More prestige for Draftfcb - 24 Oct 2011

This year it was the turn of Draftfcb to dominate the Pendoring Afrikaans advertising awards: out of 16 Golds and 21 Silvers awarded in total, not only did Draftfcb claim five Golds and five Silvers, its Cape Town office scooped the Prestige Award for its advertising for Cape Town daily newspaper Die Burger. Congrats to all the winners, and the organisers for a well-run and entertaining evening (tip: ear plugs are still a necessity, though).

Congrats go as well to Cape Town director Tim Greene, whose comedy-adventure movie Skeem won the Audience Choice Award at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival this weekend, as reported by IOL, and to Marina Penderis from Absa for winning the 2011 International Public Relations Association Golden World Award Grand Prix for the internal communications campaign "Absa rings the bell", as tweeted by Johanna McDowell (who is the 2012 IPRA president).

Meanwhile, in our homegrown local soapie, SABCwatch, there are further reports of mismanagement of funds and infighting...

Towards the end of last week, we held our second Thought Leadership Digibate in conjunction with Aegis Media and Taxi Radio, this time focused on the OOH sector (including commuter and digital), with some insights into the current intention to ban alcohol advertising. We averaged about 3942 listeners via live audio streaming per minute, of which 1462 remained listening for the full two hours. Podcasts of the lively debate should be available sometime this week.

We've also partnered with Demographica in its launch of the "Email Design Bible", a free-to-download pdf booklet that details key email design principles step-by-step and provides guidelines and examples to follow when designing email-marketing campaigns. The seventh article in our "Google AdWord Free Trial" series is also now up, with a short checklist to help ensure you're getting the maximum results for the minimum spend.

Last but not least, Biz contributor Vanessa Clark has been busy defining what opinion pieces are, why they are such a vital PR tool and the mechanics of pulling together an op-ed and getting it placed in her "Ready-made Feature" series. Look out for the third and final part, which will look at what do to if your piece is rejected and how to maximise the impact of your content, during the course of this week.

Go South Africa!
Simone Puterman (@SimoneBiz)
Managing editor

PS Oh look at this breaking news, a Cabinet reshuffle! We have a new minister of communications, Dina Pule!