Teamtalk Media
Card in Cape Town

Following months of negotiations, a successful management buyout led by operations director Barrie Jarrett took place in February 2011, making TEAMtalk media the largest independently owned digital media company in South Africa.

Without question, the internet has changed the marketing game’s rules, chiefly in that interruption-based advertising is no longer as effective. Content marketing is the ad industry’s way forward, and all the cool kids are talking about it. The short answer to this question is that, while it’s far from dead, it can’t be a marketer’s only trick anymore. Essentially, consumers are exposed to more marketing messages than ever before, and have reached a point of ad saturation. They also recognise traditional ad-industry tricks such as exaggeration and puffery, and don’t appreciate being manipulated. And let’s not forget the impact social media has had on consumer habits. That is, they now demand to be part of a dialogue with other online personas, rather than remain silent recipients of advertising messages. Roping it into an overall strategy that includes a content marketing dimension would be a great start. Content marketing involves communicating with your market without selling to them. Rather than pitching your products or services, your goal is to give your consumers information that empowers and entertains them. Content marketing creates a win-win situation between the consumer’s interests and brand’s interests, which overlap within the Venn diagram of engagement. For so long English has been considered the language of the internet. This popularly held view is undoubtedly due to a number of factors, not least of which would be search engine bias and the fact that in its formative years English did indeed dominate the internet with some reports suggesting that in 1998 as much as 75% of all internet content was in English. Jeez, it was so long ago it was almost before the era of the mobile phone. So, English as the language of the digital age is a myth. So why then, in a place like South Africa, where we have so many languages, do we still insist on producing the bulk of our content in English? And similarly the return on investment for that preacher is very hard to measure. Instead, you need to hold or facilitate a conversation with your audience, and to do that you need to talk to them correctly. For a long time our newsroom was exclusively English. But as we increasingly started to play with our head’s up and our eye’s on the opportunities, both locally and within the continent, it became impossible to remain anglophile and the scope of offering, increased. As a business we now offer real time content services in Zulu, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Portuguese and French. And the only real question now is why did it take us so long to get there? It almost goes without saying that if a service is successful in one language that it will be in another. If an English speaking audience enjoys following football commentary in English, then why wouldn’t a Zulu audience enjoy a similar experience in their own language. And in turn sometimes aligning language and content is important. The days of one-size-fits-all English solutions need to be consigned to history if you really want to deliver an engaged audience.