What you need to know about the new direct marketing guidance note
Nadine Mather and Chloë Loubser
Improved Lobola Calculator app launches
Building on the success of its initial Lobola Calculator app, released in October 2014, Friday 13 March will see the release of the improved version by developers, Digital Peppa. The first version of the app attracted over 74,000 downloads within the first four months, generating interest from across the globe.
Its purpose is to give users a unique taste of the time-honoured African wedding tradition known as lobola, where a prospective husband, or more often his family, make payment to the family of the bride. The app is designed to calculate the users' estimated bride or groom price, bringing the tradition of lobola into the digital age with a humorous twist.
Once users have responded to a series of questions, including how attractive they are, their level of education and their number of dependants, they receive a comical measure of how many cows they are worth.
The new app will introduce new features including the ability to invite social network followers to improve the users' score, based on their social standing; a crazy cow to add to the entertainment value; a question to test users' general knowledge and various funky cows that change based on the users' value to share with their social networks.
Advertising opportunities
The second big change to the App is that it will offer advertising to companies that wish to target the App users and their social networks. In addition to this commercial offering, the company is offering free advertising to E-deaf, an organisation that specialises in the social and economic empowerment of the deaf community. This is to generate exposure and support for the organisation through the App.
The company is further exploring paid-for branding opportunities where advertisers interested in reaching users with similar interests, attitudes, and opinions, can invest in advertising on the shared funky cow images, which will span Twitter, Facebook and Instagram with the potential of reaching hundreds of thousands of users.
The Lobola Calculator App can be downloaded free from Android Play store, Samsung Galaxy Apps and Vodacom's App store. For more information call Digital Peppa on +27 (0) 11 027 2466 or az.oc.appeplatigid@tcatnoc.
