DOWN TO EARTH

I open You Tube and there is a 45 second advertisement on the new Samsung Galaxy S4 phone. It looks very familiar… ah, now I remember. About a month ago Samsung were advertising their new galaxy camera in the same 45 second way. They show the camera spinning. It spins… and spins… this ad is all about aestheticism. It is the same with the S4 with a few changes like more words and a few features.

I am a professional photographer besides being a marketer. I had the opportunity to get my hands on the Samsung Galaxy camera. It is a startling white; I felt like Kylie Minogue singing Love at First Sight. 

It’s one of the best looking cameras I have ever seen. Its features: it has seamless connectivity, meaning you can send pictures by literally anything (social media, Wi-Fi etc.). It has a SIM card! It acts like has full functions of a DSLR camera; shutter speed, ISO, aperture and is fully touch. It can give the Canon 1D a run for its money with that touch screen.  Simply put, the camera is amazing.

Now this is my bone of contention; no, no, my skeleton of contention. When you are advertising electronic devices, please show what the device does. Samsung, c’mon. You can come up with a better advertisement than that. Do not misunderstand me; your products (especially the Galaxy camera. It’s super-duper fly) are great. However, the advert to someone who has never seen the phone live will not appreciate it and know its true broad functionality. Samsung has chosen to name their phone series GALAXY; there is nothing galactic about their commercials or promotions. When you hear the word galaxy the first thing that comes to mind is celestial bodies but no; the adverts are just down to earth.

If it was up to me to market the Samsung Galaxy series this is who you would see in major bus stops around the country starting with Kencom; something out of this world.

Samsung gets a 4 out of ten.

MINGLE MINGLE MINGLE!

Yes, I have been gone for a while. 

My first event of the year: The Mingle, held at Nairobi Racecourse. It is supposed to be an event that people meet, flirt, play games  - kwa ufupi, have fun.

I arrive at the entrance and there is an army of security officers (G4S, to be exact -  but not the ones you see in town. These guys were big and looked like they take pleasure in rearranging dental formula). At the end of the queue they give me a wrist tag. Past that, two young ladies dressed in Heineken football jerseys hand me a bottle of Heineken. I like it already and I’m not even inside!

There is green everywhere, i.e. Heineken everywhere; tents, posters, etc. I find the Heineken VIP lounge. Ladies and tables and couches. Heineken couches, I kid you not. This whole time there is loud music and swarms of people passing me by; I am stuck in a green moment and I take a sip. It almost feels like I am in a brewery with all this branding; in my head, Daniel Craig is about to show up any minute now. After the successful Heineken campaign, anything is possible, right? Teaming up with the Mingle was also an excellent marketing idea, seeing as all of Nairobi and their mother wants to go for it after it became marketing. I am of the opinion that marketing should hit you like those cold high school showers asubuhi asubuhi; and I think that is what Heineken is slowly but surely managing to achieve.

I give Heineken a clean ten out of ten.

I have said it a thousand times. East Africa Breweries Limited should up their game. Yes, they have a bigger market share and are not as aggressive as Heineken, but…why are we still doing Pilsner Pool Challenge, which has been there since I was in primary?

I can’t wait to see what Heineken will do for the Champions League Final!

MOBILE...ITY

I didn’t know the meaning of a flash mob till two weeks when I saw it live. A flash mob is a group of people who agree to meet in the city center with the sole purpose of performing a dance in synchrony. And usually, these people do not know each other. So technically, it was a semi flash mob, organized by Nokia.

It’s 2 p.m. in Nairobi at Kencom. I see a group of  about 25 men and women dancing as I approach. A mob has already surrounded them and are watching the spectacle.  The girls are in tight blue track suits printed Nokia and heels. Of course.

They were promoting the new Nokia Asha phone. Now that’s marketing! I mean, Nokia blocked Kencom! They had a caravan with a speaker, the works. Their exit from the event was a scene from the movie Fast and Furious. The heelclad vixens jumped on the Harley Davidsons. It looked awesome! The torque was a symphony in itself, and they knew it; they revved for about 10 minutes before they finally left.

The whole affair lasted about 20 minutes; short and to the point. Speaking of points, they get them for originality (people in Kenya have just gotten the hang of flash mobs, so it’s original here) and these guys BLOCKED KENCOM! No buses were moving. Very cool! Points for execution.

This comes up head to head against Huawei’s new Huawei Device Ascend P1 advertisement. 

An old man dressed in pure white from head to sandal wearing a flowing white toga and holding an ancient compass. He looks like something out of Greek mythology, or how you think Galileo would look. He looks into the distance, across a vast plain, where a white horse stands. He drops the compass. The horse begins to run. They meet in a titanic, brilliant clash of light and a phone emerges: a Huawei. The screen flashes ‘Beauty meets brains’. End. Genius. Simply genius!

LICENCE TO DRINK

There are 4 types of chemical bonds:

• Ionic bond
• Covalent bond
• Polar bond
• James Bond 

Let’s concentrate on James bond. The latest movie Skyfall which is 23^rd of its series, is coming out this November. What you didn’t know is you will not hear his signature line anymore; the ‘shaken not stirred’ one. Now, he will say Heineken. Yes, Heineken the green-bottled Dutch beer. I was as surprised as you; the legendarily suave ladies’ man will actually drink beer. Alas! Could it be that James Bond is an ordinary bond – err, man, just like you and me?

