As budgets dry up online looks up

Despite the global financial slowdown – as nice a way of saying ‘global recession’ as anybody and CNN has been able to come up with – at least one marketing medium will expand its share of the revenue pie, even as others prepare to face cutbacks and closures.

After online ad revenue grew 24% in 2006, 27% in 2007 and 32% in 2008, World Wide Worx researcher Arthur Goldstuck predicts it will grow 32% in 2009. This will see revenue jump from R319 million in 2008 to R419 million this year.

An informal survey by AdReview of members of the Online Publishers Association (OPA) reveals similar optimism. Members forecast that online’s share of advertising expenditure will double from the current 1.5% to 3% by the end of next year, 7.5% by 2013 and 13.7% by 2018. Interestingly, the survey showed that while there seems to be wholesale agreement on the decline in the percentage of ad spend going to TV, cinema, direct mail and print, increases are expected for radio and outdoor.

This trend isn’t only a local one. Globally, eMarketer.com notes that revenue for the US newspaper industry declined 16.4% in 2008 to $37.9 billion. By 2012, spending will slide to $28.4 billion. Yet most researchers predict growth in global online spend this year of between 3 and 15%. And a survey by PermissionTV of 400 senior-level decision makers in the US marketing and media industry revealed that they believed their digital marketing efforts to be least affected by budget cuts.

While growth will continue, it should be noted that forecasters have indicated that the pace of growth will slow. Most analysts have already adjusted their predictions downward to take into account the global crisis.

Henry Blodget, a senior Internet analyst at Merrill Lynch, notes on news site CNet.com that, historically, advertising spending on “new media” does not decline before, during, or after recessions, it simply grows less quickly than during normal years. “This trend was clearly visible in the growth of television advertising during the recessions of the 1950s and 1960s, and in the growth of cable advertising during the 1990s. One explanation for this effect is obvious: during the development phase of any industry, there are two main revenue growth drivers: new buyers and increases in spending by existing buyers.”

New buyers will continue to come online and online budgets in South Africa are expected to increase this year because of the Net’s accountability, lack of wastage through effective targeting and user interactivity. Also don’t forget 2010, when the World Cup will mean increased spend in sectors using the online market, including the hospitality, communication, travel and tourism and car hire industries, not to mention the actual sponsor brands. International accounting firm Grant Thornton estimate that 483 000 foreign tourists will visit the country during the World Cup. The Net will be a primary vehicle for research and communication for these visitors.

“I believe there will be multiple reasons why we’ll see an increase in online ad spend,” says Diane Charton, Managing Director of Acceleration Media, a South African online media planning company. “I think that the measurability of the medium and the ability to track and monitor ROI will become more critical for marketers as they need to ensure their money is working that much harder for them. As a medium, online provides this, and as more marketers begin to understand this and are educated about the opportunities and benefits, I believe we will see greater investment of their marketing budgets.”

Charton believes that many local marketers have been using the medium effectively and understand the metrics involved. These are the marketers and businesses who have developed models that measure ROI and show the proven value of the medium.

“We are also seeing increasing pressure coming from international elements within an organization questioning the lack of online in the marketing plans and strategies,” says Charton. “I think this will further force marketers to become educated on the medium, understand the potential value for their organizations and utilize the medium.”

Online consumers meanwhile are expected to spend more time online researching purchases, seeking out special deals, the best prices and comparing product features.

OPA members expect dramatic increases in the time spent online and time spent gaming. They expect moderate growth in time spent listening to the radio. However, they expect a decline in time spent watching television, going to the movies (in spite of a growing middle income segment), and reading of magazines or newspapers.

A number of factors are working in favour of online. Affordable broadband is finally set to take off during the course of 2009. Growth will be stimulated too by the arrival of Seacom, which will relieve congestion on the SAT-3 cable, networks laying fibre networks in major metropolitan areas and the EASSy cable connecting up in 2010. This in turn will see bandwidth limitations diminish and user engagement increase.

