“I don’t vant see, ‘Vee Kerr, Vee
Kerr, Vee Kerr!’ yelled an exasperated Indian gentleman across the vast
boardroom table, evidently seething and frothing at the mouth. “I kennot say, ‘Vee Kerr’ vhen I’m not
selling anything! I vant sells!” Before I proceed further, anyone not
fluent in Indian English will find a translation sufficing: “I don’t want to
see, ‘We Care, We Care, We Care!’ I cannot say, ‘We Care’ when I’m not selling
anything. I want sales!”
This dressing down took
place during the very first post-launch review early on a Thursday morning
exactly THREE days after the grand unveiling of the discussed-at-length and greatly
debated Warid Telecom. We promulgated the brand campaign—festooned with much
pomp and ceremony and razzmatazz—premised on the emotive ‘We Care’ platform
which we thought at the time was a decent strategy to introduce a Middle Eastern-owned
telco setting up shop in Uganda. What we did not reckon, however, was His Excellency
His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Nahayan Mubarak Al Nahayan hiring a superfluity
of Indians to administer the operation and with them came the innate
life-or-death hyper-urgency to sell, sell and sell, at high decibel if need be,
in addition to the utter disregard for brand building that has become
synonymous with Indian commerce, at least in this part of the world.
While we were struggling
to absorb the shock of this assault, Client swiftly went behind the agency’s
back to out a parallel campaign that might assuage this pressure for “sells” inside
just a couple of days of launch, complete with all the bells and whistles and
bits and bobs that have come to characterise the modern Ugandan radio ad; never
mind that a sales component was dovetailed into the strategy all along or that no
one knew jack-shit about Warid Telecom or their capabilities at the time, or even
that the tactical campaign betrayed no discernible semblance to the brand
campaign personally approved by H.E. the Sheikh. This series of unfortunate events,
I believe, marked Ground Zero for the racket, clatter and clutter we hear on Ugandan
radio today. (Aside: Must every radio
ad feature that aggravating man
perpetually bellowing at the top of his sore voice?? But I digress...) Apart
from heralding the beginning of the end for Warid, within just one week of
being introduced to the Ugandan public, that particular development also sounded
the death knell for creativity in Ugandan advertising.
 |
This has got to be one of the low points of Ugandan
advertising, even by Airtel standards. |
Why bother labouring to
write a half decent radio ad when you can hire that lunatic to scream your barely intelligible, hardly succinct and
wholly unsettling sales pitch, all day and all night without fail? No brand
affinity necessary. Why even bother to craft a lucid campaign when you can
sacrifice your brand at the altar of ‘quick returns’ while pestering and harassing
potential customers left and right with sales promotions every single day of
their lives, month on month, all year round while at it? Perhaps they knew that
their tenure in Uganda was short-term, but the net effect was that Warid rapidly
metamorphosed into an undesirable and cheap ‘promo’ commodity (note: not brand), a reputation that followed
them into their last days. Everyone had a Warid SIM card which was promptly retrieved
from the wallet or wherever else it was buried every time a promo materialised,
which was pretty much every other fortnight; no one had Warid as their primary
number. No brand affinity required. In short order, other telcos borrowed a
leaf from Warid’s peculiar brand of advertising and because telcos command the
biggest share of ad spend in these parts, this lunacy immediately became the
norm, what with every single advertiser without exception jostling for the
podium to scream at full decibel; subsequently we now see everything, from iron
roofing sheets to sanitary pads, taken to market in this aggressive tone oddly reminiscent
of an Evangelical preacher in the throes of the Holy Ghost. So the next time a
client approaches you with that well-worn cliché ‘cut through the clatter’,
this is precisely what they are talking about. Ugandan radio is practically
‘unlistenable’ to.
 |
Airtel's entry for the 2014 Loeries. Notice it had been recycled for a decade
before Airtel "thought up" the award winning idea. |
Now DNA is a curious phenomenon.
