#StartupStory: MMMC and Canvas CAM start joint venture

Pictured L to R: Thomas Mofolo (MMMC’s chief brand communications consultant), Anna Hlalele (Co-founder, Canvas CAM) and Vinesh Duckworth (Co-founder, Canvas CAM).

Like MMMC, Canvas CAM is based in Johannesburg and represents a wide variety of public figures, actors, voice over artists, TV personalities, and writers. Excited about the partnership, founder Anna Hlalele, said: “As a team, we at Canvas CAM are delighted and expectant for this collaboration with MMMC and look forward to impacting our local industry by providing revitalised, dynamic and powerful talent.”

I caught up with MMMC’s chief brand communications consultant, Thomas Mofolo and asked him to elaborate on this new venture and partnership with Canvas.

How did this partnership come about?
I know the founders of Canvas personally and have been following the growth of their business over the past few years with much excitement and saw an opportunity for how I could marry my marketing communications expertise with their skills of nurturing local media talent.

A few years ago, they invited me to a PR event hosted by Hennessy where they were in the process of providing talent for a new campaign that the brand was developing and since then we have been in ongoing discussions about how to use their talent as ambassadors and influencers to help out other brands.

As the popularity of using influencers to promote branded content kept on growing in the world of marketing we finally found a mutually beneficial way for how our businesses could collaborate and decided on pursuing this joint venture.

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Tell us about the new venture and how it works.
Most of Canvas' talent already has a huge fan base in their own right because of their fame on screen as actors and naturally, this has also translated into a huge social media following which makes them influential in a number of ways that can help brands looking to increase their awareness, affinity, and loyalty. Although they are not influencers in the traditional sense of being personalities who are authority figures on a specific content genre they still have a voice and most importantly a significant audience of young South Africans.

As part of this new venture, MMMC will now function as an in-house PR partner for Canvas and seek new brand partnerships for their talent, assist with increasing their media coverage as well as produce and manage some of their digital content.

Our value proposition to the brands who were looking to partner with is to:

1. Conceptualise creative communications and produce branded content for new digital campaigns.
2. Use Canvas talent as the narrator or influencer for all of this content.
3. Create affiliate marketing programs where brands can sell their products through the influencers own digital platforms.

What is your competitive advantage or core differentiator over the rest of the industry?
Most of the rest of the industry who are still trying out influencer marketing as part of their strategy have a huge challenge in managing and measuring the impact of some of these individuals so our main advantage is that our talent is already proven and has mass appeal even outside of social media.

Secondly, we go beyond just promoting product solely within social networks but also produce the content as well which helps with streamlining processes where multiple teams or suppliers would usually be needed to coordinate everything from production right through to paid promotion.

And most importantly we deal with the drama off screen so brands can focus on their own canvases.

What's first on the agenda?
Creating a collective and individual brand identity for the actors then migrating their followers from social media on to their own digital platforms (personal websites) where we can collect their fans personal info as data and explore how to monetise these fan bases through brand partnerships targeted at their audience.

What does the future of influencer marketing look like to you?
Very bleak. Influencer marketing is definitely not the solution to fix all marketing problems but just one piece of the puzzle for how to help brands navigate the digital realm. As algorithms on social networks continue to hamper organic reach even influencers will potentially start seeing their popularity wane due to low levels of engagement with their content.

In the future, the only true influencers will be those who actually own their audience outside of social networks. A high following on social media means nothing if you can’t engage all those followers in one go on your own terms.

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What advice do you have for budding entrepreneurs who want to follow suit, contemplating if partnerships are the way to go?
As a sole proprietor with only two hands there is only so much that I can do myself but with a network of other talent and partnerships in place I can bring much more value to any project I undertake so I would advise young entrepreneurs to also invest their time into collective partnerships with like-minded businesses who are already doing great things in their own right that can benefit their own efforts.

Find out more about MMMC from their website, Facebook, and Twitter feed. For more on Canvas CAM, visit their website, Facebook or Twitter pages for updates and general information.