“The Internet usage and activity boom of 2006-2008 will flatten in 2009, but easing of broadband limitations and international interest in 2010 will compensate,” says Goldstuck’s State of Online Media in SA report. In 2008, 4.5 million South Africans were connected online (a figure expected to grow to 5.1 million in 2009 and 8.4 million by 2013), 1.05-million of them already have access to broadband.

South Africans are also flocking to social media applications like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter and this is driving increased openness to and comfort with online interactivity. It’s not all plain sailing, though – Goldstuck’s research shows an ‘Experience Curve’, which reveals that the average Internet user needs to be online for five years or more before engaging actively with high-level applications like online retail and interactive applications.

“The Experience Curve means that new users will still take five years to be integrated,” says Goldstuck, “meaning that the have-nots are more than ten years away from Internet integration – for online media, an ongoing growth path.”

By MarkLives editor Herman Manson
From Tony Koenderman’s AdReview, published with Finweek, May 1, 2009
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Mark Magazine Issue 2 – Blueprint

Read the second issue of Mark Magazine here.

Twitter to the people

Brands are venturing onto micro-blogging platform Twitter – with mixed results.

Twitter has a funny side – though you might not think so, considering the current media and PR push (into Google’s arms, if reports are correct) surrounding this very useful microblogging service.

Take this one-word piece of advice that comes as part of the lowdown on how corporates can use Twitter for marketing and PR purposes at http://howtousetwitterformarketingandpr.com. The one-word piece of advice is, of course, DON’T. Luckily, on Twitter, you get another 135 characters to discuss.

Just a quick note for the uninitiated: Twitter is a rather nifty broadcast service that allows users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters. You follow people, brands or news channels, and they have the option of following you.

Great resource

Marketers should embrace Twitter in a personal capacity, because it is a great resource for gathering news, picking up on industry gossip and networking across your industry. For media workers, Twitter is a tool to interact with their audience and provides another platform from which to disseminate their content.

Brands also have a role to play on Twitter, but brand owners should not expect it to happen on their own terms. Advertising is losing its edge as consumers increasingly demand two-way communication. Twitter is about communication, and people, which also means it’s complicated: not the technology itself, but the psychology, the interaction and the sense of humour and flexibility required to work with people in a fairly anonymous space.

Yet a number of brands are successfully using Twitter to answer questions, dispel misconceptions and engage directly with users.

Vida e Caffé (@vidaecaffe) has quite a vibrant Twitter community following. It addresses all sorts of questions relevant to Vida e fans, including the lack of credit card facilities at two of the shops, and discussions about the closure of three others. Or it’s used to announce special deals. It doesn’t do corporate speak here, that’s for sure.

Ian Jepson is the guy behind the Vida e account and he says the group initially joined Twitter after noticing there were numerous comments coming from Twitter users about the company.

“Quickly snowballed”

“Our plan was to simply join, get in contact with those people, and sort them out with a free coffee or two,” says Jepson. “This quickly snowballed (as things do on Twitter) and before we knew it there were 30 – 50 messages in our inbox from Vida-fans enquiring about the giveaway and all asking the same thing, ‘Can I have some too?’”

Vida e Caffé was now officially ‘on Twitter’.

“It’s an amazing platform, especially because of how easy it is to see what the average person thinks about your brand and products,” says Jepson. “We’ve had amazing compliments, polite criticisms and many, many mentions since we’ve joined. Twitter allows customers to instantly ask a question. We’ve gotten everything from business requests to ‘what time does your _____ store open?’ and we reply to every single one of them. Our account isn’t overtly active – we make about two or three posts a day – but we are constantly watching and listening to our customers to see what they have to say next.”

Not everybody is successful

Not everybody is successful. I find the @SteersFastFood Twitter feed, um, cheesy. Is cheesy really the Steers brand image? I always thought Spur had first dibs on cheese.

@Nedbank has only one post on its feed, which reads: “Need more info on Nedbank service? Want to complain? Want to compliment? Follow us, or DM us to tell us what’s on your mind.”

