Freakonomics local style: Part 2

A quick reminder, we’re asking questions and trying to answer them in a way that will get people to change. The questions are:

Why is the Internet advertising spend in South Africa one sixth that of Switzerland or even Belgium, when we share similar audience sizes? Why do brand marketers keep telling me that on-line reach in SA is tiny?

Working in reverse order, we tackled the second question in my last post. So let’s try and figure out an answer to the first. We now know that spend cannot be linked to the size of our online audience. Reminder; our Internet audience is not small, actually the audience we boast in SA is the same size as the audience in both countries mentioned previously, it is the advertising revenue which is small.

OK, so you know that we have an audience the same size as that of Switzerland, you know they are boasting Internet advertising revenue of $186million (we are sitting at about $40million). So what is it? I have met many of the players operating in that market and I can tell you that it has nothing to do with their being better sales people than our media sales players. Our guys are way better, and in fact they have to work much harder than their European counterparts.

Again the answer comes in twos. For one, we need to look at a combination of time spent online and where the access point is. Secondly, we must look at creativity and our lack thereof.

It is not new, nor surprising to anyone, that the majority of SA’s online audience is using their work connection as a means to access the Internet. So in terms of net usage and time of day, the biggest spike in terms of visitors to most local sites is between twelve and two — lunch time. This is the major difference with our comparative countries, where in Belgium that spike comes between 19h00 and 21h00. To make matters more interesting, Belgium still see the spike at lunch, it’s just that it is even bigger in the evening.

So what does this mean, and what is the impact on the industry? Well for one, media consumption habits in these countries have changed so much faster than in South Africa. In Switzerland people spend more time consuming online media than they do radio. And they are all doing so with super fast connection both at work and at home, with very low access costs. This means that they are spending up to eight hours online heavily interacting with the sites they visit.

The converse is that in South Africa, we have not yet seen the spike in home usage. Indeed one local leading ISP tells me that within their home customer base a significant portion still access the net using dial up. I didn’t know it still existed! Tying this all back to the impact on online advertising as well as e-commerce is quite simple. The more time people spend online, the more value for both the vendor and the advertiser. The user becomes more likely to purchase a camera from www.digitalplanet.co.za , to search and choose a new credit card at www.justmoney.co.za or to play Coca Cola’s fun online game within the advertising banner creative seen on www.iafrica.com . Most importantly they don’t have to do so in a rush before the boss spots them!

I just mentioned an online game within a banner… “What’s that?” I hear you think. Well this is the way we should be thinking about online advertising. Not by the number of clicks a site will deliver for a campaign, but rather what type of audience visits that site and as a result what creative execution the advertiser is going to employ on that site to engage the user.

So taking the Coca Cola example, which is based on a campaign they ran in Egypt, getting the user to click through to a micro site for Coke was only one part of a success measurement. The rest was based on how the user interacted with this clever execution seen in the banner on the media owner’s website. In this case the user could play a game, watch the latest TV ad, submit their contact details and refer friends, all within the creative advertising served on the site. Not one click through to a micro site!

In South Africa there are so few examples of award winning online creative, and too many examples of online campaigns simply modelled out of an existing print or TV campaign, just hacked together to fit the web. This is not good enough, both the client and the agency need to realise that the medium presents amazing opportunities and challenges that merit its own creative thought.

Luckily there are more and more digital agencies investing in good creative, but we have a long way to go and the big agencies need to come to the party. It seems that awards are a key part of driving the aspirational value within creative circles, and that for too long the creative people involved in the digital landscape have gone unnoticed. Well this is about to change…
[Second plug; watch out and keep an eye on the OPA website www.opa.co.za something exciting is afoot, soon South Africa will for the first time truly recognise our creative talent in the digital landscape]

I hope that through recognition of talent we will see more of our talent focusing energy online, creating amazing digital advertising work. Not just amazing destination micro sites, but truly interactive creative advertising material to accompany the media buy.

To any marketing managers or directors that may be reading this, a word of advice. The next time you assign budget to digital ensure your solution combines a great destination site (either your brand site or a specific micro site) with great digital advertising creative. Too often I see amazing micro sites with either no online media promotion or after thought creative work. This is akin to creating the world’s most amazing billboard and plonking it in the Namib desert. Who would do that?

To end this post with a look ahead, we do have a way to go on home usage and the amount of time spent on-line in SA. But this is changing and thanks largely to the cellular players the advent of mobile connectivity is helping drop prices and makes access easier, and soon Neotel will push that even further. So we will witness larger and larger amounts of time spent on-line. When it comes to using the medium effectively and really engaging the audience with award winning creative, well, that time is now. The audience is there, the sites exist and the technology is available in South Africa. And for all you budding young creatives…the awards are coming in 2008!