Mweb accounts department9/10/2023 ![]() ![]() Holgate adds that Ogilvy managed the entire advertising process for MWEB from media planning to digital and ATL work. At the same time as moving to FoxP2 it also appointed Vizeum as its media planning agency while Acceleration Media won the digital media planning business. FoxP2 would create the iconic TV ad ‘Lost’ (see video below) for MWEB. FoxP2 was also the only agency that challenged “Just like that” and came up with “Connect & you can” to showcase the innovative nature of the brand and to take its core service to a less frightened audience.ĭempers says it was important for the brand to move away from its ‘protector role’ (we will do everything for you) as the market had evolved substantially by that point. So when FoxP2 won the account in 2010 it was because of a combination of great people and its stature as a great creative agency that won it the business. Holgate says they manage their pitch processes internally as she views her ad agency as integral to the business and she places a premium on the relationships between people at the agency and how they get along with the people in her marketing department. Still – the ads were selling the Internet rather than pushing MWEB as a brand. ![]() ![]() By 2007 consumers no longer feared connecting the Net and MWEB repositioned its advertising campaigns to highlight the world of opportunity that existed online. The Jupiter Drawing Room held the MWEB account for two years before it went to Ogilvy who held it for a decade. In other words, you bought the box, and MWEB did the rest, just like that. They consume 4.5 petabytes (4,500,000,000,000,000 bytes) of bandwidth per month.īut back in the days of the early Internet it was a brand dogged by controversy, first for gobbling up rivals, its ambitious content play which then included the News24 and The Daily Mail & Guardian (now the M&G Online) operations, not to mention famously burning through R20 million a month just before its delisting in 2001.ĪBSA had introduced free dial up for its client base and signed up 170 000 users, quickly closing in on MWEB, in a move that at the time seemed like a threat to MWEB whose then CEO, the late Antonie Roux, scorned the ABSA offer publicly for not being sustainable (and was proved right in the end).Ĭarolyn Holgate, GM and MWEB Connect, the consumer arm of the MWEB brand, and Karen Dempers, Marketing Manager at MWEB Connect, explains that in the early days of the brand – the Big Black Box days – the technology was new and MWEB needed to position itself in a way which made connecting to the Net look simple and easy. It serves a user base of over 300 000 subscribers (which is not that much higher than figures available for 2005 – although it has had success in converting many of those to ADSL) of whom more than 200 000 sits on ADSL. Its pay-off line has changed to Connect & You Can to reflect the growing acceptance and integration of the Internet into daily lives. Today it is a friendly consumer brand wholly owned by Naspers. The first dot com bubble had yet to burst and MWEB was spending large swathes of money buying up rival ISPs before its 1998 listing on the JSE. ![]() The commercial Internet was new and exciting and big business was getting in on the act. The Big Black Box even included a (printed) book, a specially updated edition of Arthur Goldstuck’s 1995 tech guide The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Internet, helping to turn it into the best-selling IT book ever published in South Africa. The big black box, in case you don’t get it, was a box, and black, and offered wary South Africans everything they needed to connect to the Internet via dial-up modem, with the payoff line “Just like that” (I still hear the finger snap in the background).
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