What, no news on how to ride out the financial crisis? No “Good news, folks, interest rates are dropping”? “Make things happen”, indeed…

Media brands are doing better, especially @MyNews24, which could be a case study in the successful use of Twitter by a media organisation. It has a human being posting breaking news updates, replying to reader queries and following followers. It has recognised that Twitter is about more than simply dumping headlines.

Key point

A key point to remember when venturing onto Twitter is that it is about people, not brands. Actually, that is also true about business, a point many managers have conveniently forgotten, but which is once again being brought home by the big noise that 140 characters can make.

First published on Bizcommunity.com

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Finding value in Web 2.0

Allowing employees to embrace these technologies can increase collaboration and information sharing.

The rise of blogs, micro-blogs and Wikis, to name but some of the new online tools now available to the enterprise and popularly referred to as Web 2.0, has seen lots of interest but substantially less implementation from business.

The reasons are numerous and range from inflexibility in large scale IT systems and blueprints that won’t allow wide scale implementation of these tools, to a fear that employees will misuse communication platforms to damage company reputation or that it will simply undermine productivity.

Let us clarify one important point upfront. Facebook is not Web 2.0. Nobody expects you to roll out company-wide implementation or even allow employees access in work time to social networks. A significant proportion of businesses ban access to social network sites from their offices and few executives would find fault with that.

That does not mean the tools available can’t be put to good use in the corporate environment. Also, face the fact that your employees will use these tools after hours regardless of your opinion on them. In fact, a recent report by Forrester Research indicates that if you wait too long with making Web 2.0 tools available internally, “employees may create their own collaborative environments on the Web”. This effectively means that if you don’t, they will, outside the structures you should have established to manage the processes in the first place, in the public sphere, and using disparate systems that ultimately won’t allow for easy IT integration at some future point.

The benefits of Web 2.0 for businesses are quite clear, if not always tested. For the enterprise the value lies in rolling out these tools internally for now – CEO and selected employee blogs being the exception – but more about that later.

Internal blogs encourage employee participation and foster a sense of community, research shows. Collaborative projects spanning various locations definitely benefits from better communication tools, notes Gino Cosme, founder of consultancy Cosmedia.

Blogs can also decrease e-mail usage, as only high priority messages would need to be sent out with other relevant content landing on internal blogs. Blogs are great tools to build up networks – something that could allow managers to survey talent for future recruitment.

A wiki (which content any authorised person can edit – think Wikipedia) is another Web 2.0 technology and can be used to collect workplace knowledge into a single source, which is especially important considering the lack of skills and knowledge many businesses face today. It keeps the collective knowledge of departing or retiring employees within the organisation.

Micro-blog services (where content is limited to around 140 characters), like the popular Twitter, allow for streams of relevant alerts to flow to employees – once again without the need for e-mail. Then there is company-wide social networks tools to replace typical employee directories, or as Forrester puts it, providing context to content.

Siemens South Africa has rolled out an intranet site tailored to its Web community of online marketers and communicators within the Siemens group. It provides the platform for idea sharing and education via blogs, wikis, citizen journalism, podcasts and streaming video.

“There are also plans in place to roll out an extensive Web 2.0 external approach as part of the new global corporate campaign, ‘Siemens Answers’, although we are awaiting final details,” says Dale Ladner, online communications manager at Siemens. The CEO, sector heads and divisional management communicate important information to staff via regularly updated blogs on the various intranet sites within Siemens locally. Streaming video and podcasts are also used for this purpose. Ladner says employees respond well to blogs and they are regularly in the Top 20 most visited pages on the Siemens intranet.

“We see an increase in efficiency simply because employees are better informed, often in real-time, or close to it,” says Ladner. “Moving forward, it will be about managing perceptions. We are trying to change the old-school, clock-watching mentality that views Web 2.0 technologies with suspicion. Quite frankly, we would not be overly concerned with how much time employees spent engaging on Web 2.0 platforms, provided they deliver on expectations. Indeed, these technologies can only help breed a discursive corporate culture and they are well aligned with our brand DNA as a technology company.”

