Al-ilm
Thursday, 25 April 2013
“Who really ported our Saka”? The guy who created the character speaks
Well, as a Professional, I wouldn’t want to respond to the Saka menace going on in town but then I keep getting emails upon emails from students, clients, fans and friends. People keep asking me several questions; why on earth did Saka port?
Relatedly, I went for a Strategic meeting with the Executive Board Members of a renowned bank, and the story came up again. In fact, they played the commercial and applauded the sheer brilliance of MTN. I actually heard one of the Excos saying ‘I’m going to port immediately.’ So I asked them: what worked for you in the commercial? Majority of them said ‘we just love this Saka man’
There’s nothing as powerful as that cultural connection and that humanness factor we display as brands. As I watch from a distance the recent Saka phenomenon I can only bow to this timeless advertising principle. Culture eats Strategy for breakfast. Hats off.
As the Creative Director who was privileged to have created the iconic Saka for advertising, I watch as this device takes on a life of its own and how it is gradually becoming a major case study in the history of Nigeria’s advertising. However, before I go to major brand lessons this should teach us, I shall quickly correct some insinuations flying round in our ad circle. Ad people can be their own worst enemies. Don’t take my words for it. Go see Mad Men. However, it’s good to have a first person point of view to this saga.
For the record.
First, Saka was not a celebrity used for etisalat. Rather, he was a character we at Centrespread designed for an ad campaign that has come to take on a life of its own. When we did create the character bible, we needed a talent that could act the role and he came in for the casting like any other person. Looking at the screen test later on, we had no doubt that Saka was the man we were looking for. You must give credits to etisalat to have approved of our direction and choice. It really was not their ‘type’ of advertising. So, it was not a case of celebrity endorsement, it was a case of characterization. In Wendy’s ‘where is the beef’, the miniature old lady has become a phenomenon because of her characterization and Wendy wouldn’t dare joke with that.
Secondly, we must also quickly correct the impression that the ‘funny’ man was looking for money, hence porting to MTN. While it is a fact that all of us on this planet would want to be better paid for our talent, I know personally, that Saka gave his very best to us on etisalat’s campaign. He was not signed on a contract. He was paid like any other 3-month model arrangement. He was not paid the proverbial gbem. For the brand then, it was more of a tactical usage. He didn’t fit their typical advertising look and feel. Remember etisalat is the hip, classy and swag brand. Like I said earlier, we must credit them to have approved of the Saka idea in the first place. Although it was beginning to look like this was a devise that etisalat could own, going by the results it generated, Saka was treated like any other cast. I am very sure Banky W got more handsomely paid than our beloved Saka. Far far. But where is Banky W today? He ported also. That is what you can refer to as celebrity usage. Saka was not treated as such.
Quickly onto major brand lessons.
1. Advertising people must realize that people don’t really go all out to watch and listen to what we have to say. People don’t like ads. However, people love characters. Characterization is the holy grail of great storytelling. And if you are lucky to have one working for your brand, you’d better recognize and keep it like gold. My friend Udeme. Mama na Boy.The Malboro man. The Michelin Man. The Morton Salt Girl. Some of these are animated devices, some are real cast. Whatever it is, it is the job of the brand to treat such characters as assets for brand equity. In Africa, our type of storytelling is rarely animated. Hence, the place for human characters. I shall talk about this, another day.
2. We must come down from our high horses as advertisers and start recognizing local nuances and cultural elements in our storytelling. I don’t know where we got the theory that ‘looking good is great advertising’. Great ads may look good but that’s not their intentions. They normally have that verisimilitude to the lives of the people they serve. They are usually humanly populist, interesting and sometimes funny. How professionally done is the Indomee song ‘mama you do good o’? It may be tough selling that to a boardroom of brand people who believe in certain types of music production and musicians. The Indomee song came to the market awash with on-air fake accents and stole the show. It mirrors what our people would do. It mirrors how our children would sing.
