“The Pendorings are an important celebration of the rich diversity that makes our beautiful country so unique. We believe in the power of this diversity and embrace it, as part of living our Purpose, which is to enable more people to create and secure a better future. We are thrilled to be a part of this wonderfully transformative adventure,” says Heidi Brauer, chief marketing officer at Hollard.

This year's Pendoring's campaign focuses on the importance of developing multilingualism in society. In a country where more than 91% of South Africans have an indigenous mother tongue, mono-culture strips us of our dignity and rich cultural resources in favour of internationalisation.

The female-led campaign by Think Creative Africa and visual artist Lady Skollie makes a bold call for our mother tongues and for multilingualism to be applied at all levels of society, from early childhood development to the corporate environment. This is underpinned by the global UN Decade of Indigenous Languages that kicks off in 2022.

“As we start to look towards 2022 and the beginning of the Decade of Indigenous Languages, we do so with a sense of what could be, and a genuine optimism that South Africans will come to appreciate the richness of all 11 of our official languages, and the power of those languages to help us see the world with new eyes,” adds Brauer.

Adjustment to categories and rules

Categories and rules have been relooked and slightly adjusted to make room for the broader marketing and communications community. Corporate publications or annual reports, ATM interfaces, short films, music videos and the like can now happily be entered into the Pendoring Awards – as long as 70% of the work is in one of South Africa’s ten indigenous languages.

Pendoring GM Eben Keun explains: “We have removed words such as ‘commercial’ in reference to some film categories and expanded how we think about the definition of a ‘brand’ to include individual people with a public presence. For example, a musician, so an indigenous language music video can be entered; a content creator can enter into the Digital Crafts – Writing category, etc.”

The Pendoring Awards are unique in that it is the only advertising competition in South Africa with substantial cash prizes, not only for the overall winners, but also for gold and silver winners in each category.

The deadline for entries is 20 August 2021.

For more, go to www.pendoring.co.za