A strategy for blogs and social networking services outside the protection of a corporate firewall tend to centre on communicating brand insights and engaging consumers in their preferred medium.

A number of South African firms have come up with successful external Web 2.0 strategies, including BMW South Africa – its Facebook page just passed 5 000 fans. “We’ve had fantastic feedback and interaction on our [Facebook] discussion forums,” says Scott Gray, interactive manager at BMW South Africa.

Its YouTube video channel, says Scott, has enjoyed over 1.4 million views, while the channel it hosts on local video-sharing site Zoopy is also growing. BMW doesn’t plan on rolling out any of these tools internally, at least not now. “I think that people are used to the way they do their daily work, and introducing systems and channels for them to share more information as well as collaborate on it is going to require huge change management encouragement and patience,” says Gray.

Financial services company The Unlimited World is rolling out an informal, but company-wide, education programme called ‘A Brown Bag’, where Mark Smith, the firm’s online marketing manager, takes staff through the principles of search, and then into blogging, PPC, RSS feeds, wikis, and social media. Smith says while employee blogs remain internal, he plans to help employees who wish to have external blogs with the tools and knowledge to set these up. An external CEO blogging strategy will be rolled out soon. Its marketing department is already using Basecamp to improve productivity and RSS feeds and wikis to keep project details in one place.

Internationally, service, creative and technology companies especially use employee blogs that have built up industry credibility to link back to their corporate sites. It gives business a human face: “Look, real people work there!”

Issues such as privacy, intellectual property rights and freedom of expression remain, but these can be dealt with if clear policies and guidelines are put into place. Rob Stokes, CEO of Quirk eMarketing, does note that if a corporate blog is totally sanitised by the PR or legal department, it will more than likely fail to connect with its readers. “The challenge, therefore, is finding a balance between voice and control, and this is different for every company,” says Stokes.

Cosme suggests that it wouldn’t harm employers to negotiate these policies with staff, which in turn empowers them. When done during the strategy development phase, this could provide further insight into how social media can add value to the company.

Strategies, like that being implemented by Siemens, are exciting. But as Ladner notes, it remains vital to stay mindful of who you are speaking to, your target audience. “We will not use any tool or technology just because it is popular, we will use it where it makes sense and it can add value to our stakeholders, customers and our organisation,” says Ladner. After all, “a fool with a tool is still a fool”.

* Herman Manson is a journalist and the editor of Mark magazine. He blogs at http://www.marklives.com. Follow him on Twitter. This story first ran on ITWeb.

Lead with care

Can an elaborate employment branding strategy be successful if managers suck? Probably not, which is why leadership is closely linked to successful employment branding and employee relationships. The implications for any business are potentially far-reaching.

Talent, says HR Future Publisher Alan Hosking, resides in the top 20% of a company’s employees who, by their skills, knowledge, experience and attitude, generate 80% of the company’s revenue.

“They want to work in companies that enjoy good standing in the community, in the marketplace and in the eyes of its employees, so that they can talk about their employer with pride,” says Hosking. “Consequently, they are not attracted to companies which do not have a strong employer brand.”

While South African business are slowly waking up and implementing employment branding strategies, these are still centred on how managers view the business (and their own management skills) rather than how current and future employees view it. The first step towards effective employee branding seems to be assessing the people management skills of management.

Hosking agrees, saying there’s no way incompetent management can create a reputable employer brand. “Essentially, while management creates the strategy to strengthen the employer brand, its success is in the eye of the employee. The employer brand has to be seen to be good by the employees, not the employers,” says Hosking. “Unfortunately, incompetent employers believe their own lies. The employees have a better chance of seeing the true state of things.”

