{"id":7742,"date":"2020-08-17T16:26:33","date_gmt":"2020-08-17T14:26:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xneelo.co.za\/insights\/?p=7742"},"modified":"2024-04-09T13:55:02","modified_gmt":"2024-04-09T11:55:02","slug":"in-a-high-tech-world-we-need-more-than-just-high-tech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xneelo.co.za\/insights\/in-a-high-tech-world-we-need-more-than-just-high-tech\/","title":{"rendered":"In a high-tech world, we need more than just high-tech"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor\u2019s note. This guest post is from our Insights archive. <\/i><\/b>
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\n<\/span><\/i>We partnered with Heavy Chef to help them bring entrepreneurial education to more South Africans. <\/span>
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\n<\/span><\/i>Heavy Chef is a learning platform for small business owners and entrepreneurs featuring over 200 “recipes” and 2000 “learning bites” covering leadership, technology and creativity. These tasty morsels are words of wisdom and advice from over 200 leaders in their field.  The Heavy Chef community is currently around 45,000 members strong. <\/span><\/p>\n

Fred Roed, CEO and founder of Heavy Chef, has a deep understanding of the South African entrepreneur scene. We asked him what the most surprising recent changes are \u2013 here\u2019s what he had to say.<\/span><\/p>\n

Over to Fred.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s been two decades of hard technological advancements. In this environment, it\u2019s important to remember the soft stuff. <\/span><\/p>\n

The importance of partnerships<\/span><\/h2>\n

The world is crazy right now. There\u2019s a pandemic raging outside, and havoc being wreaked on economies and society as a whole. In this environment, understanding technology platforms is important. Understanding partnerships even more so. <\/span><\/p>\n

Heavy Chef recently engaged in a long-term partnership with xneelo<\/a>, focusing on inspiring and empowering entrepreneurs in South Africa and beyond. It\u2019s such a privilege to be engaging with the xneelo community again. I have a long history with the company, from way back when I ran a tiny digital marketing agency in the early 2000s. In those days <\/span>xneelo was called \u2018Hetzner\u2019<\/span><\/a>, and it was immediately striking to interact with the team.<\/span><\/p>\n

Digital-first, way back when<\/span><\/h2>\n

Back then, my agency \u2013 <\/span>World Wide Creative<\/span> \u2013 was part of the early crop of digital-first agencies. The traditional agency folks were a little bemused by our group of young techno-heads. We spoke about things like \u2018always-on communication\u2019 and \u2018many-to-many conversations\u2019. <\/span><\/p>\n

Marketing people in boardrooms were partly intimidated by us, partly annoyed by us \u2013 mainly because they had no clue what we were talking about most of the time. Much of the time, neither did we<\/span><\/p>\n

We were certainly a lot more confident about the new technologies than the traditional agencies. Traditional agencies were hesitant to embrace our digital gospel because they didn\u2019t need to: their business model was working beautifully.<\/span><\/p>\n

It went something like this: <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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  1. Agency salesperson secures a portion of a corporate budget. <\/span><\/li>\n
  2. Said budget goes towards securing a young, hungry and hyper-talented creative team. <\/span><\/li>\n
  3. This team is fed with alcohol and pizza, coaxed to working overtime in order to come up with the \u2018big idea\u2019. <\/span><\/li>\n
  4. After several \u2018reverts\u2019, the big idea is approved and then manipulated into marketing collateral. <\/span><\/li>\n
  5. The marketing collateral \u2013 made up of one television commercial, at least three print ads, some outdoor signage and three radio ads \u2013 is then flighted on television, print, outdoor and radio. <\/span><\/li>\n
  6. This flighting is billed on a conveyor belt of neatly stacked media channels for anything from 3 months to a year, or more. <\/span><\/li>\n
  7. The traditional agency celebrates the 18% commission on their client\u2019s media spend by consuming more alcohol and pizza, while the agency \u2018special division\u2019 hastily assembles a slew of award submissions. <\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

    This \u2018digital thing\u2019 was not good when viewed through the lens of five decades of ever-increasing profit. I go into more detail about how disruptive digital really was, here: <\/span><\/p>\n


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