Before you get angry that this Bond is now drinking beer, there are marketing/advertising and production reasons behind this partnership. In previous movies, the Bonds were so smooth that even when 5 goons are after him and a building is exploding behind him, he still has time to open the car door for a lady. This generation’s Bond, Daniel Craig, is a man’s man, not a ladies’ man. Compared to Pierce Brosnan, he is not as easy on the eye. He’s rough and tough. When he drink’s a man’s man drink, a beer, it’s believable.

I feel that with this partnership, Heineken has upgraded itself from being just a beer to being the  smoothest, badassest beer (drunk by the smoothest, badassest man). Its competition, Guinness, whose current slogan is ‘Come drink at the table of men’ will be in trouble after Skyfall premieres, simply because Bond is drinking Heineken; all men on the planet want to be James Bond (and all the ladies just drool and drop at his feet), so they are going to drink whatever he is drinking.

For a long time Heineken has sponsored sports; first Liverpool Football Club , then the UEFA Champions League which is a huge success. We are talking about the guys who brought Usain Bolt on as a hype man in last season’s final match between Chelsea and Bayern Munich. They should bring Daniel Craig this time. They have gone a step further, a step larger still, by choosing a universally popular far-reaching platform: the world’s longest-running movie franchise (James Bond just turned 50 on Bond Day, October 5^th). Heineken is branching out from traditional sporting sponsorship to entertainment industry, with one swift, well-calculated move. It is, quite simply, brilliant. I love it.

Just because Heineken positioned itself strategically with James Bond, today I give Heineken a ten over ten. The basic moral of this post is, positioning in a new market must be strategic and properly thought out.

As soon as I learned this information on a Friday afternoon, I promptly walked into a classy bar and did my best James Bond impersonation for the female waiter who quickly approached. In a charming, Bond-like manner, I lifted one eye brow and asked for a Heineken. She didn’t even notice that we were in my own movie, License to drink.

CITIUS, ALTIUS, FORTIUS

The above is Greek for ‘Faster, Higher, Stronger.’

 

This is the Olympic motto. Every four years for 1 month the world comes to a stop to witness the greatest sporting spectacle this world has ever been privileged to know, passed down to us through a rich Greek heritage, separating the demigods from common man: the Olympics. ‘Tis the season.

The Olympic Games are here and with them comes advertising on a large scale. A case in point is ARIEL detergent. Their ad campaign is a series of commercial portrayed with their slogan as the ‘proud keeper of Kenyan colours’. It starts with an Olympic gymnast and goes on to showcase of various athletes in their different disciplines. The highlight is when they show the Kenyan heroine Catherine Ndereba, 4 time winner of the Boston Marathon, finishing the race and gets to her knees dressed in the Kenyan Olympic uniform, bright colours blazing. The voice over then says “…In the Olympic games, it’s not the colours you go out with. It’s the colours you came in that matter.” This ad is 31 seconds long but in that short period of time the magnitude of inspiration is well displayed. It is for this reason the advert gets a Naeto C: 10/10.

Then we come to the culprit of the day, Coca Cola. Let me tell you, one of the reasons I fell in love with advertising is Coca Cola. I was 9 years old and there it was: the ‘holidays are coming’ Christmas ad. I’m sure you all remember: the ad started with a young boy sitting on his grandpa’s lap by the fire. It’s Christmas, the house if full of decorations and he is reading a book to the little boy. Suddenly a huge shiny red Coca Cola truck magically appears and powers through the living room fireplace, with lights everywhere and a rotund Santa giving out gifts to little children on the way. The little boy becomes Santa’s little helper in the first truck in a line of what looks like thousands of red Coca Cola trucks as far as the eye can see. That ad was spectacular. Every time I watched that ad I was in awe, and I would rush to my room to kneel down and earnestly pray that just once, this red Coca Cola truck would pass by my house so I could see it, if only once…

This year is an Olympic year and Coca Cola is the official partner of the Olympic Games. This means it gets the most advertising rights during the entire period of the games. There is only one problem. Their global campaign is ‘Move to the beat.’ It is about fusing music with sport. I am sure this campaign was decided on as they rode on the cusses of the excellent World Cup 2010 campaign with K’Naan’s Waving Flag (also a great ad with a great song choice, obviously, and the 3D robot with the boy was good as well). But to do it again in 2012 is NOT OKAY. In 2010 one month to the World Cup the whole world especially Africa had the World Cup spirit. The Coca Cola ads played everywhere, all the time; on the radios, on our TVs and flooding the internet. Fast forward to 2012. Barely a week to the Olympics and the Olympic spirit is lacking! Their current campaign for a billion Africans sharing a Coke is good; emotive, happy, powerful, all the things a good Coke ad is known for. However, for the Olympics ‘Move to the beat’ is a poor campaign. I feel it has scarcely any life or colour, in comparison to Coca Cola’s past record, and bears no unforgettable traits to adequately represent true Olympian ideals. We all grew up on Coke. They set a benchmark in advertising that they are apparently they are finding hard to keep up with. I mean you can’t compare ‘the Brrrr! Side of life’ or simply ‘Always Coca Cola’ to ati ‘Open Happiness’. Coca Cola is, unfortunately, steadily losing its touch. They have managed to do injustice to the Olympic campaign that is why today I give Coca Cola a 2/10.