Sadly, the human resources function in many companies today seems to have very little to do with building people up and a lot to do with controlling them. Etsko Schuitema, author of Leadership – The Care and Growth Model, suggests the mechanical metaphors we use to describe business (’If all parts of the system work, then the machine makes money’) make us overlook the fact that people are more than just parts of the system.

“We can nurse a mechanistic view of an organisation as much as we like,” writes Schuitema. “The simple fact of the matter is that if the people are not committed to the business, and therefore willing to go the extra mile, we do not have a sustainable enterprise.”

Some companies are getting it right. Hosking says Investec has such a good employer brand that they don’t have to advertise positions – they have quality candidates approaching them for work and they can afford to pick the best. Mark Gray, of marketing and human resources firm Graylink, also points to Outsurance and RMB as positive examples. “They’ve successfully integrated their corporate and employer branding efforts, linking their people directly to the success of their businesses and saying to the market ‘we respect those that work for us’,” says Gray.

What are people looking for in a company when they seek a new employer? Gray believes needs change from audience to audience. Often age (and generation) has a large part to play. “When you’re just out of college looking for your first job, things like travel and experience are top of your agenda,” says Gray. “For those with families and a large mortgage, security might be of greater importance. The trick for any employer is to map what attractive things (value propositions) they can authentically offer with those things the target audience actually values/ wants/ needs.”

Leadership, or the lack thereof, helps define every aspect of a business. Schuitema argues for the importance of leadership in empowering employees through genuine care (about them, not just the stock price) and the creation of growth opportunities and empowerment (less control, not more).

Companies that understand that employees are not simply a cost but a credit to the business are better positioned to release the full value their people bring. This ultimately is what makes or break an employment brand and a business.

– Herman Manson is the editor of Mark and marklives.com This story first ran in Mark magazine Volume 1 Issue 1.

EXTRA:
For more information on how other companies are finding a path to meaning, purpose and self-motivation, contact Johan of Facilitating Hope at http://www.facilitatinghope.co.za

Seeing is believing?

Online product videos are influencing consumer behaviour, but local online retailers won’t bite just yet, never mind the popularity of video services like YouTube.

It’s no secret that consumers use the Internet to do product research. Before making important product-buying decisions, more and more people are going online to research products, prices – and alternatives. Even though word-of-mouth and recommendations from friends remain the most important methods for deciding on future purchases, even these are moving online with the help of e-mail or services like Twitter and social networks like Facebook.

Recent research suggests that even offline sales are being influenced by online research. Accenture last year released a survey showing that while a majority of respondents in the US still preferred to shop in physical stores, 69% researched product features online and 68% used the Net to compare prices.

Instead of replacing bricks-and-mortar stores, the Internet is an extension of consumers’ in-store shopping experience. “Retailers and manufacturers must understand this consumer behaviour trend in order to reach shoppers, educate them, serve them and earn their loyalty,” the Accenture research noted.

It has become critical for businesses to pull out all the stops online on their own Web sites and on the commerce sites that sell their products. With access to broadband increasing rapidly, video has become an important method of highlighting product features. This isn’t only true of International audiences – think how popular YouTube is among South African Internet users.

So, how exactly does an online video presentation influence customer behaviour? “Firstly, we know that shoppers choose to spend an average of almost three minutes viewing each product tour,” says Rick Martin, CEO of SellPoint, a US-based provider of on-demand video product tours. “Secondly, third-party analytics have verified that shoppers who choose to watch video product tours are 12% to 30% more likely to complete a purchase of the product. And, lastly, we believe that buyers who watch product tours are more informed and, therefore, less likely to return online purchases.” SellPoint claims use of online video resulted in an up to 35% increase in the conversion rate of e-commerce sales for some of its clients.

As part of its video offering, SellPoint also creates a one-stop space that includes printable material such as user guides and owner’s manuals. Over half of the shoppers who view the video tours choose to also view the printable collateral content, according to Martin. “Can you imagine the response a shopper might receive walking into a typical retail store and asking to read the owner’s manual for a complex product?” Martin asks. “Product tours make it easy for shoppers to find and navigate through the information that’s important to them.”

