Eric Edelstein

On Wednesday, I was delighted to be a guest blogger at the Reshaping Media conference held at the Bay Hotel in Camps Bay in Cape Town.

It was an action packed line up discussing “Marketing Trends & New Media Technologies” and a big thank you to Stanley Edwards and Natalie Hands from Platypus Productions for putting on a highly interesting day of speakers.

I usually attend conferences dealing with…

Internet Marketing and it was fascinating hearing about other forms of New Media such as Branded Entertainment, Mobile Marketing and Digital Signage.

My only negative point was that there were too MANY brilliant speakers (and one or two not so brilliant speakers). This meant that lunch was cut short, and coffee breaks were kept to a minimum, and although the conference ended bang on time at 6pm, most delegates had taken in too much information by the end, and the last few speakers had a very small audience. And they were definately worth listening to.

The lineup was EXTENSIVE.

A few highlights: (and these are just a few of the memorable moments from the day - there really was a HUGE amount of valuable content presented during the day)

1. Stanley Edwards from Platypus showing clips of an iPod being destroyed in a blender which resulted in a massive increase in sales for the Blender company

2. Listening to my mate Dave Duarte who is a BRILLIANT speaker discussing a variety of topics dealing with Transmedia, and of course not ignoring one of his favourite topics - The ClueTrain Manifesto - I have to admit I still haven’t read it, but it has now been pushed higher up my agenda! Way to go Dave…I’d vote you speaker of the day.

3. “The Fortune is at the bottom of the Pyramid” - Nic Bednall from BBDO discussing Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad’s quote. 30% of personal care products in India are sold in single units for a cent.

4. Henry Needle - I saw the HenryNeedle.com site about a year ago and wrote a comment asking why an international company was advertising locally. And today I found out it was a spoof site for Nokia! LOL. I thought it was a brilliant site for some forward thinking tailor - I never suspected it was for a cell phone company! And apparently the site was created locally…

5. Graunt Kruger from Vodacom speaking about the potential of Vodacom’s new mobile advertising company - On-The-Line.co.za. Huge projections for On-The-Line. Will be fascinating watching how they move forward. And vodacom4me and Vodacom live have just joined the OPA so they can show South African’s how they’re actually top of the OPA list. And Graunt was the 2nd person during the day to mention Blyk which is an American company targetting the youth by giving them free airtime and sms’s in return for sending them advertising. The UK have a similar start-up.

6. Mxit. Paul Stemmet from Mxit speaking about the growth of Mxit. They’re currently on 5.5 million Mxit users. I loved the way Paul mentioned the Mxit userbase…

“Mxit has a MODEST number of +- 5,500,000 registered users”. With 5.5 Million users, Mxit can deserve to be anything but modest! What incredible growth!

Mxit is definately a South African success story and I learned that the second biggest growth market for Mxit globally is Indonesia, followed by Namibia and then the UK.

Overall, the Platypus guys put on a great conference with an extremely high caliber of speakers.

The JHB leg of the Reshaping Media conference is taking place on the 22nd November. For details speak to Natalie Hands on 021 423 7245 or natalie@platypus.co.za or visit the Platypus Blog.

Reshaping Media gave me a big picture overview of digital media. It was a day well spent!