COMMENT - From
Amai Jukwa's channel on Youtube
(YOUTUBE) Mugabe Says No To Violence
(YOUTUBE) Tsvangirai Must Respect Women
Zanu PF political ads target Tsvangirai
13/03/2013 00:00:00
by Staff Reporter
In the last election, President Barack Obama and his rival Mitt Romney’s campaigns are believed to have spent up to US$1.1 billion on political ads.
With the growth of Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites, the adverts were not just limited to television alone but were omnipresent in all spheres of life.
Ahead of general elections in Zimbabwe later this year, all the main parties have increased their presence online, targeting not just the voters in Zimbabwe lucky enough to have access to the internet, but also seeking to sell their vision to the world.
Campaigning has not started, because the election date is not yet known, but MDC-T secretary general Tendai Biti said recently that he expects the campaign to have a “cerebral component, a thinking component”.
He had no doubt, he said, “that in this election Zanu PF are going to try and be smarter than 2008 when they were crude, predatory and extractive” by focusing their campaign on issues.
If a new internet advertising blitz by Zanu PF supporters targeting MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai is anything to go by, then Biti is right on the money.
A Zanu PF-supporting polemicist, known online as Mai Jukwa, and who has drawn a sizeable following, this week released three attack ads all critical of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai.
In an e-mailed response, Amai Jukwa insisted the ads were a creation of “surrogates standing of our own accord”, adding: “Zanu PF is not responsible.”
The strategy appears to follow the American super PACs – political action committees allowed to raise and spend millions of dollars on advocacy programmes for candidates, but independent of the official campaigns.
Two of the adverts posted on YouTube and Facebook portray Tsvangirai as pro-same sex marriages and lacking respect for women in the wake of his amorous adventures.
A third portrays Zanu PF leader Robert Mugabe as a man of peace, juxtaposed with a video of the former MDC-T legislator Roy Bennet punching Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa in Parliament, and a brutal assault on the former MDC MP Trudy Stevenson, allegedly by Tsvangirai’s supporters.
Zanu PF may have fired the first salvo, but it could just be the beginning of a season of negative campaigns.
[How is telling the truth negative? - MrK]
Labels: 2013 ELECTIONS (ZW), ADVERTISING, TENDAI BITI
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Stop RB’s TV adverts, ECZ challenged
TIME PUBLISHED - Tuesday, April 26, 2011, 1:29 pm
Kabwata Member of Parliament Given Lubinda has challenged the Electoral Commission of Zambia to stop the TV campaign adverts of President Rupiah Banda. Mr. Lubinda said the adverts being aired on national television are illegal and that the ECZ should stop them from being shown.
He said that it was unfair for the ruling party to take advantage of its incumbent status by airing political campaign adverts on national television while stopping other political parties from doing the same.
Mr Lubinda said that no announcement of the elections date has been made; hence the campaign adverts of President Banda receiving airplay are illegal.
Speaking In an interview with QFM News, Mr Lubinda challenges the ECZ to show its strength by taking action against the MMD
Labels: ADVERTISING, CORRUPTION, ECZ, GIVEN LUBINDA, MMD, PF
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Milupi challenges RB to disclose the sponsor of TV adverts
By Kombe Chimpinde
Mon 27 Sep. 2010, 15:00 CAT
Alliance of Democracy and Development president Charles Milupi has challenged President Rupiah to disclose the source of funding for his “campaign adverts” which are ruining on Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation (ZNBC).
And Milupi has charged that
the ruling MMD's was using finances acquired dubiously to buy political power. Milupi said that it was clear that the adverts were being used as a campaign tool stressing that it was prudent for President Banda to disclose the financier of his adverts because ZNBC is a public medium.
“it is clear that those adverts are a campaign tool. It is alright if the government is paying for them and also if ZNBC is allowing others to air their campaign adverts, “ he said.
“Our concern is whether those adverts are being paid for and if they are, what is the source of the money. We are aware that they are foreign investors who are funding MMD because they have been given contracts by government.”
Milupi also alleged that foreign investors were behind the adverts in question.
There is nothing wrong for foreign partners to sponsor government to run adverts on ZNBC TV but they should be able to indicate and declare their interest so that Zambians are clear on how government is spending their money.
“Laws have been made and repealed to suit the interests of MMD for example the industrial and minerals act that allowed and required foreign investors to partner with government in order to be given licenses to operate, this administration of RB repealed that law now we don't know if there are foreign companies which are getting unusual favors on condition that they sponsor MMD campaigns,” he said.
