I go face to face with Wadim Schreiner for the inside scoop on agenda setting and the battle for control of your brain. Schreiner is a specialist media analyst and the MD of Media Tenor South Africa and partner in Media Tenor International (Switzerland). He decodes and analyses media trends and interprets the media agenda […]
Media
Posted inMedia
US sport: A marketer’s dream
This weekend, I watched a cricket match. I don’t mean I joined some fellow South Africans and crammed into one of the few pubs in the city that broadcasts cricket and rugby. No, I mean I watched a live cricket game, which, in the US, is about as rare an event as hen’s teeth. It […]
Posted inBusiness, Lifestyle, Media
Good advertising – we’ve been having it!
About two years ago, I read an article about a Swedish promotion agency saying that South African adverts are among the best in the world. I sometimes get upset when I walk down Parliament Street and see the foreigners (Western foreigners, that is!) busy shooting a commercial or part of a movie on Church Square. […]
Posted inBusiness, Lifestyle, Media, News/Politics
Black diamonds, white trash
Marketing people are strange types who, I suppose, have to justify their existence by continuously showing management just how clever they are. It always beats me, though, as to why, at car launches, they feel this huge urge to explain to the media just who their product is aimed at. Of course, every presenter earnestly […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Elections 2.0: New media and democracy
The internet has a critical role to play in democracies. Likewise, it will play an important role in the country’s upcoming national elections. This is now being recognised by the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), which for the first time had “new media” on the agenda at its national media conference in Pretoria — a high-level […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Delivered, bound hand and foot
In every province of human life, and in that of reporting truthfully principally so, we have a right to demand a living sympathy of mind with mind. It is clearly not only about getting the highest circulation in the media establishment; the press is charged to inform, to entertain, to enlighten and sometimes to swim […]
Posted inMedia
Confessions of a journalist
When I studied journalism, I was taught, among other things, that in order to call yourself a competent journalist you should have the ability to remain a fly on the wall at all times. “Your job is to observe, not to interfere, and to switch off your emotions in order to be as objective as […]
Posted inBusiness, Media
The first step to building a brand is having one
One of the most critical elements in marketing a business is its brand. It’s the symbol that identifies and distinguishes a business. Achieving name recognition in the marketplace usually takes years to establish and big advertising expenditure. Why then, do businesses not take the time to develop a proper symbol, name or logo to help […]
Posted inMedia
What is your vision for the SABC?
A special Talkback question on the Mail & Guardian Online: What is your vision for the SABC?
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Leadership from an unexpected quarter
I will start off with a controversial statement: Former MK cadre Robert McBride is now my hero! He is a source of hope in this South African hour of darkness. Well, it is men like him in our history who have always been our source of hope, confidence and optimism, you know. We need to […]
Posted inBusiness, Media, News/Politics
Damned lies, journalism and private healthcare
What is it about journalists and numbers? Mathematical incompetence among journalists is, as the American media scholar Steve Maier once put it, ‘legendary”. Actually, Maier was wrong. Far from being legendary, the numerical cluelessness of journalists has been empirically established in a number of studies, including one of my own, soon to be published in […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
The minister and the law
Ignorance of the law excuses no man; not that all men know the law; but because ’tis an excuse every man will plead, and no man can tell how to *confute him, so said John Selden (1584-1654), posthumously published in Table Talk, 1689. There are four fundamental pieces of the law that set the boundaries […]