It's Not Inside It's On Top: Memorable moments in South African advertising

By Khanya Mtshali

South Africans know how to make iconic ads.

Brands have influenced and borrowed from television, music, sports, comedy and youth culture in a way that has allowed communication across our diverse peoples.

It also sometimes gets it horribly wrong.

A blend of memoir, criticism and cultural commentary that is fresh, contemporary and informed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tafelberg
• Release date: Mar 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9780624090724

Khanya Mtshali

Khanya Mtshali is a writer and cultural critic from Johannesburg. She holds an MA in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from NYU. She writes about history, literature, politics and fashion and her work has been published in The Daily Maverick, New Frame, The Mail & Guardian, The Guardian, Newyorker.com, Timeline, Popula and Quartz Africa.  

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9780624089810_FC

KHANYA MTSHALI

MEMORABLE MOMENTS IN

SOUTH AFRICAN ADVERTISING

Tafelberg

To Mamzo, Dad, Bisi, Gogo, Mkhulu –

Thank you for exposing me to the joy of a great turn of phrase.

‘Let’s go’

Joëlle Kayembe, ‘Nothing to Wear’, Sprite Zero

(Ogilvy & Mather, 2005)

Introduction

About two and a half years ago, I was sitting on my friend’s couch, randomly reciting Cremora’s ‘It’s Not Inside, It’s On Top’ television advertisement. We were trying to pass the time during loadshedding, taking turns to discuss some of our favourite television adverts from our childhood, and surprising ourselves with how vividly we remembered each one of them. We cringed at some of their awful plotlines and politics, gasped at how crude and inappropriate their ‘jokes’ were, and acknowledged their occasional wit and creativity. At the end of our conversation, my friend made the remark, ‘But South Africa makes good ads, hey?’ When the lights came on and we returned to what we were doing before this state-sanctioned darkness, I kept thinking about South African ads, particularly those which aired after the arrival of democracy in 1994, which was when I had my first memories of watching TV. I remembered the commercials featuring patriotic beers, proletarian cars, culturally imperialistic pay TV, airplanes promising to fly the whole country down to the coast, as well as diet fizzy drinks capable of giving women infinite amounts of confidence and sensuality.

This book is a collection of essays on TV ads, most of which were produced in post-apartheid South Africa. But what constitutes a post-apartheid commercial, which I have loosely defined as one that gestures towards multiracial unity, started from as early as the mid-1980s. Initially, I thought this project would materialise as a thesis. However, after a few setbacks, I considered writing about South African TV ads in a collection of cultural essays. I’m certainly not the first person to write about South African television advertising. There are a number of print and online publications such as MarkLives, The Media Online, Media Update, The Mail & Guardian, Business Day, Bizcommunity, Between 10 and 5, Africa is a Country, Financial Mail and Money Update, to name a few, which have covered events, changes and news in the medium extensively. There are also a number of scholarly texts, journal articles and theses that have done an exceptional job of looking at media and advertising and providing insight into ads, the political climate and the dynamics of the industry. Some of these scholars and writers include Alex Holt, Anne Kelk Mager, Kim Hoffman, Sarah Britten, Sean Jacobs and Ruth Teer-Tomaselli, amongst others. What I’m hoping to contribute to this field is a fairly accessible, socio-cultural analysis of memorable South African TV ads from our recent history, which might exist as a form of online cultural criticism and commentary.

This brings me to the meaning of the word ‘memorable’. It’s admittedly vague and imprecise, but it’s meant to highlight ads or campaigns which have made their mark on our country – be it through a payoff line, comedic style or experimental (and sometimes failed) interrogations of race, class and gender In this book, I explore how we’ve grappled with our identity and standing as a country against the backdrop of global economic and technological change. In terms of structure, these essays focus on individual ads, or a series of ads from a particular brand. These choices were determined by how many ads were available archivally and the number of industry practitioners who were willing to speak to me. In addition, each of these essays examine the ways in which TV ads used to be able to project and even exploit the political, economic and cultural climate of our country, displaying the medium’s once undeniable ability to influence the minds and hearts of the most malleable, sceptical and even reluctant consumers.

