When going digital, read the fine print

HERE’S one of those tales with a bizarre little twist. We all know newspapers are dying, don’t we? So, if you’re a digital security software company, where do you go to advertise your products?

Well, if you’re mimecast.com, you use the front page of a newspaper… because at least you recognise there is a real audience there – and people in that real audience are quite likely to be decision-makers in companies.

This week, mimecast.com’s simple but striking ad, on the front page of The Star, caught my eye for two things. First, the message was clear – and scary. The text at the top ran “91 percent of attacks start with e-mail. But hey, 9 percent don’t.” Okay, now you’ve got my attention. It went on: “Are your employees letting cyber-criminals into your business?”

And then: “Snap out of it. Stop malicious, targeted e-mail attacks with Mimecast Targeted Threat Protection.”

Then there followed contact details, both phone and e-mail.

It’s a simple, yet effective, ad. But what shows the real intelligence of Mimecast is using a newspaper to get its message across.

So for that bit of cleverness – and doing highly cost-effective marketing (for that cost, how far would you have got in cyberspace?) – Mimecast gets an Orchid.

Would that ad have worked on Facebook or anywhere else for that matter? I doubt it… because movers and shakers don’t waste their time on social media and surfing the web. They’re too busy making money. But they do read newspapers.

I must say I am normally allergic to government advertising or PR drives, because a lot of it seems designed to stroke the egos of the principals involved, be they mayors, MECs or ministers.

However, I do think the #ICareWeCare campaign by the Gauteng province has definite merit.

In measured tones, its message – in print ads and on radio – asks what protesters (in various places) hope to achieve by destroying things like schools, clinics and hospitals. This, it says, will only impoverish communities even further.

Whether this self-evident logic will get through to the sort of protesters who would like to reverse “colonialist science” of things like gravity is another issue – but I won’t quibble with putting that message out there.

The one problem I do have with some of the print ads is that the Infrastructure Development MEC Mamabolo and his advisers have been unable to resist the temptation to throw a head-and-shoulders photo of him into the mix – the same size as an aerial shot of something burning.

MEC and advisers, Rule No 1 of Communication is that if there is anything seriously negative, keep your personal brand well away from it.

However, that being said, I think the province still deserves an Orchid for Effort.

The thing about traffic jams is that, in theory, they should give your radio advertising much more punch because the motorist/consumer will pay more attention to your marketing message.

However, with time on one’s hands, one can also listen more closely and pick out absurdities in ads while you sit and contemplate the brake lights in front of you. Such happened to me last week. I heard an ad for Liberty, extolling some product or other which will help a company’s employees worry less.

Sleepless nights of its employees can cost a company as much as R46 000, the ad intoned.

R46 000 what? For how long? A day? A month? A year? No such clarification. I do know it has become commonplace to chuck numbers at innumerate South Africans, but I do expect better – and more rigorous science (whether colonised or not) from a company like Liberty.

Then it went on to say that it would take care of the employees from 5 to 9, so they would be fully engaged, for the company, from 9 to 5.

The symmetry is nice, but the logic is not. People do not only worry from 5pm (presumably) and then break into a broad smile four hours later. #LogicMustFall Oops… it already has. Onion for Liberty.