by Marius du Plessis | Jun 11, 2016 |
Some readers of this blog would have seen the series of fairly new Telkom television adverts. It basically shows a bunch of young people being amazed by the lack of technological savvy displayed by some older people when it comes to online awareness. The kids all laugh when an old guy asks “don’t you go to the mall anymore?”. The implication is that your future customers are all shopping online. The company’s use of the medium of television is ironic, of course, but that fact clearly escaped their marketing department. The Telkom ads are pretty good, I must say. They’re rare entertaining gems in a very predictable TV ad world. However, one wonders whether the conclusion is a bit overdone – are all the kids really not going to the mall anymore? Of course they are. A visit to any mall around South Africa will reveal an assortment of top-end hoodies and entry-level cellphones en masse. What’s interesting is that in many cases what got the kids to the mall with its brick and mortar retailers is mobile marketing – proving, once again, that traditional marketing and mobile marketing really do complement each other very nicely. Brands should worry less about the split between traditional and mobile and focus instead of their overall bottom lines. What got me thinking about all of this was an article this week about a very clued-up someone called Mary Meeker from a certain venture capital fund called Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. She had conducted an ‘exhaustive study’ on Internet trends and presented the findings at a conference in Silicon Valley – findings...