Milupi said the people of Zambia must look beyond the adverts which are talking about developments that neither existed nor was forth coming.
Labels: 2011 ELECTIONS, ADVERTISING, CHARLES MILUPI, CORRUPTION, RUPIAH BANDA
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SADCtrader offers SMEs free online platform
by Business reporter
07/05/2010 00:00:00
A
FREE online advertising platform has been launched to take advantage of the recent surge in continental internet penetration and help boost trade in the southern Africa region. The internet has helped transform business across the world but Africa missed out on the so-called dot.com revolution due to low internet penetration levels.
However the promoters of a new free online advertising platform,
SADCtrader.com say with Africa’s internet usage growth topping 1 800 percent in the last ten years, the continent is now experiencing its own internet revolution.
SADCtrader.com offers a free platform for private and business to business commercial interaction covering all the 15 countries in the SADC region, from Angola to Zimbabwe.
“The project was inspired by a sense of frustration caused by lack of information on how to do business in developing economies. Information on products and services as well as producers and service providers is not readily available, which is a stifling bottleneck to trade,” SADCtrader.com marketing manager Douglas Tobaiwa said.
The project offers what could be a crucial marketing platform for informal traders and the small-to- medium scale enterprise sector (SMEs) which now contributes significantly to gross domestic product growth in regional economies.
SMEs growth in Africa is generally constrained by the lack of exposure and the unavailability of information resulting in businesses failing to realize their full potential.
“Users can advertise goods and services for free and they can also use the site to find anything including a job, a date or a holiday. You can search adverts in all sections using keywords, category or price using a powerful quick search tool or by location using the map,” Tobaiwa said.
Companies can also list for free on the site’s online directory which allows them to provide key information for customers such as websites and contact details.
“They can also give a brief description of their products and services which makes it a very effective means of advertising to the entire region and the world at large,” Tobaiwa added.
Free advert uploading: http://www.sadctrader.com/selLoc/selectLoc.html
Free online directory listing: http://www.sadctrader.com/submitdirlink/0/0.html
Tobaiwa can be reached at: info@sadctrader.com
Labels: ADVERTISING, ICT, SADC, SADCTrader
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The scramble for Zambia
By Edem Djokotoe
Friday October 03, 2008 [04:00]
On 1st September 2006, I published an article in this column headlined Life Without Advertising. I have been tempted to reprise it two years, two months and two days later not to commemorate the tide of angry corporate reaction it generated but to draw attention to the effects of the conspiracy between municipal authorities all around the country and big business on the urban and rural landscape.
I know councils have to find a way of generating money but I think they should draw the line somewhere about where and how companies advertise in public spaces municipal authorities hold and manage in trust for the citizenry. What is happening now is not too different from the historical episode we know as The Scramble for Africa where the big powers of Europe carved up our continent as though she were a Christmas turkey! Now big corporations are scrambling for our public spaces and defacing them in their attempts to woo our custom with advertising!
In reproducing this article, I am hoping to elicit some kind of action from the Ministry of Local Government and Housing or even some civic response from ordinary people, many of whom are accepting 30 pieces of silver from companies so that their walls can be defaced with garish advertising.
How can anyone possibly hope to keep Zambia clean if we are all going to sit around and watch big business and political office seekers appropriate every tree, every street light, every wall they can find and splash them with advertising and campaign messages?
And a lot of the posters are being stuck onto trees, street lights and walls with glue, making them virtually impossible to remove without damaging these surfaces. It is the sense of outrage I feel when I see these things that has motivated me to dig up Life Without Advertising from my archives and reproduce it below.
“Today’s article was inspired by Kalito’s Letter to the Editor published in The Post exactly one week ago. Entitled ‘Celtel, MTN Advertising’, the letter reminded me of a documentary I watched on the Discovery Channel recently about an epic battle between an African bull elephant and a rhino.
“I am not sure exactly how accurate the parallel is, but indeed when two corporate behemoths lock horns, it is not just the grass that suffers; even innocent bystanders get caught in the crossfire. The evidence is there for all to see. A landscape which has become an advertising battlefield, running with blood of Celtel red and the fat of MTN yellow.
I’m yet to find a single person in Zambia today whose head isn’t spinning from this advertising blitz unleashed on a hapless population by these two telecommunications giants. Word on the street is that if you stand in one place for five minutes, either Celtel splashes you with red or MTN with yellow! The two competitors are scrambling for every available space with a passion not seen since The Scramble for Africa when the imperial forces of Europe carved up the continent like a turkey.
