‘Future Advertising’ Specialists feature on Between 10and5

Whilst TV and radio are still the major players in the South African advertising scene, new categories of media have emerged over the past few years that are reshaping the marketing landscape. An example of the work done by the OWS digital marketing agency Portland will show you how marketing continues to evolve continuously. Initially, all of these new forms of marketing fall under the umbrella term ‘digital’. These new non-traditional marketing channels have since mushroomed into their own independent fields with entire specialized businesses that employ a whole troop of highly skilled professionals whose job titles didn’t exist 10 years ago. For example, digital marketing techniques such as email campaigns are now widely used to promote products and services in most industries and these strategies are often overseen by a digital marketing campaign manager. If you would like to learn more about email marketing, you can head to the make a website hub website. Above all, it will be interesting to see if any more digital marketing techniques emerge over the next few years.

Today, it’s impossible to talk about marketing and advertising without including social media experts, bloggers, seeders, influencers, online video producers like this Utah video production
company, branded content specialists, digital marketing gurus, mobile mavens and the like, who each play a pivotal role in connecting brands to their audience in new ways.

With the Loerie Awards taking place this weekend, which will celebrate and award the biggest and the best campaigns of the year, we decided to check in with fellow ‘future advertising’ specialists to hear their views, opinions and predictions for the future of advertising and marketing. We asked each person, collective and agency the same set of questions, and received a whole truck-load of insight.

I’m a freelance blogger and social media specialist. I work predominantly with destination clients, promoting destinations across digital platforms. I work mostly with Destinate, a boutique destination marketing agency headed by Mariette du Toit-Helmbold, who was the CEO of Cape Town Tourism for 10 years. Our clients include Stellenbosch and Reunion Island.

After starting my blog on a whim in 2010, I started getting more involved with brands in the digital space. I had my first social media job at a small PR agency called Positive Dialogue. Combining my love for Cape Town and digital, I started working on the Cape Town Tourism brand in 2012. I decided to go freelance in the beginning of 2014 and I have not yet looked back.

I think so. Essentially we are advertising experiences. The great thing about destination marketing is that you are marketing something that a person can never have enough of. You can have too many pairs of shoes, but you can never have too much travel. I get to marketing something that helps people have meaningful, life-changing experiences, which is really fun.

Well, when I graduated from high school in 2006, there was no such thing as a job in social media. Maybe if you worked for MySpace, but that was so far removed from my Afrikaans world. Social media and the idea of marketing has created the opportunity for people to make their own positions. Back in the day there were no such thing as a Pay Per Click Agency, but now that we know professionals like these exist, we might as well use them to our advantage. If they are willing to offer their services to help our businesses, then who are we to turn it down? I don’t have any formal degree in marketing, writing or digital, but I’ve made a space for myself in the world of marketing by using platforms that appeal to me.

Simplicity. A campaign that makes you feel something. A campaign that you want to tell other people about. A great example is the Recife Sport Club Immortal Fans campaign by Ogilvy Brazil. It’s simple and it gives me goosebumps every time.

In terms of digital in the destination marketing space, I think we will see a lot more user-generated content. A few years ago it would have cost a destination hundreds of thousand of dollars to create a destination video, which mostly trade would see. Now, with social media, GoPros and drones, users are creating travel stories that reach millions of people and don’t cost the destination a cent.

I also think there will be a rise in healthy, socially-aware travel. Travellers want to connect with locals, eat healthy food and help out the community they visit. Destinations will need to start marketing responsible tourism through story-telling.

Originally posted on 10and5.com