New black-owned agency Azaguys is a breed apart, pioneering the `imbizo’ concept to assist with their advertising campaigns. Ferial Haffajee reports
BAKER MASEKO and Sipho Luthuli fly into the room in a whoosh of co-ordinated ties and shoes so shiny you can see your reflection in them.
They’re all energy and pace; eyes darting everywhere and words aimed precisely at various targets – sometimes a competing advertising agency, other times challenging stereotypes. Their words spurt forth like well-aimed assegais.
Maseko and Luthuli are the brains behind Azaguys – the newest, black-owned advertising agency on the block.
Officially launched just six weeks ago, their Sandton offices are so new that the company’s insignia – a spear of course – is still stuck up with Prestik.
Like all carefully chosen agency names, this one too has been coined for multi- meaning: it’s sharp, wants to be at the cutting edge and wants to stand apart from the rest. “It’s a play on `other guys’,” says Maseko, the company’s client services director.
So, what sets it apart from other advertising agencies, particularly black agencies? Azaguys does not assume it will get the business that other white agencies are scrambling for, simply because it is black.
“The fact that I’m black doesn’t make me an expert,” says Maseko. To disarm the myth that being black means “automatic expertise in South Africa”, Azaguys has pioneered a plan called “the imbizo [big meeting] concept”.
It has assembled a group of “experts”, black and white, whom it can call on to help research and plan its advertising campaigns.
The experts range from an economist, a business fundi to a market researcher who are on call 24 hours a day.
“We can also co-opt education specialists, teachers, nurses, lay-people,” says Maseko, adding that Azaguys, unlike other advertising agencies does not rely on “just two people” – the strategic planner and creative director – to co-ordinate and plan campaigns.
The company says it wants to win accounts with this imbizo innovation as it proves that it actively headhunts people with the precise background and knowledge before embarking on a campaign. Maseko and Luthuli argue that they do not want to win advertising contracts because they’re PDIs (previously disadvantaged individuals).
“I like beating whoever’s up against me. I would feel insulted if something was given to me because I’m black,” says Luthuli.
Azaguys has used the imbizo concept to run campaigns for the company’s two biggest accounts: the Ntsika Investment Promotion Agency and Transnet. The ads are simple, but a little unexciting. They do, however, get the message across.
The Ntsika Campaign is an introductory campaign (Ntsika is a new government initiative to support and bolster small and medium-sized businesses). The newspaper advertisements flighted last week answer the basic questions of who, why, and where do we get hold of them.
The clients seem to be happy. “[The campaign] is not just creative, nice and pretty. It looks at the commercial aspect and it is very informative about Ntsika,” says Lulu Bolani of Ntsika.
Transnet’s brief to Azaguys was to create a new look, different to the staid orange, white and blue image which characterises the transport parastatal. The campaign hit the press last Sunday. It’s a basic campaign; all easy-to-read type with new colours and a new mission statement.
Azaguys’s two maiden voyages don’t look likely to win them any prizes. And that’s fine with the agency: “We want to create ads that people understand, not ads that are designed to win prizes in Paris,” says Luthuli.
He argues that the fledgling company is not Afrocentric, but that it does have a special understanding of “that group of people all businesses want to reach” – the emerging black middle class.
Maseko says the agency can almost guarantee a growth spurt as they never take any shortcuts with their adverts.
Azaguys, he says, will never make “one- size-fits-all advertisements” like the Lux soap campaign where all the agency did was change the colour of the woman singing in the bath.
They’re also critical of Telkom’s big budget ad about the young man who sends a message – via a telephone network which goes from big city to tiny dorp – that his AK-47 must be destroyed. “That criminalises the townships. They don’t understand the townships,” complains Luthuli.
It’s precisely complaints like these which were the genesis of HerdBuoys, the biggest of black-owned agencies.
However, Luthuli criticises HerdBouys, saying the agency has “missed the point”.
Perhaps because they’re older and wiser, Herdbuoys is more magnanimous. The agency’s chief operating officer Happy Ntishingila says: “The more black-owned agencies, the better.”
But he questions whether Maseko and Luthuli, an economist and lawyer respectively, have enough advertising experience.
“You must have worked a considerable time in the industry; especially when you’re spending millions.”
But Azaguys hasn’t gone in cold. The company’s other major shareholder is the Meintjies-Parker agency, which owns 49% of Azaguys. For the next six months, Meintjies-Parker will play big brother to the new kid on the block.
All the art work, media planning, administration and finance will be done for Azaguys by Meintjies-Parker, which is behind some pretty major accounts like Clover, Comair, Saambou and CTM.
“It’s their way of giving support for new players in the market. We will buy out their shares whenever we can afford to,” says Maseko. The symbiosis is clear. The agencies sit cheek-by-jowl with interleading doors giving easy access for shared staff.
And Meintjies-Parker also benefits from the street credibility which having a black partner like Azaguys brings. It’s better, say Baker and Luthuli, than being the token “black departments” of leading agencies.
Saatchi & Saatchi chief executive William Leach agrees: “Any sort of empowerment deal is good”. However, he cautions that it is “not good to have separate black agencies and white agencies”. Integration, he says, is the best means of empowerment as it reflects the diversity of the country. Saatchi & Saatchi has sold off 26% of its shares to a black consortium and has drafted key people to its board.
But Azaguys is sticking with its plan. It’s going for what the industry calls “above- the-line” accounts, the big guns which can bring in more than R5-million.
It won’t turn away from government work (it is, after all, parastatals which have given it its first boost), but Luthuli and Maseko want the exciting accounts which make you buzz. “Government stuff is not as exciting as advertising Coke.”