Last week, Mario Gamper paid Virtuosa a visit taking time as an ‘intern’ with the hope of learning more about specifically online  marketing and  search marketing  in the Agency  environment in South Africa. He met Ingrid Rubin, our GM, at Cannes two years ago at a Lowe Worldwide Digital Conference; and made Africa (specifically South Africa) one of his stops as he is interested in seeing how agencies are structured here, the maturity of the market and approach to strategy and emarketing.

For 5 days Mario had  an intense ‘internet marketing crash course’ to help him in writing his book before he continues with his worldwide tour to other countries and continents.

I had the opportunity to interview him while he was here and I must say that he is a very knowledgeable and interesting guy, with a fresh approach to looking at online advertising. I envy his vision and the end result of his worldwide summary of advertising and the future is certainly going to be interesting.

Mario’s Background

Mario Gamper has a TV and Print Ad agency background where he worked at Scholz & Friends for 10 years. After heading up the interactive department, he finally decided to travel and write a book on changes in the advertising sphere around the world and what to expect in the future.  He has teamed up with designer Raban Ruddigkeit, who is the editor of Freistil, a magazine on Illustration in Germany.

What the book will be about?

Mario’s project is called ‘Ideas Will Travel’, which is derived from the notion that people have to be moved by the ‘ideas’ in a campaign/ad. Mario views ads as ideas in motion and the book goes further to investigate:

• how we create ideas that are being talked about,
• why they are being talked about,
• how they are being passed on.

Basically, in Mario’s view the challenge for ad agencies (on and offline) all over the world is to generate a successful ad that can generate a discussion, in his own words “that is the value… that is the lesson“.

Why is the book different?

Mario believes that we are already living in the ‘future’ that we predicted 5 to 10 years ago with micro-blogging and augmented reality, and the question the book answers is: “What can we expect in the next 5 years of the advertising industry?”.

He believes that ads/campaigns (on and offline) will aim to constantly re-educate and their success will be measured by their ability to create new ideas and be shared through various mediums.

It was great hosting him and I for one can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of this insightful contribution to advertising. There are not too many authors and books in this market that have managed to provide a well researched and global insight into changes in marketing and advertising.

To keep track on Mario and his journey visit: Facebook and to ask him any questions, you can also visit his blog: www.ideaswilltravel.com .

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Yesterday I attended Tony Koenderman’s breakfast session, it was specifically to discuss the upcoming AdReview awards that take place on the 24th April 2008. There were a variety of people, from stand-alone digital agencies to the in-house divisions of some of the large Advertising agencies.
It is always great to get together with others who share the same passion for digital and to know that there are so many other like-minded professionals out there.
One of the discussion points that came up and is always a sore point for us digital geeks is “who has been selected to the panel to judge the digital agency of the year award”.
It is a sore point because the traditional advertsing industry stalwarts are usually judges and they do not have the “big picture” on what digital is all about… if the entrants submit really “cool looking” websites and you “win lots of awards” for them then that Agency gets the most votes… no one takes into account the fact that most of these websites cant be found by the search engines as they are developed in flash; that “best practice” hasnt been applied for usability and, navigation is extremely time-consuming…. the end result of which is Client’s disappointment of the website’s performance and a reluctance to spend any further budget online. We have to educate, educate, educate that whilst “good looks” count for everything in traditional advertising, digital is primarily about the “inner” which is content, content, content; locating the content you require as quickly as possible and as easily as possible.

So Tony being the amazingly progressive man that he is, asked for suggestions as to who could be approached to sit on the panel so that “best-practice” for digital design is taken into account. It gives great comfort to know that the “industry greats” are so committed to ensuring we move in the right-direction to excellence in this medium.