The majority of the arguments and observations I’ve made in this book come from reporting and research, but there’s also a mix of criticism, memoir and cultural commentary. The collection isn’t designed to be exhaustive. There were plenty of commercials I wanted to include but couldn’t, due to a lack of information, time, access, footage, as well as some of the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. While I’m indebted to the media scholars, advertising professionals, marketing and branding critics and consultants who’ve published thoughtful and incisive articles about this topic, this book is not meant to be an academic treatment of TV ads, nor is it meant to just be a compilation of nostalgic commercials or a document for industry insiders. In fact, there are several parts of the book where it’s evident that my knowledge of the industry is amateurish at best. But having been on the receiving end of these communications my whole life, having watched them take on a life that not only is their own but filters into our lives too, I thought I might include some of my own reflections on them.

I imagine it would be easy for a reader to interpret this book as a glowing endorsement of the advertising industry. With every essay, I try to account for the practices in which some brands and advertising agencies have engaged in order to gain a foothold in certain markets. I also look at how business, politics and marketing worked together to take advantage of exist­ing divisions in our country. Finally, many experts and practitioners have declared that the 30-second spot or 60-second TVC (television commercial) is not only on the decline, but is considered by some to be old-fashioned, passé or even dead. There is some truth to that, but radio and TV are still a big part of how South Africans access and consume media. In my view, it would be shortsighted to ignore this in favour of repeating what we all know: that our lives are increasingly spent on the internet. In any case, I hope you enjoy this hodge-podge of a trip through our recent TV history.

1

Somewhere Over The Rainbow

The labour movement behind Volkswagen’s ‘People Logo’

The opening of Volkswagen South Africa’s ‘People Logo’ ad is a buoyant spectacle of industrial activity. A heavy, pulsating drum-machine beat co-ordinates the scene of raw materials being molded, sliced and thrown onto the car company’s assembly line with the force and intensity of a young fighter landing his first punch. Black and Coloured male workers attend to various duties on the shop floor, smiling at each other and then to the camera, before moving on to other tasks in the factory. A white male driver joins in on the smiling as he transports various objects around with rehearsed festivity. After an obligatory display of the VW logo, which crashes onto a metal surface in slow motion, we hear the words of the ‘People Logo’ jingle. It starts off as a melodic hum, transitioning into a corporate interpretation of what a Ladysmith Black Mambazo song might sound like before becoming a fully fledged anthem: VW You and Me, We All Believe in Quality, We’re All Kinds of People in the Volkswagen Family.

We’re then transported outside the plant where a low-angle moving shot reveals a racially integrated line-up of workers on a tarmac surface, dressed in their blue uniforms and VW caps, staring into the distance while passionately lip-syncing the jingle’s lyrics. The camera returns to the plant. Black and Coloured workers are now joking around together, helping one another out in what looks like the most fun and laid-back working environment in South Africa. Back outside, a few women workers are added to the frame for a hint of gender parity. The camera finally pans out to show the workers assembled in the shape of the VW logo, waving their caps in the air, which is shown from a handsome bird’s-eye view.

You may be wondering why I’m cataloguing the racial groups of the VWSA workers like a Stats SA employee in the middle of a census. In the context of some of the multinational car company’s most memorable TV adverts, the ‘People Logo’ is somewhat of an anomaly. It didn’t involve David Kramer, fancy race car drivers, a circus animal or a nice middle-class family travelling in a kombi (or Volksie Bus). Instead, the commercial was shot on the shop floor of the Uitenhage plant in the Eastern Cape, with the co-operation of about 3 000 workers who supposedly volunteered to feature in it. Operations were shut down for the day, costing VWSA millions in lost revenue, so that the film crew could capture the workers conducting routine activities, albeit with touch of thespian flair and zest.

