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The Drip Edition 1

Welcome back to The Collective Drip!

It’s that time of the week again. The time when – if you’ll allow me to – I’ll take up a few minutes of your life to highlight a few things happening in the world that interest me.

But first, a bit about this week.

Some of the Cape Town and Durban team were in our Joburg office for a fantastic integration workshop, working on some ideas for a new client. I think everyone really brought their A game, and we managed to nail a few of the key elements for the new brand, content strategy and the website. Exciting times!

Some things I learned from our workshop session:

  • Brainstorming can really work if you keep it really simple and focused (one brand; a few elements to work on)
  • I loved the idea of coming up with really terrible ideas together – it broke the ice and gave us a lot of laughs
  • Having people come up with ideas on their own and then get the team to build on them together  was a great way of getting everyone to put their ideas forward

Thanks to everyone for their input 😊

Okay, on with the show!

What can you look forward to reading this week?

Procter & Gamble taking agency work in-house; a Cannes round-up; Joburg water is being cut-off for a few days (awks); Facebook to launch its own cryptocurrency (ugh) and CRITICAL reads for anyone working in advertising (books; resources; presentations and white papers).

Let’s get to it…


Brands Are Taking Work In-House:

Procter and Gamble has taken their Secret brand in-house, replacing their agency Wieden and Kennedy.

“P&G Vice Chairman-Chief Financial Officer Jon Moeller said Secret “no longer has an agency of record. The brand team has become its own agency, bringing in nearly all advertising creation and media planning.New ads are “being created in as little as a tenth of the cost of traditional executions,” Moeller said. “The time from idea to execution has significantly reduced, producing content in under a month,” compared to an average production time of three to five months when using an agency. Taking over media planning also gives Secret “complete control and flexibility to react in real time to current events,” or consumer feedback, he said.”

Worrying? Alarming? Downright terrifying? Well, only time will tell.

My take on it:

Cost-saving, time-saving and creativity can (and will) happen in the short term by bringing all creative in-house. But in the long term? Building a full in-house agency has significant implications.

Good ideas might come at first – but they may soon get stale, and it becomes expensive to hire new creative talent. Teams may not be able to keep up the creative output, seeking outside assistance in the form of freelancers anyway.

The beauty of an agency is its size, capability, network, opportunities and varied creative thinking from so many different people. But maybe they can pull it off. They certainly have the money.


Cannes Round-up:

Check out all the winners, losers, weird things and be envious of the 1% living the high life on the Cannes yachts this week. Personally I would rather poke my eye out than be on a yacht with a bunch of ad execs, but that is just me. I am an island of discontent when it comes to socialising. Here is also the Digi Day briefing at least attempting to answer to unanswered questions at Cannes, such as “Where is the creativity?”

Then, this perfectly sarcastic thread on Twitter makes all the Cannes talk worth it.


The Water is Being Turned off in Joburg for 54 hours:

Fill up your buckets, JHB colleagues – winter has come, and it brings with it a pipe refurbishment from Rand Water.


Essential Reading for EVERYONE in advertising

This presentation gives a breakdown of incredible resources, presentations and books. The presentation divides the recommendations into four categories – resources for a strategy director, a senior strategist, a strategist and then for a junior strategist. Honestly, there is something for everyone to learn in each category, especially account managers and creatives (there are a lot of creative resources in here), and I urge you to pick up at least one of these readings this year.

The JWT planning guide has helped me many times, and Byron Sharp’s “How Brands Grow” is on every marketer’s desk. If nothing else, it gives you an insight into what our clients might be reading. You’ll even find suggestions for books titled “Hey Whipple, read this”, which is amusing.


Some more brand-building goodness:

Les Binet and Peter Field are incredible marketing effectiveness experts who talk a lot on brand-building, and its importance in the sales cycle and why doing work that builds brands is as important – if not more important – than short term sales uplift activity. Watch their talk on “Effectiveness in context”.


Launch of Facebook’s Libra Cryptocurrency:

Watch the Libra propaganda launch video here

For the past three years – particularly throughout 2017 and 2018 – cryptocurrency became the ONLY thing people were talking about. I began avoiding social situations, detesting going out for all the inane conversations people were having trying to understand blockchain technology, mining bitcoins or shorting crypto. Forget it guys, us mere mortals will never understand HOW the blockchain works (except you Nic).

That being said, the social network that we all love to hate will be launching its very own cryptocurrency. Seemingly innocuous, like everything else Facebook does, the currency is steeped in controversy. Blockchain as a concept is meant to be decentralised. According to the Financial Times, “Transactions will initially be validated by the founding consortium, which is anathema to those who see cryptocurrencies as an anonymous alternative to the central banking system.

‘This project is the antithesis of bitcoin and is another step towards total control of data and users,’ said Phil Chen, decentralised chief officer at phonemaker HTC’s blockchain-driven Exodus project. ‘This global coin is the most invasive and dangerous form of surveillance they have devised thus far.’ Privacy experts are also expressing doubts about Facebook’s promise not to target advertisements using sensitive financial information.”

Read the criticism here

You can read the well-framed whitepaper here, written by the team at Libra, and make of it what you will 🙂


Design Porn:

Thanks to Bryce for showing me this beautiful parallax scroll website about birds (and flowers). This whole website is incredibly calming to look at.


For my Digital Nomads

For anyone who travels a lot, here are some incredibly fun tech toys to get for the road.

If you have any thoughts you’d like to share about any of the content, or you want to just have a chat, or even have some things of you own you would like to share, please send them through to me throughout the week 😊

Kind regards…

Animation, Code, Drip, Media


Carla Gontier

Carla Gontier

Carla Gontier is Director of Strategy at Iconic Media. Carla has developed significant digital and content strategic experience over the past 8 years, with the bulk of her experience within digital and social primarily spent across the FMCG; Automotive; Tourism; Insurance; Education and Tech industries.

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