Jacques Nel, MD of digital marketing agency Stonewall+, agrees that online video is great marketing format, especially when you need to explain complex features/functions of products. “It comes in really handy where products are rather technical in nature, and a one-minute video can inform the viewer in far richer format, adding detailed moving video and audio,” says Nel.

Video also allows you to feature a product in a completely different way. Nel points to the incredible amount of product and brand exposure that Blendtec received through its ‘Will it Blend?’ online video campaign. Blendtec created a viral marketing campaign and a Web site called WillItBlend.com that featured video takes of Blendtec founder Tom Dickson blending anything from golf balls, marbles and Thanksgiving dinner to mobile phones using his blenders. So popular is the site that it even has its own entry into Wikipedia, and the phrase “Will it blend?” has become an Internet meme, not to mention putting a smallish company on the map overnight.

It’s not all plain sailing, though. Last year MTN caused some controversy when it posted videos on YouTube that some online users felt was “recycled and uncredited” because it was based on original material posted by other YouTube users.

For the most part, South Africa’s online retailers do not seem to have adopted video to drive product sales. It seems it’s up to distributors to take their sales strategy into their own hands.

Yaron Assabi, CEO of Digital Solutions Group (which runs digitalmall.com), highlights poor bandwidth availability and quality as the reason video doesn’t feature on his site. “What is promised to be broadband is very narrowband,” says Assabi. Keeping an eye on the near future, he notes: “We are all waiting for Seacom to launch next year when bandwidth availability and pricing will hopefully become more reasonable.”

YouTube, the popular video-sharing site, recently announced it will start experimenting with new advertising formats to grow revenue. This should boost awareness among marketers even further.

The global credit crunch and the resultant economic slowdown also means consumers are spending even more time researching before making a purchase. Micro product sites that contain lots of printable information such as product manuals as well as video seem an obvious way of helping customer decision-making. Making these accessible from both the corporate and e-commerce sites as SellPoint does means you go where the consumer is.

It sounds like a pretty smart move to me.

LINKS:
SellPoint http://www.sellpoint.net
Blendtec http://www.blendtec.com
WillItBlend.com http://www.willitblend.com
DigitalMall http://www.digitalmall.com

See the original story as printed on ITWeb here.

Mark launches!

The first issue of Mark, the business magazine about people, has just been released at http://mark.marklives.com. Its launch issue explores the many facets of business identity, including the impact the emerging market is having on defining business identity, what influences people’s perception of your CI and issues around employee branding.

The new title is launched on the back of my popular marketing blog MarkLives.com.

Mark – first cover

Mark magazine - first cover

This is the cover for the first issue of Mark magazine. Mark is a new business magazine about people and how business. Art Director Candice Turvey designed the cover around our theme for this issue – ‘Identity.’

The challenger

From Brand April/May 2008

Given recent negative comments by Julius Malema and others on Desmond Tutu I thought I would reprint an opinion piece that ran in the April/May 08 edition of Brand magazine.

The mood has changed. Talk to almost any South African and you will notice the negative nuance when they talk about the economy, our democracy and the future. The country, plagued by uncertainty around the presidential succession, declining economic growth and power outages, and little tangible success against violent crime, no longer seems to inhabit the noble space it once laid claim to.

Our great man – Madiba – is growing ever more silent, removed from public life by the fragility wrought by age and decades of imprisonment and forced labour. His presence has always smoothed the nation’s mood and he continues to embody, for many people, the face and spirit of our constitutional democracy, both here but also particularly abroad. But there is another whose voice has always been the conscience of our people.

He is Desmond Mpilo Tutu (76), Nobel laureate and Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town, and possibly the man most consistently vilified by the politically powerful in this country. Those in power, both old guard and new, have shown their disregard for, and yet at the same time their agitation at, the message of forgiveness, clean government and human rights that Tutu uncompromisingly communicates.