“Kalito is afraid The War of the Primary Colours will claim many more casualties in the city of Lusaka, like it has in my neighbourhood where, in a one-kilometre radius, you will find six instances of advertising defacement. ‘I tremble at the thought of seeing Evelyn Hone College’s newly erected wall fence along Church Road suddenly coated in red and yellow,’ he writes.
“Doesn’t all this make you want to close your eyes, block your ears and imagine what Life without Advertising would be? Of course, money from advertising revenue keeps the production costs of newspapers down, making them a lot more affordable to ordinary readers and giving the press a chance of financial sustainability beyond unit sales.
But think about the piece of mind you could enjoy in a world without billboards, without irritating jingles blaring on your radio every other minute, persuading you to buy something you don’t need, without having to be crudely interrupted by an advert as you watch your favourite programme on television after a hard day’s work.
“Don’t get me wrong. Advertising fulfills an important informational role in the world of commerce and industry and is more practical and more efficient than direct, person-to-person selling.
But there’s need to draw the line somewhere. I think it is important to draw a line between advertising that helps you make informed choices and advertising that is pure seduction, founded on outright lies. The kind calculated to lead you up a garden path, like trying to convince you that if you drank a certain brand of chibuku, you’d be showing “Respect”. To whom, I wonder?
“When I was a teenager, I was almost seduced by advertising to turn myself into a human chimney. Looking back, I am happy parental guidance prevailed at a time when Will Power did not stand much of a chance against Temptation. I was intrigued by Benson & Hedges cigarette ads, particularly the catchy slogan: Discover Gold. Those who have seen this brand will know that the packet is a rich gold and all the magazine and billboard adverts I saw advertising Benson & Hedges exploited this colour scheme brilliantly.
Of course, every single advert carried a public health message (in very small print, I might add) that the Surgeon-General had warned that cigarette smoking was dangerous to your health. But who really paid attention to a drab public warning competing for attention with slick, glossy photography and the message: Discover Gold?
“But even in print media advertising, there has been some regulation.
For instance, in 1998 the tobacco industry and the Attorneys-General of 46 states in the US agreed to ban the use of cartoon characters in tobacco advertising because it was felt the practice encouraged young people to start smoking. This was after there was a public outcry over the use of Joe Camel, a popular cartoon character, to sell Smooth, a brand of cigarette.
“Proponents of advertising argue that we shouldn’t take advertising messages too literally and that as rational beings, we ought to be able to suspend our disbelief just as we do when we watch a movie. We know the blood we see on the silver screen is not real and that the vampire on the silver screen sinking his fangs into his victim’s neck is just an ordinary actor earning a living. So why shouldn’t we cut advertising the same amount of slack?
“Why indeed!
Try telling a consumer who is under-paid, overworked and over-taxed and who has to struggle year after year to put food on the table, to clothe his family that you have made his life better because he happens to subscribe to a particular mobile phone service for which he has to pay! And he is not supposed to be pissed off with the service provider when he constantly has to battle with network problems! Not only that.
The glib sloganeering notwithstanding, his socio-economic circumstances doesn’t change at all. I admit, catchy slogans are an advertiser’s stock in trade, but trying to insult our intelligence with some of the things they are throwing at us is another question altogether.
“Actually, it was in trying to insult our intelligence that advertisers gave birth to soap operas in the late 1920s. They realised they could cash in on the gullibility of the public and make a tonne of money in the process. Soap opera grew out of American commercial radio in the late 1920s, when all the smaller stations were being hooked up to make two large, rival national networks, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and the Columbia Broadcasting System (now CBS). Once large sections of the American public were able to hear the same programmes, advertisers began searching for the perfect series that would be most effective in selling their products.
You see, this is because radio and TV stations in the US and Europe operate on the basis of ratings, that is, the size of listeners and viewers who tune in to a particular programme at a given time. This helps them put a value on air time. The more listeners or viewers a station has at a given time, the more expensive the air time is.
“And the battle between and among competing stations is really about audience share. So CBS and NBC started to target the daily 15-minute romantic dramas about people with whom listeners, mostly housewives, identified. The first dramas were sponsored by the big soap manufacturing companies (Lever Brothers, Colgate-Palmolive and Procter and Gamble).
That was how the name ‘soap opera’ was coined. ‘Soap’ for the products that were advertised; secondly, ‘opera’ because the dramas were highly exaggerated and melodramatic.