3. Lastly, and don’t take this personal as it’s commonplace not just to a particular brand. Ad people must begin to have a relook at how we treat our local talents and agencies. If we can go on to pay Kim Kardashian that insane amount of money as a country just to appear for a 3 minute talk, we must begin to have a relook at how we treat our local talents that deliver the numbers for us. Listen guys! Don’t like me. Don’t even like my work but hey please, give me some credits if my work is delivering for you. Ad people are mad people for a reason. They are awake all night thinking of ideas. They work and work to see their works deliver for their clients. It’s a two way street. The agency has the talents and the ideas, you have the budget and the brand. So, we need each other. Hence, we must respect each other. We must respect talents. When we lose, we lose together, and when we win, we win altogether. Same goes for the agency. Do we really tell the truth to our clients? Are we honest with our proposal? I have lots of friends on the client side and I know how tough it is for them to deliver on their KPI. So, we agency people should not feel victimized. Everyone is under pressure. But we should always talk.
When I tell you about communicating your proposition, you as a client should listen. It’s what I have done for donkey years, and when you talk about your Marketing deliverable, I must listen very well. You always know better. No one is superior. In Insanely Simple, a book, Ken Segall went on to narrate how Steve Jobs cut off the unwinding long process for ad approvals. As far as Jobs was concerned, a product person did not and should not be consulted on advertising creatives. Jobs trusted Chiat to bring the magic on. No interference. This is a must read for all clients and agencies: Insanely Simple . How to create a brand like Apple. Sometimes, I don’t know if we tell ourselves real truths when we sit at those roundtables having coffee. AAAN and APCON, note.
4. Marketing is a game of opportunities. You find a loophole in competitions and you quickly use it to your advantage. Dog eat dog. That’s the case of MTN. They did try the Saka phenomenon with Osofia and Mama Gee but they knew that if it’s not Saka, it’s not Saka. We all know this is a very strategic move for MTN for the portability season. However if I must warn that etisalat is a very spontaneous brand at times. You may expect a shocker. Guys at etisalat , it’s time to look within. There’s something inside of etisalat; locked up in there. The brand must find it. Every brand has a great story locked up within it. It’s our job to find it. It is often brutally simple that we overlook it.
Ok, I need some Coffee please!
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So, the story is not as reported in some quarters that Saka betrayed etisalat. I need to port too o!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
*This piece is culled from KennyBrandMuse via Ynaija
Thursday, 28 March 2013
Chelsea Launch £21m Bid for Prolific Turkish Forward Burak Yilmaz
Chelsea have had a bid for Galatasaray’s Burak Yilmaz turned down according to talkSport.
The Stamford Bridge reportedly got in touch with the Turkish club to discuss a possible move for the Turkish striker, who has been in impressive form this season after scoring 25 goals in just 31 games.
But Galatasaray only recently signed the player from Trabzonspor last summer and are keen to hold on to the free-scoring striker. Yilmaz’s contract with the Turkish giants currently runs until 2016.
They reportedly knocked back Chelsea’s initial offer of £21 million but it is thought the London club are likely to return with an improved offer.
It is thought Galatasaray are looking for a fee closer to the £33 million mark for Yilmaz, but Russian billionaire and Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich is thought to be ready to sanction a big money move for a new striker.
Chelsea are in the market for a new striker after finally running out of patience with Spanish striker Fernando Torres.
The misfiring forward has scored just 14 goals in 74 appearances for the club and it appears the Chelsea hierarchy are now prepared to cut their losses on the striker who cost £50 million from Liverpool in 2011.
Source: Caught offside
Every top player in Europe is often linked with Chelsea Football Club. If this story is anything to go by, then something must be wrong with decision makers in the club. What then is the future of Romelu Lukaku, Islam Feruz and other young strikers in their academy?
Tuesday, 26 March 2013
Achebe: Bearing Witness, With Words, by New York Times
Achebe: Exit of a literary giant
“If you don’t like someone’s story,” Chinua Achebe told The Paris Review in 1994, “write your own.”
In his first novel and masterpiece, “Things Fall Apart” (1958), Mr. Achebe, who died on Thursday at 82, did exactly that. In calm and exacting prose, he examined a tribal society fracturing under the abuses of colonialism. The novel has been assigned to generations of American high school and college students — my college dispatched a copy to me before my freshman year.
In many respects “Things Fall Apart” is the “To Kill A Mockingbird” of African literature: accessible but stinging, its layers peeling over the course of multiple readings.
“Things Fall Apart,” its title taken from William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” has sold more than 10 million copies and been translated into some 45 languages. Time magazine placed it on its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.
The novel tells the story of Okonkwo, a stoic clan leader and former wrestling hero who returns to his village after seven years in exile. (He’d been sent away after his role in an accidental death.) The changes that Christian missionaries and other white men have brought are intolerable to him. “Things Fall Apart” rolls toward a bleak denouement.
