SABC brand re-launches with new pay-off line

"The guiding principle is ensuring that our actions have a positive impact on the citizens of our young democracy. SABC is shifting from an inward-orientated self assessing stance to a broadcasting culture that is totally citizen focused. The good of the corporation is to ensure that the SABC brand promotes democracy, non-racism, nation-building and empowers the citizens through informative, entertaining and educative programming in all official languages," said SABC GCEO Adv Dali Mpofu.

Nation building

Y&R was tasked with producing the brand campaign and develop a new pay off line. "The SABC supports South Africa being alive with possibilities, and has a unique and critical role to play in inspiring and building a winning nation," explains Clinton Bridgeford, creative director of Y&R.

Bridgeford says the campaign aims at bringing "Vuka! Sizwe!" to life, and focuses on what it means to the nation, and the impact it has on our lives. The wording and visuals that have been used in the campaign are highly emotive, and talk to the whole nation, a thread that runs throughout the campaign, in the print, billboards, radio slots and the epic TV commercial.

The commercial opens on an athletics track, with children milling about. A branded school mini bus arrives, to the kids' excitement. A teacher disembarks and takes his tie off. The children run over to him and he hands out running spikes. The children take them and start trying them on, exchanging sizes and designs amongst themselves.

While the children are preoccupied with the spikes, the teacher walks around collecting pieces of broken glass off the ground. He speaks: "Vuka! Sizwe! These two words make me view every child as my own." As the teacher walks on the track, a couple of kids speed past him racing each other. The narrator says, "They make me treat them with love, giving them the security they deserve."

All walks of life

The commercial uses South Africans from all walks of life - a businesswoman in the city, watching people from all walks of life catching taxis, or climbing into their cars saying, "These words help me understand that we're all different, yet equal."

It shows a shop owner placing a basket of free condoms on his counter, telling us that sometimes we shouldn't only mind our own business, and a vendor on a dusty Limpopo road waving at a busload of Japanese tourists, saying, "I remember that the world is watching."

Towards the end we see eight SABC staff members, going about their jobs and saying fragments of a sentence: "Vuka! Sizwe! Two words that drive us as a public service broadcaster. That inform every decision we make. They are our way of saying: 'Rise South Africa! Let us build a winning nation together.'"