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Who do you share your ideas with?

Arthur Charles Van Wyk | August 24, 2011 | 0 Comments

It was 2007. I had just started using Facebook and received an invite to Gmail from Vinny Lingham, whom I wanted to help by contributing to the Sekamo local custom search engine. I then happened upon the website for The Pavilion, a shopping mall here in Durban. The website was horrible. It lacked clear direction [...]

Introducing the Social Media Starter Pack

Arthur Charles Van Wyk | August 22, 2011 | 0 Comments

On Monday 29 August 2011 Fluence New Marketing, the digital advertising agency I am the CEO of will launch the first interactive online course in Social Media in South Africa. Yes we know there are other online courses and a number of them are interactive as well. However, after researching the social media education space, [...]

Brand African?

Arthur Charles Van Wyk | August 18, 2011 | 0 Comments

It started one day when I jumped in taxi in the Musgrave area to go to Overport City, and the taxi driver tried to spark a conversation with me in Zulu – his mother tongue. I politely responded in English making known that I am unable to converse with him in his home language (I [...]

Get high on your own supply

Arthur Charles Van Wyk | July 25, 2011 | 0 Comments

The rap group NWA released their debut full length album in 1987. The album contained a very catchy song titled “Dopeman”. The catchiest line of that entire song is “To be a dopeman boy you must qualify. Don’t get high on your own supply”. I heard that song for the first time in 1988, learnt [...]

Why still do email marketing when we have social media?

Arthur Charles Van Wyk | July 6, 2011 | 0 Comments

In 1997, after a 1-year stint self-funding and publishing an underground hiphop magazine, I decided to make the switch to digital. I launched a “virtual community” called URBANTAINMENT. At that time the best – in fact the only – way I could see myself reaching the same amount of people I reached in print, and [...]

I wanna be a brand ambassador

Arthur Charles Van Wyk | June 29, 2011 | 1 Comment

Yesterday I saw the Volvo Facebook fanpage, which contains a great custom tab with high end graphics of David Tlale, Gert Johan Coetzee and Nkensani Nkosi posing next to Volvos they were given to drive as brand ambassadors. So the question sprung to mind: “Why are celebs given cars to drive by automotive manufacturing companies [...]

Don’t judge a Tweep by its cover

Arthur Charles Van Wyk | June 26, 2011 | 0 Comments

When I reached 5000 followers on Twitter in 2010 I retired from actively seeking interesting and influential people to follow. I mean how many people can you really have a conversation in 140 characters with in any given day? Since then all the human followers I have accumulated are people who followed me first and [...]

The myth of the savings account in bank branding

Arthur Charles Van Wyk | May 2, 2011 | 0 Comments

When I was 19 years old I started my first job at Coastal Metal Works in Woodstock, Cape Town. (yeah you can see I’ve been avoiding that company like the plague.. their website looks like digital vomit) I subsequently opened my first bank account with United Bank in St. George’s, Cape Town, but this was [...]

Marketing’s really about Cs not Ps

Arthur Charles Van Wyk | April 25, 2011 | 0 Comments

When I enrolled to study BCom in 1995 one of the courses I did was Marketing Management 101 (I don’t know why the 101, cos there was never any upgrade versions between that and 201). In that course the teach you that Marketing hinges strongly on 4 letter Ps (also known as the marketing mix) [...]

Brand ANC fails the future today

Arthur Charles Van Wyk | March 30, 2011 | 0 Comments

I’m a child of the 80s. Born in 1972 and grew up during the 70s, but mostly during the 80s because that’s when I started becoming aware of things. Yes I witnessed the 1976 unrest, but I was only 4 years old and had no idea what was really going on. All I knew was [...]