What sticks with you about the novel is its sensitive investigation, often through folk tales, of how culture functions and what it means. Mr. Achebe (his name is pronounced CHIN-you-ah Ah-CHAY-bay) had plenty to say about notions of traditional masculinity, as well, not to mention his braided observations about nature, religion, myth, gender and history.
The novelist grabbed the subject of colonialism “so firmly and fairly,” John Updike wrote in The New Yorker in the 1970s, “that the book’s tragedy, like Greek tragedy, felt tonic; a space had been cleared, an understanding had been achieved, a new beginning was implied.”
Growing up in Nigeria, Mr. Achebe attended schools that were modeled upon British public schools. In his recent book of essays, “The Education of a British-Protected Child” (2009), he was eloquent about what it felt like as a young man to read classic English novels. They provided a cognitive dissonance he had to work through.
“I did not see myself as an African in those books,” he wrote. “I took sides with the white men against the savages.” He continued: “The white man was good and reasonable and smart and courageous. The savages arrayed against him were sinister and stupid, never anything higher than cunning. I hated their guts.”
Mr. Achebe grew up, and grew wiser: “These writers had pulled a fast one on me! I was not on Marlowe’s boat steaming up the Congo in ‘Heart of Darkness’; rather, I was one of those unattractive beings jumping up and down on the riverbank, making horrid faces.”
Mr. Achebe was a poet, professor, short-story writer and critic in addition to being a novelist. His more than 30 other books include the novels “No Longer At Ease” (1960) and “Anthills of the Savannah” (1987). He published several children’s books. He was also the author, controversially, of an essay called “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness.’ ”
While many critics defended Conrad, Mr. Achebe didn’t back down from his assertion that the racism in Conrad was not merely the norm for its time. In a book of essays he quoted earlier writers who, he said, were less backward.
Mr. Achebe was a mentor and role model to a generation of African writers — he’s often referred to as the father of modern African writing. But like many novelists who find success with an early book, Mr. Achebe found himself almost solely defined by “Things Fall Apart.” He spent the last two decades in the United States, teaching at Bard College and then Brown University.
It’s been more than 50 years since the publication of Mr. Achebe’s pioneering and canonical novel; it no longer seems to stand, to a Western audience at any rate, for African writing as a whole. His talent and success have helped spawn an array of postcolonial writing from across the continent. Among the talented young Nigerian writers alone who cite him as an influence are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani and Lola Shoneyin.
In 1990 Mr. Achebe was paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident in Nigeria. The following year he gave an interview to Bradford Morrow in Conjunctions magazine.
Mr. Morrow asked him about the accident, and Mr. Achebe spoke about it with stoicism and good humor. “Children are born deformed,” he said. “What crime did they commit? I’ve been very lucky. I walked for 60 years. So what does it matter that I can’t for my last few years. There are people who never walked at all.”
“Things Fall Apart” is, at base, about the strength that human beings find in community. His car accident offered him similar lessons. “It is an opportunity,” Mr. Achebe told Mr. Morrow. “It’s a lesson. It’s so much. It is an enrichment. I’ve learned so much. I’ve learned how much we depend on each other.”
Credit: New York Times
First Bank of Nigeria (FBN) Capital Limited Graduate Trainee recruitment, March 2013
First Bank of Nigeria - FBN Capital Limited Graduate Programme 2013
FBN Capital Limited, a subsidiary of First Bank of Nigeria (FBN) is seeking to engage top-performing individuals from diverse academic backgrounds into our Graduate Programme, and groom them within an enabling culture.
Opportunities await talented individuals who demonstrate a high level of determination and a winning attitude. The Program enables candidates learn about the firm, its services and work environment over a 4 month period, with the close guidance of a mentor, towards ultimately discovering value for themselves and the Group.
At FBN Capital Limited, we seek to engage top-performing individuals from diverse academic backgrounds into our Graduate Programme, and groom them within an enabling culture.
We know that the quality of service delivered to our clients and stakeholders is determined by the quality of our people, and we understand that true winners are raised on strong foundations.
We believe our people are our most valuable asset. Being one of the leading private sector employers of graduate-level personnel in the country, we pride ourselves as being a progressive and responsible employer that constantly seeks best-practice methods and knowledge in attracting, developing and retaining staff.