There’s no denying that the ‘People Logo’ is a visually pleasing and efficiently shot commercial. It evokes the kind of unity and hope reminiscent of the 1971 Coca-Cola TV commercial ‘Hilltop/I’d Like To Buy The World A Coke’, which bears some thematic similarities to the ‘People Logo’. In that ad, young, hippie-looking adults of various nationalities, ethnicities and races assemble on a hill to sing about how much they’d like to unite the human race with the help of a bottle of Coca-Cola. On the surface, the VWSA ‘People Logo’ commercial was a precursor to the political changes that would sweep the nation in the next few years. It appeared to channel the spirit of non-racialism, which was a central part of the African National Congress’s (ANC) political identity, particularly after the 1994 elections. But this VWSA ad wasn’t made when the country was christened ‘The Rainbow Nation’, nor was it produced in the run-up to the 1995 Rugby World Cup. In the same way the term ‘The New South Africa’ was created by the late advertiser Louis Wilsenach during his tenure with the National Party (NP) in the 1980s, the idea for the ‘People Logo’ was devised in the decade before democracy, when some members of former president PW Botha’s administration were beginning to see the limits of ‘Total Onslaught, Total Strategy’.

Released in 1988, the commercial was created by a small but dynamic advertising agency called Rightford, Searle-Tripp and Makin (RS-TM), later Ogilvy & Mather, Rightford Searle-Tripp (O&MRS-T&M). The commercial was ranked South Africa’s favourite of the year according to Adtrack, a database owned by the data and consulting company Kantar Group, which has tested over 100 000 TV commercials and conducted 1.1 million interviews with South African citizens. It also won a Grand Prix at the Loeries in 1988. While this vision of proto-rainbowism in the ‘People Logo’ may have left viewers feeling optimistic about the potential of South Africa, the atmosphere at the Uitenhage factory where the commercial had been shot wasn’t so rosy. The ad’s invoking of multiracial, working-class solidarity was more an appropriation of the camaraderie that was established in the wake of the 1980 Volkswagen general strike, in which Black and Coloured workers staged a historic walkout at the Uitenhage plant. In the ‘People Logo’, Black and Coloured workers pledge allegiance to the so-called Volks­wagen family. In reality, one of the few organisations to which they would have shown such devotion would have been their union.

The 1980s is often referred to as one of the golden ages in South African advertising. At a time when Black South Africans watched their neighbourhoods descend into warzones under strict military control, agencies like Grey South Africa, Partnership, and D’Arcy MacManus & Benton & Bowles, amongst others, were reaping the fruits of a prosperous industry, in which the budgets were good, creativity was boundless and the horizons seemed infinite. Some of those agencies were mainly using techniques and tricks of New York- or London-based agencies. But RS-TM was determined to do something different. Founded by Rightford (the suit), Searle-Tripp (the artist) and Makin (the writer) in 1976, this outfit was driven by a high-minded pursuit of excellent ideas. If there was a place where young advertisers dreamed of working in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was the ‘little yellow agency in Cape Town’, writes author, editor and media strategist Toni Younghusband in her book Wallop! An Advertising Phenomenon Called Rightford, Searle-Tripp and Makin. Part of the RS-TM charm was its mission to turn the agency formerly known as Mortimer and Tiley into a hub ‘for non-conformists, for rebels and eccentrics’, who felt like outcasts. At RS-TM, if the idea lacked ambition, heart and vision, it was best left as a thought. Having cut their teeth at De Villiers and Schönfeldt (DeV&S), which ended with Rightford being sacked from that agency, the three men wanted to distinguish RS-TM from ‘the very conservative and staid industry that surrounded [them]’. They welcomed the liberal politics of young white graduates ‘politicised at campuses around the country’, creating a fun workplace that tolerated, if not encouraged, silliness, so long as the work was exceptional. They also pushed for out-of-the-box creative strategies, conducting future studies research, which was considered unusual and new at the time.

As young, mostly white professionals at RS-TM pushed the artistic and professional boundaries in their advertising and marketing world, Black and Coloured VWSA workers were on the precipice of their own renaissance. Unlike South African advertising’s golden age, theirs wasn’t triggered by an abundance of money, but rather a lack of it. Following the Durban strikes of 1973, started spontaneously by 2 000 employees at Coronation Brick and Tile,¹ a growing number of factory workers in the country realised that disciplined organising and strike action could serve as a powerful tool in negotiating for better wages and working conditions from management. The 1970s would lay some of the groundwork for the resurgence of the South African labour movement in the following decade, with the Volkswagen plant emerging as one of the most important demonstrations of what unions could accomplish through racially integrated, collective organising.

