This agency, ranked 12th in size by staff complement, appears among the winners in almost every advertising awards pageant in the past year. It featured at the Loeries, the Pendorings (Afrikaans advertising), and the Assegais (direct marketing). It was the only agency to win golds in all the major SA awards, and also earned SA's highest film accolade at last year's Cannes Lions festival, a silver.
The event was the platform to launch Tony Koenderman's AdReview, an annual survey of advertising and marketing published with Finance Week, and in an Afrikaans version in Finansies & Tegniek.
Agencies are chosen for the best combination of advertising achievement and business development. Factors considered were creative and other advertising awards, new business won, growth in revenues where available, Apex awards results, and ability to produce likeable advertising (as measured by Millward Brown Impact's Adtrack.)
Net#work qualified for the overall award by winning in its size category, the mid-sized agency category. Size categories this year were based on staff numbers. Large agencies were those with more than 120 staff; mid-sized were 50-120, and small were up to 50. The reason for this is that international agencies no longer allow their local subsidiaries in countries all over the world to submit financial performance figures. This is in terms of American legislation, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
"Although we ranked agencies in our Big League table by income, the figures carried for international agencies were our estimates, and as such are obviously approximate," says AdReview editor Tony Koenderman. "This makes it unrealistic to try and define the size categories by revenue when making awards. Local agencies are ranked according to figures which they submitted to us, supported by auditor's letters.
"By our estimate of revenue, however, Net#work ranks seventh, thanks to a very high income-to-staff ratio."
Net#work gained an estimated R45m worth of new business last year, making it fifth-best in the new-business table, again putting it ahead of some bigger agencies. For the second time in a row, it was named as the best ad agency to work for, in a survey conducted by Deloitte's Human Capital Corporation. It also demonstrated remarkable public spiritedness, developing pro bono work for five different charities.
For all of these reasons, it was best able to meet the award's criterion of providing the best combination of advertising and business performance. In comparing it with bigger agencies, its performance is measured in relation to its size.
Other awards went to:
Mpho Makwana, ceo of the Marketing Federation of SA, has been named as the AdReview Advertising Personality of the Year. His move to head the MFSA has been marked by a series of bold initiatives to reposition the organisation as southern Africa's foremost marketing thought leader; reshape the Loeries into a three-day marketing festival; finalise the transformation of the industry; and establish a value statement for the marketing community.
Makwana is chairman of the industry transformation committee, which will soon be presenting its findings to a working group. By August a set of empowerment targets will be ready for discussion at an industry indaba.
These will include an empowerment score card to benchmark ad agencies and other members of the industry.
FCB produced more likeable advertising last year than any other agency, according to a survey done by Tony Koenderman's AdReview, an annual review of advertising and marketing.
This was based on the 60 most-liked TV commercials, as measured by Millward Brown Impact's Adtrack. A top-30 position was allocated three points, and a position in the next 30 earned two points.
FCB earned a total of 52 points, followed by TBWA Hunt Lascaris (33), Ogilvy (25), HerdBuoys McCann-Erickson (23), Net#work (21) and Lowe Bull (11).
Ádtrack separates the developed market from the emerging because of the startling differences in what appeals to the two groups. The emerging market places much greater store by information and seemingly wants ads that are obviously ads. The developed market seems to be more sentimental and favours ads with more entertainment value and a less direct selling message.
The best-liked ad in the developed market was a commercial produced in Australia for a global ad campaign for Whiskas Nuggets. In the emerging market, the most popular was a local ad produced by Saatchi & Saatchi for Postbank.
The ads are rated each week by a demographically representative panel of viewers.
Nearly 300 guests at the AdReview Awards banquet on April 1 gave FCB deputy chairman Nkwenkwe Nkomo a standing ovation when he was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award for his "enduring contribution to the advancement of the advertising industry."
When he emerged from eight years on Robben Island and Pretoria Central in 1982, for the crime of being national organiser of the Black People's Convention, he was offered a job in advertising by Len van Zyl at Lindsay Smithers. He wasn't sure what a copywriter was, but he quickly discovered he had the talent.
Seventeen years later he became the first black chairman of the Association of Advertising Agencies, as it then was, and he played a crucial role in leading the ad industry's commitment to the Transformation Charter.
Last year his career reached another climax when he helped engineer the biggest empowerment deal ever, a 26% purchase of FCB, SA's biggest marketing communications group, by black investors, including himself.
The effect of transformation policies in the ad industry is clearly evident in the agencies which have reported results in Tony Koenderman's AdReview this year. Of the top 28 reporting agencies on the Big League table, only eight have no form of equity empowerment. But three of the eight have deals pending.
The internal empowerment, or "representivity" level averages just under 33%, which means that across the industry many agencies are within reach of achieving the target of 40% by the end of the year to which they committed themselves four years ago.
Five are already there: Blueprint with 70%, HerdBuoys McCann-Erickson with 58%, Chilli Bush with 42%, Grey Global with 41% and OliverMcIntyre with 40%.
Another nine are at 35% or above, and are likely to hit target by year-end, but more than a third of the top agencies are nowhere close.
Moreover, the industry has still failed to attract enough advertising professionals, such as copywriters, art directors, strategic planners and account executives. Only a quarter of these professionals are previously disadvantaged individuals.
The biggest empowerment deal of last year left FCB, the biggest and most diversified of agency group in the country, with no local white equity. The company is now 74% held by Interpublic Group of New York, the parent company of FCB Worldwide, and 26% by black SA investors.
AdReview
Tony Koenderman
Tel: (011) 263 4727
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