printed on a thicker paper stock for easy access, and will have an interesting mix of news and features that relate to babies, toddlers, pre-schoolers, tweens and teens. The section will also include a kiddies’ fashion feature.

Your Family editor Janine Collins adds: “This is an exciting opportunity for Your Family to extend its subject matter to include content that appeals to next-generation families with a wider age range of children and for advertisers to reach a larger, parenting-aligned readership in print. We’re optimistic about the brand’s future in this new format.”

 Caxton Magazines DNA

Storytelling is our business. Content is our currency. Caxton Magazines is a division of Caxton CTP Printers & Publishers and houses 12 brands in print and digital formats, primarily aimed at the women’s lifestyle segment across life stages, lifestyles and income groups. These brands are: Vrouekeur; Woman & Home; Bona; Living & Loving; People; Food & Home Entertaining; Your Family; Garden & Home; Farmer’s Weekly; Essentials; Rooi Rose and SA Country Life. Visit www.caxtonmags.co.za

In her address to the annual Kader Asmal lecture, hosted by the Council for the Advancement of the Constitution, NPA Head, Advocate Shamila Batohi said “corruption has become so widespread that there is a real danger of it becoming entrenched and normalised in South Africa unless something serious happens soon. For too long, corrupt politicians, government employees and business leaders have acted almost with impunity to plunder the scarce resources of our country.”

With almost one-third of South Africa’s GDP lost to corruption (Shamila Batohi lecture), ordinary South Africans feel powerless to stem the flow and corporate corruption is on the rise with seven in ten companies experiencing fraud in the last year.

Corruption isn’t just tender rigging and state capture. It’s also inflating costs, supplying unnecessary equipment and using contacts inside an organisation to bypass legal procurement procedures to land a deal. All of these fraudulent activities require the falsification or alteration of documents. None of these corrupt deals could happen if it wasn’t possible to easily change the information on an original document. Often these changes aren’t noticed because they look exactly like the originals. For example, it’s hard to pick up changes to figures when a document originated in one department is changed along the way and then presented as fact to an unsuspecting finance department.

iPlate, a South African company, has pioneered leading anti-fraud technology to create a global first – the digsig – a digital signature secured in a QR code that is embossed onto a document or encrypted onto a digital platform. The digsig secures the authenticity of the information by securing it digitally, thereby protecting the original data and rendering it impossible for anyone to alter or forge any high-value document for criminal gain.

As Dev Naicker, iPlate’s CEO explains, “People still put a lot of trust in paper documents as proof of authenticity. In this age of artificial intelligence and the fourth industrial revolution, many companies are spending billions on cybersecurity but still using a rubber stamp to authenticate high-value documents like bank statements, academic qualifications and proof of payment. These printed documents can be easily tampered with and this is where fraud is taking place on a global level. It’s the loophole that many fraudsters are using to defraud the system. This is particularly prevalent in the tender process, where most companies are still heavily reliant on documentation – which can be easily altered by corrupt officials”.

The digsig was developed to actively assist corporates and government to fight fraud and corruption. As ordinary South Africans watch, very little is changing across the government and corporate landscape and the results of a decade of State Capture are coming in. State-owned enterprises have collapsed. Investor confidence is at an all-time low. And more and more blue-chip companies, once the pride of our nation, are struggling under corruption allegations and auditor ‘mistakes’.

“It is hard to change the moral fibre of a corrupt person. But it’s easy to make it harder for them to conduct their corrupt activities”, says Dev. “The iPlate digsig gives every South African business the chance to create a corruption-free zone. It’s time that as business leaders, we all look at how we can be more responsible and ethical in how we do business. It’s time we all do everything we can to create a culture and ethos that makes it clear we are taking a stand against corruption.”

As Advocate Batohi prepares to charge those who have stolen nearly a Trillion Rand from our country’s coffers, the digsig is on the frontlines of the anti-fraud technology that is protecting the little we have left.

iPlate.co.za

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Contact: Nicola Tempest – 082 564 2266