Masha du Toit

OK – I got to attend the entire day of Design Indaba on Friday. I’m going to write each speaker as a separate post, otherwise this post will get a bit long.

First up was Gary Human – executive director of Ogilvy. He introduced himself as the root of all evil, as a representative of advertising, where apparently the previous days speakers were much more concerned with all kinds of ecologically correct and relevant topics:

He was an uneasy speaker, taking a cynical tone – “good advertising is a unique way to sell stuff no one needs” – and overall quite strange as the first speaker of the day. He took as a theme “the seven summits of effective advertising”, introducing examples of adverts from seven continents and making some generalizations about the type of adverts each culture is good at – Americans are funny, Australians crude, Europeans are sophisticated etc.

The ads were amusing to watch, and in many cases I had not seen them before – but some were a bit hackneyed – that Honda ad, stunning as it is, we’ve all seen it before. So the talk was not particularly enlightening, but quite entertaining.

I found it interesting that the ad that got the biggest audience response was a South African radio ad for the lotto. Just a voice, with some effects.