The experience of riding in one of South Africa's infamous taxis is captured in the latest Ogilvy Johannesburg ad for M-Net's Channel O, which is founded on the advertising idea: "If you're African, you get it".
Ogilvy Creative team Art Director Michelle Dicke and Copywriter Neshika Chiba saw the premise of the ad as the fact that taxis are notorious for their base-pumping, ear splitting music.
The idea behind the ad is therefore to see what happens when you put two young gossip-loving, black women in a rickety old taxi, complete with blaring music and blown subwoofers.
"Try and have a conversation in one of these and you've got the perfect recipe for dramatising Channel O's 'If you're African, you get it' proposition - it's something we can all relate to and is very much an African thing," explains Chiba.
Lourens van Rensburg of Fresh Water Films, who directed the 30-second ad, says it successfully captures an authentic South African experience: "It initially shows two women in a taxi trying to speak to each other over the music. What's really funny is that when they get dropped off in a quiet neighbourhood, they continue to speak just as loudly."
The new ad forms part of an aggressive Channel O revamp campaign, which launched in August this year, in an attempt to win a bigger slice of the young black audience pie.