Unless a mutation occurs, it is pre-programmed to propagate, replicate and
assert itself in successive generations. And so it transpired that in 2013 Airtel
acquired Warid for $100m and with it the proclivity for jarring communication and
an etched-in-stone predisposition towards absolutely no creativity in
advertising. Airtel then proceeded to set the bar much lower than did its
precursor via unashamedly divesting international award-winning campaigns,
tagging their logo onto them and passing them off as their own and then deliberately
entering them in other international
awards, ostensibly unaware that the world is nowadays a very small place
thanks—ironically—to the Internet, their key revenue stream second only to
Voice. You can’t make this stuff up.
As earlier noted, other
telcos long ago took cue from the Warid-Airtel tag-team (thereby opting for the
path of least resistance) and are now up to their eyeballs in this hapless miasma
of hopeless imitation. It is indeed a sad day when one witnesses two telcos
apparently independent of each other producing literally the same poster for
public consumption, complete with the exact same concept, visuals and even copy,
the only point of divergence being logos and brand colours. This egregious lapse
in judgement can be quickly attributed to the emergence in Ugandan advertising of
this creature called the ‘Google Creative’ whose first port of call is Google
Images (or Shutterstock, Getty Images et al.) in search of ‘ideas’ the moment a
job lands on his or her desk, a practice diametrically opposed to the
time-honoured process of mulling over the brief and coming up with considered, original ideas and executions. Sadder
still is the decline of the Strategic Creative.
 |
| Do we still have creative agencies in Uganda? |
The Ugandan advertising
landscape is littered with a surfeit of these Google Creatives, a disproportionately
large number of whom now masquerade as Creative Directors, “Executive” even. Matters
are not helped one bit by the super-urgent and kneejerk approach that has
become the modus operandi of the
telco industry, which scarcely leaves any time at all for anyone to produce anything
original or nominally consequential. As one of my readers pithily observed
recently, “...and both MTN’s
and Airtel’s agencies have the same really tired old idea of ‘My Paka Paka’ and
‘My Pakalast’ recycled from MAAD’s original ‘Pakalast’ for Warid.”
The Prosecution rests, my Lords and Ladies.
******
The pain in the Ugandan
advertising industry is not relenting.
During the weekend of
24th—26th February it was variously bandied about that The
Brand House had dropped a whopping 8 employees like hot stones, including an
unprecedented 3 top level managers, one of them a shareholder. Now the veil
shrouding the events leading to this bloodbath is drawing. I earlier reported that The Agency Formerly Known As Moringa
is haemorrhaging clients faster than a dripping faucet in the still of night,
this being the main reason behind the collapse of the purported million dollar Dentsu deal. I can now report
that Bank of Africa is again going to pitch—barely a year since the last pitch
where Moringa only just retained the account—after severing ties with TBH,
which partly explains the Carnage at Moringa on Friday the 24th of
February. But that is only half of the story: TBH has amazingly managed to lose
SIX major accounts in the last 12 months alone. Is it not then conceivable that
David Case should come out of semi-retirement in Nairobi to re-assume the helm of
his sinking ship? Heads had to roll.
As rolling heads go, a
little bird whispered to me that on that same star-crossed weekend, the Group HR
Director at WPP-Scangroup was in town. Make no mistake: this was no Uganda
Tourism Board sponsored sightseeing trip; it was made strictly in the call of
duty and while here she wangled the dismissal of several ScanAd Uganda employees.
I am reliably informed that she will be making another round trip later in
March to lay off even more people. And this being pitch season, I have it on
high authority that NSSF is also going to pitch. I also have it on high authority
that the Fireworks contract is due for automatic renewal as has been the case
in the past. So all you thirsty upstarts can strike that delectable account off
your to-do list for the foreseeable short-term.
In light of all this, I
am reminded of that eternal aphorism by the sagely David Ogilvy: “Unless your
advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.”
The industry is in bad
shape.