From the 1960s, VWSA had been hiring semi-skilled Black and Coloured workers to occupy positions that were previously held by low-skilled white workers. Under apartheid, Coloured workers were allowed to join a union, while Black workers were barred from union representation. The National Union of Motor Assembly and Rubber Workers of South Africa (NUMARWOSA) was quick to pursue Coloured workers, who joined the plant in 1968. Black workers at VWSA had to settle for the liaison committees which were established to manage, or even placate, the grievances of Black workers. But after several failed attempts to have their complaints addressed by management, it wasn’t too long before the liaison committees were seen as ineffective. This prompted their more political members to consider the idea of independent representation. In ‘Shop Floors and Rugby Fields: The Social Basis of Auto Worker Solidarity in South Africa’² scholar Glenn Adler argues that rugby and the close proximity in which Black and Coloured people lived in Uitenhage allowed for both groups to imagine the possibility of working together to negotiate with VWSA management. Cross-racial (or even intra-racial) organising was uncommon during that period. Almost all the unions at car factories like Ford and General Motors were segregated because of how strictly the Group Areas Act 1950 was applied in areas around Port Elizabeth, where both plants were more or less based.

This wasn’t the case in Uitenhage, about 40 kilometres away, whose fluid geographical design allowed for more interaction between Black and Coloured people, lending itself to the formation of close social networks in its surrounding neighbourhoods. In partnership with brothers Albert and Phumzile John Gomomo, as well as Vuyo Kwinana, the Coloured members of NUMARWOSA like Elijah ‘Scoma’ Antonie and Chris ‘Papa’ Williams had the idea of establishing a sister union for Black workers. This led to the establishment of the United Automobile, Rubber and Allied Workers’ Union of South Africa (UAW) which received immediate recognition from VW management as a Black union, right before the government allowed Black workers to unionise officially following the Wiehahn Commission in 1979.³ In April that year, the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU, later COSATU) was founded by mostly Black workers looking to ensure that shop stewards (or union representatives) were fairly elected members of the working class.

At the time that RS-TM was awarded the Volkswagen account in 1979, the car brand’s appeal was being threatened by the growing popularity of Japanese vehicles like Toyota and Honda. In Wallop, Younghusband writes that while RS-TM was excited to have an account worth R2.3 million in billings, VWSA was experiencing a relative slump in comparison to previous years. The Uitenhage plant had already begun scaling down their units and by the mid to late 1970s, they were down by almost two-thirds. By 1978 production in South Africa of the VW Beetle, despite its popularity, had ceased.

The agency got to work nonetheless, adopting Rightford’s uncompromising demand for ‘total immersion’ by redesigning each VWSA car dealership’s showroom, supporting merchandisers and providing counsel on product pricing, as Younghusband states. Even so, when it came to the actual advertising, RS-TM was still following the lead of global players, sheepishly emphasising the brand’s superior ‘German engineering, research and development’.

According to former managing director of VWSA, Peter Searle, it was decided that a family-oriented approach would be applied to the car company’s advertising to spruce things up. Instead of nerdy details about engines, directional stability or horsepower, these ads would infuse an emotive and cinematic style of storytelling, and reference South African lingo and humour. The new approach materialised in the 1981 commercial ‘Ag Pleez Deddy’ for the VW Microbus/Volksie Bus, inspired by the 1961 song also known as ‘The Ballad of the Southern Suburbs’, by English folk singer Jeremy Taylor. For this ad, which showed a white South African family travelling in the red and white Volksie Bus, VWSA hired Taylor to remix the words to the original song.⁴ The family group, which includes a mom, husband, kids, a dog and grandparents, comes to a stop in a field, where they take out some chairs and enjoy a large lunch. They eventually pack up and head off on the road again in their kombi. There is no hidden message, or engine-related boasting behind the ad. Just a family enjoying each other’s company on a roadtrip through the country.

When Taylor declined to do a follow-up to the ad, RS-TM hired singer and playwright David Kramer, and the 1983 commercial ‘Farewell’ was born. Kramer, a performer of Jewish, English and Afrikaans ancestry, had already achieved mainstream success with his second album Die Verhaal van Blokkies Joubert in 1981. As a former folk artist who used to perform for liberal white students at the University of Cape Town (UCT), Kramer was reluctant to work with a multinational car company at first, telling Younghusband in Wallop that