They were targeted at housewives because who else but a housewife would have a passionate love affair with a detergent? In short, soap opera is a derogatory term for a never-ending story with an implausible plot aimed at viewers and listeners who have nothing better to do with their time and whose intellect is low. Of course, you won’t find that definition in a dictionary, but that is what it is.
“And that is why, as a matter of principle, I don’t watch soap operas, or ‘soapies’ as they are popularly called. They were born out of a conspiracy by advertisers to seduce us and take money out of our pockets while our senses are befuddled.
“For the record: I have nothing against advertising or advertisers. But like I said, there is need to draw the line somewhere. Consumer protection associations must do what they can to protect us from unscrupulous advertising because let’s face it, advertising will not tell us the whole truth about the products they are unloading on us.
“I know that in the US, more and more people are taking an aggressive stance against corporations whose adverts have had far-reaching implications on their lives. Four years ago, Caesar Barber, 58 sued Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s for jeopardising his health with their greasy, salty menus by misleading him about their nutritional value in their adverts.
Barber, who weighed 122.4 kg at the time, filed the suit on behalf of a number of other obese New Yorkers who eat fast food consistently, saying the corporations did not disclose the ingredients of their food and the risks that came with eating too much of it. His lawyer, Samuel Hirsch, said the multi-billion fast food industry has an obligation to warn consumers of the dangers of eating their menus. ‘It’s a question of informing consumers the same way cigarette manufacturers warn smokers by law that smoking is dangerous to their health,’ he said in an interview.
“Such public protection is a public health prerogative.
I remember how in 2003, the Ministry of Health in Zambia banned the importation of Jiggies, a popular children’s snack on grounds that the product contained tartrazine, a widely used food colouring made from coal tar used in cakes, biscuits, soft drinks.
Tatrazine is also fed to chickens to give their yolks an incredibly yellow look. Anyway, to redeem its image and its market share following the Ministry of Health ban and the report that appeared on ZNBC, Carnival Foods, the company that makes Jiggies, launched a public relations campaign. It involved sending Luckson Nthani, the ZNBC reporter who did the report to their factory in South Africa.
“Nthani told me in an interview: ‘Carnival Foods complained that their market in Zambia had been ruined by my report on ZNBC TV. They showed us around the factory and tried to underplay the fact that Jiggies does indeed contain tartrazine,’ he said.
“Today, Jiggies is back on the shelves, albeit with different packaging. Gone is the reference to tartrazine on the packaging. In its place is a reference to ‘food colouring’ but no-one knows which kind. What is the Ministry of Health doing about it in the interest of public health? Search me. I asked the ministry this question among others I sent in a press query in January 2004. I am still waiting for an answer.
“While things like this may seem inconsequential in Zambia and other parts of Africa, within the European Union (EU), nutritional labelling is optional for food production corporations unless any nutritional claims are made in advertising or on the package, in which case it is compulsory. The information should spell out how many kilojoules, calories and how much protein, sugar, carbohydrates and fat, cholesterol, sodium and sugar alcohols (polyols) are contained in the food.
“It may seem like a bit of a bother, but such information helps consumers make informed choices—in the interest of their own health. It’s fine, for instance, for a company to advertise the exciting range of flavours of maheu it has just launched. But what we want to know is: what does it contain and how much? I need to know that the product I am about to drink will energise me, not make me sick because I may be allergic to some ingredient they haven’t had the presence of mind to tell me about.”
Postscript: Since I wrote this article, Celtel has morphed into Zain. As one would expect, with the change has come a change in corporate identity. Thankfully, we don’t have to be assaulted with Celtel Red everywhere we go, no matter how remote. But that is not to say Zain Black (or is it green?)is a better substitute. Frankly, this is not about colour but about a wanton disrespect of civic values and public spaces. Who knows? Perhaps tomorrow, some consortium could take over MTN and decide to replace the chicken yellow of the mobile phone company with psychedelic purple? And none of us would be the better for it, I can tell you that. Except, of course, those who profit from defacing our environment. Enjoy your weekend!
edjokotoe@yahoo.com
“But question is: how golden are a smoker’s lungs? What about the fact that cigarette smoking has been proved to cause lung cancer among smokers and foetal injury and premature birth for pregnant women?
It is because of this that today, cigarette advertisements can no longer be aired on television in Great Britain and the United States. Public concern about the promotion of addictive substances in a medium to which there is a wide access, particularly by children has led to this regulation. However, newspapers and magazines are still free to carry such advertisements, as long as these ads are accompanied by a public health warning talking about the dangers of smoking.
Labels: ADVERTISING
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