How to Apply
For more information, visit
http://www.fbncapital.com/careers]graduate_programme.php?sub_page_id=1015
To Apply, visit http://www.fbncapital.com/content.php?page_id=7
Lufthansa Graduate Trainee recruitment in Nigeria, March 2013
Lufthansa is one of the world`s leading airlines. As an internationally-operating aviation Group Deutsche Lufthansa is active in five business fields: Passenger Transportation, Logistics, MRO, Catering and IT Services.
More than 400 subsidiaries and holding companies also belong to the Group. The airline offers more than 215 destinations in approximately 80 countries using currently around 640 aircraft, more than 350 are used for Lufthansa German Airlines. Around 110 million passengers worldwide place their trust in us each year. The dedication, skills and excellent service of more than 115 000 employees from almost 150 nations everywhere in the world is one of our greatest strengths.
The following Job Vacancy exists:
Job Title: Graduate Trainee
International Airline Professional (IAP)
Lufthansa - Lagos (Nigeria)
Description:
Lufthansa Passenger Airline is looking for Bachelor Degree graduates for our International Airline Professional (IAP) trainee program. We currently have an opening in Lagos, Nigeria with a focus on sales and marketing.
Lufthansa sales offices are responsible for reaching local and regional sales targets. Building and maintaining relationships with our corporate and leisure clients as well as travel agencies form the core of their activities. By analyzing and evaluating market and customer data, they identify opportunities in existing and new business. Through careful pricing strategies they aim to achieve revenue optimization. Our sales offices are also responsible for the marketing and communication regarding Lufthansa’s products and services, including our loyalty programs.
The IAP trainee program offers you the opportunity to develop and use practical skills as you gain firsthand experience in various functions of the airline business, with the focus on sales and marketing. As an IAP trainee you will be part of an international network of trainees, interacting with different cultures and gaining a solid overview of the structure, challenges and strategies of a leading aviation group. The IAP program prepares you for future responsibilities and opens the door to interesting career opportunities in Lufthansa departments worldwide.
Qualification
Above-average Bachelor Degree or equivalent qualification
Nigerian citizenship or permanent residency and work permit for Nigeria
Fluency in English (both written and spoken) as well as basic knowledge of German or willingness to learn German
High level of service orientation
Ability to work effectively in a team as well as on your own
Intercultural competence and sensitivity
Good analytical and problem-solving skills
Entrepreneurial thinking
Strong social and communication skills
Ability to work efficiently under time constraints in a dynamic, fast-paced environment
Proficient MS-Office and computer skills
Ability to meet all local security requirements through history records check
How to Apply
https://career.be-lufthansa.com/index.php?ac=register
Monday, 18 March 2013
Ohio teens guilty of rape
Thursday, 14 March 2013
Argentinian Pope, 76, is named Francis I
Tens of thousands of Catholics flocked to the Vatican City last night to witness Jorge Mario Bergoglio's unveiling as Pope Francis I - the Church's first ever leader born outside Europe.
The Argentine son of an Italian railway worker was chosen as the 266th pontiff on the fifth ballot of the conclave of cardinals last night, with the Sistine Chapel's symbolic white smoke revealing the decision.
To the cardinals who chose him, it is hoped the 76-year-old's election will be a watershed moment for the world's 1.2billion Catholics.
They undoubtedly feel that with his Italian roots he will be able to take on the Vatican bureaucracy known as the Curia - which has been subject to accusations of money-laundering - and to take a tough line on the sex scandals continuing to embarrass the church worldwide.
The former Archbishop of Buenos Aires is the first South American and also the first Jesuit pontiff, and will be tasked with leading the Church out of one of its darkest spells following the plethora of recent scandals.
But despite the most daunting of starts to his new role, Pope Francis thought it best to start his first papal address with a joke.
He told the thousands of soaking Catholics huddled in the Vatican City's St. Peter's Square that the cardinals had gathered to 'give Rome a bishop' but said that they had 'gone to the ends of the earth to get one'.
The multilingual Pope's birthplace will be seen as a significant move for the Church, taking the Papacy to a continent in which 42 per cent of the world's Catholics live.
It also poses a diplomatic puzzle for Britain, which went to war with Argentina when Bergoglio was rising through the ranks of his national church.
He is first non-European Pope since the Syrian Gregory III in 731.
Known as an avid reformer, he becomes the third non-Italian Pope in a row, having being born and spent his life in the Argentinian capital. Source: Daily Mail.





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