******
Africa telco giant MTN
Group last Thursday reported a staggering $108 million annual loss, apparently
their first in 20 years. Could this shocking revelation possibly explain why
MTN Uganda is mercilessly and shamelessly stealing our data and airtime, an
ill-fated attempt to make up for this colossal historic loss? The unprecedented
deficit resulted from a
crippling $1.1 billion regulatory penalty that wiped out $770 million from their
2016 headline earnings following MTN Nigeria missing the deadline to cut off
unregistered SIM cards. Now a new management team headed by CEO Rob Shuter and
CFO Ralph Mupita is set to take over on 13th March with a brief to
try and repair reputational damage from the Nigerian fallout which cost former
CEO Sifiso Debengwa his job last year. They have already begun, it would
appear, by firing MetropolitanRepublic as their advertising agency. Value for
money can also be measured in monetary terms.
Back at the ranch, ownership
of Uganda Telecom Limited, the country’s pioneer in mobile telephony and
largest provider of landlines, reverted back to Government of Uganda last
Wednesday after UCom, a subsidiary of Lap Green Network, their Government of
Libya-owned 69% shareholder ran to the hills, completely unable to discharge
its obligation in injecting capital to turn around the long ailing former giant.
UCom also directed its five representatives in the Uganda Telecom board to
resign. UTL has been progressively falling and failing for several years,
particularly ever since Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, that darling of the Ugandan
economy (and a closer than close friend to the ancient Kingdom of Toro) was raped
with a bayonet and thus expunged from earth. Their market share has dropped
from 30% to less than 6% today, and we now learn that UTL has not paid any taxes
for the last five years.
The beginning of the
end sneaked on UTL in the late 90s as they were preoccupied with putting on a show
of shocking, never-before-seen insensitivity to the market, a rare variety of
arrogance and sheer audacity that misled them to believe that they could and
should walk all over consumers seemingly without consequence. Their enduring
slogan is ‘It’s All About U’ which, when read between the lines, reveals that
it really is all about them, the ‘U’ here standing for UTL. So they callously
and casually disrespected their customer base until one day MTN entered the
market and completely blew them out of the water; then along came Celtel who buried
them, never again to recover or regain an audience with the contempt-weary and savvier
Ugandan consumer who now had a glimpse into the Promised La-La Land of customer
care and expedited service delivery. As their corporate image was steadily
plummeting, so apparently were their fortunes in advertising: UTL has been
jumping from agency to agency for the last several years, leaving a long, winding
trail of unpaid media and agency fees in their wake.
 |
| "Just like Bbale Francis, with UTL your airtime will never expire." |
And then they landed on
the agency that prepared (for lack of a better descriptor) that ominous campaign
featuring Bbale Francis and Alex Ndawula, which turned out to be the final nail
on UTL’s coffin. Soon after it launched, Bbale expired (#RIP) and Alex was panned out of
Capital FM, resulting in a fully-fledged meltdown on Facebook.
Annexe
Meanwhile, Nokia has reintroduced
the iconic 3310 handset (“a chip off the old Nok”) to the global market. From
what I gather, it is essentially (still) a 2G phone with nothing like the
capabilities of the modern smartphone: an ‘updated’ version of the old-timey
2D, 2-bit Snake game, upgraded 2.4-inch colour screen (240 x 320 pixels, not hi-res), a slightly shrunken keypad,
battery standby for up to a month (remember when you could leave home without a
charger?), 2 MP rear camera and all other trappings of 20th century
mobile telephony. Last week I was thoroughly amused when Fundi Frank observed that the people excited about
the new Nokia 3310 are the same people wishing Henry Motego (or Ambrose Ayoyi) played
for Sport Pesa All Stars against Hull City. (Please ask a Kenyan to interpret
the joke). Now everybody and their dog knows that Nokia is a dying-to-dead brand,
but I can’t, for the love of Odin, figure out what plans are afoot by exhuming
this cadaver. For the time being, the rest of the world is gearing for 5G. #AskingForAFriend
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