During Apartheid he rejected violence perpetrated by both sides of the divide. He has angered Thabo Mbeki for saying that his government’s failure to address poverty in post-Apartheid South Africa puts the country at risk, and for saying that the new politicos “stopped the gravy train just long enough to get on themselves”. He has publicly called for Jacob Zuma to drop out of the presidential succession race because of his corruption trial. He has opposed both xenophobia and homophobia, thus challenging most average South Africans to rethink their prejudices. He opposes the death penalty, saying it encourages the doctrine of revenge, calling it government-sanctioned violence. In return he has been called a “loose cannon” and a “scandalous man”.

His message is courageous: passionately pro-South African, but not afraid of calling something by its name, and has more value than any internal Proudly South African branding campaign could ever hope for. Frankly, Desmond Tutu captures why we are proud to be South African.
A society as brutalized as ours can still manage to produce somebody like Tutu – this is a message of hope if ever there was one.

Taking up his message ourselves remains a list of missed opportunities. After the racist University of the Free State video surfaced, Tutu said the students involved showed they needed to be helped to become more human. His message was left by the wayside the day after he uttered it.

Last year, I witnessed how this stooped, frail man (he was first diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1997, with a recurrence in 2005) got an entire concert audience to their feet and applauding as he was assisted in slowly making his way out of the hall after the performance. It was a heartfelt outpouring of respect that none of the performers that night could hope to match.

The politically powerful continue to make light of his contribution to the dialogue within our society and his consistent vilification has affected how many view him. But he continues to proclaim his challenge to our loss of faith in our fellow man – a loss of faith so great that many find it unbearable to embrace the essence of what Desmond Tutu stands for: “Good is stronger than evil; love is stronger than hate; light is stronger than darkness; life is stronger than death.”

South Africans proved this true no less than 14 years ago and Tutu serves us greatly by challenging us not to forget.

King James gets Unconventional

From MarkLives.com22 October 2008

When Alistair King and James Barty founded their very well regarded agency King James ten years ago they agreed it was going to be an unconventional venture. They set out building King James sideways, expanding into digital, eventing and public relations amongst others, and now the group is pushing into book and magazine publishing.

The group recently partnered with Shaun Johnson to launch a new book publishing house and has bought a substantial stake in pop magazine One Small Seed. It’s not a gimmick either. Alistair, who sat down with MarkLives to discuss the new ventures, insists that the business aims to transform how books, especially fiction is published in SA. He is currently investigating alternative printing methods, packaging formats, pricing models and distributions channels. In March next year the group will publish the South African PEN, a collection of short stories, followed by a collection of South African literature. He hints that the collection of short stories might reveal the talent he requires for building a stable of new South African writers.

One Small Seed is the first magazine King James has bought into. Alistair believes the pop culture title will allow his agency a window into the world of pop culture. Forget about focus groups – he is plugging his agency into the cutting edge. Further investments will be announced in the months ahead to build critical mass and to ensure the new ventures contribute to the bottom line of the King James Group.

Taking an ad agency into media ownership might sound odd to many executives but Alistair explains it wasalistair king from king james born from a personal and professional need not to come stuck in a single medium and from frustration with the general state of the ad industry. Tired of being forced to grow at breakneck speed and to win the maximum number of awards possible or risk being described as losing its edge the group decided not to pitch for any accounts in 2007. Instead the focus shifted to building relationships with employees and customers. “I wanted to build a more sustainable business and a happier agency,” says Alistair.

The results has been dramatic, with the agency becoming one of the most awarded in the country this year (for achievement with real client accounts, he notes). Business is growing at a speed that suits the group, and so is its people.

Alistair’s belief in multiple careers is driving the business to look beyond the obvious niches an ad agency could expand into. His privately owned record label has produced eight records to date. The expanded King James is exciting enough to keep him in the business, provides King James with access to a diverse group of people, and adds color to the agency. Time will tell how media ownership impacts on the group. In the meantime life at King James just got a lot more interesting – not to mention creative.