Woo hoo. It’s game over for everyone else and ‘insert coin please’ for the winner of the Urban Trash ‘guess the identity’ competition: Darryl! Nice one man. Hope you hit Sunday without sleeping.

What earned him the free gaming console? He guessed that the new character in Jeremy Nell’s Urban Trash comic strip would be a scruffy little puppy (dog).

And now for the happiest moment in any guy’s life: getting a knock at the door from someone wanting to give you free happiness. Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for Wii Wish You a Merry Christmas - a festive season hit by Darryl, Jeremy and Zoopy.

Grant Haskin, ACDP member and the brand new Deputy Mayor of Cape Town, has gone where many politicians have feared to tread: online! He recently opened a Zoopy profile and has been pretty busy filling it up.

If this is the first you’ve heard of our new Deputy, stop by and say hi here: http://www.zoopy.com/granthaskin

Nice one, Grant - enjoy

Flying into Cape Town this morning on the 7.25am flight, we caught a glimpse of the estranged Nationwide aircraft engine in the middle of a patch of grass next to the runway. Not a pretty site from where we were sitting (still airborne) but I’m sure our view was a million times more delightful than the poor Nationwide passengers, who saw the entire engine (there are/were only two, remember) tear free from one of the wings and hurtle towards the ground they’d just lifted off from.

Anyway, we’re back in CT, back at Zoopy HQ and back to our real day-to-day desk work that’s so important (even though remote laptop access is pretty efficient) if you need to make giant strides quickly.

For those who know what we’re talking about, we’re neeeearly there

Mike is dressed in a Carling Black Labour t-shirt. Nice one. His first slide is about 2007 being a tipping point for the SA Web. His point: Web 2.0 and social media are here. Even Mike points out how obvious this statement is - but it’s an important one to reiterate nonetheless.

Mike believes that Facebook democratises the web by making applications really easy to run, install and distribute for users who aren’t necessarily early adopters and innovators, but who find the utility simple and fun to use. But even so, there are obviously broadband considerations in South Africa that affect any social media experience from our shores. Times and costs are changing though, with Telkom pricing dropping fast. We now have more options like Neotel, Vodacom, MTN, Sentech and more. So the good news is that landline and mobile connectivity costs are becoming a lot more affordable, which makes the internet and social media a lot more accessible to even more people.

Social networking is NOT a trend, shouts Mike. The technologies are. We’ve been connecting with each other since the dark ages but how we do it is what’s moving on a daily basis. The web allows a long tail of content for us to tap into - from main news portals right through to the hundreds of smaller blogs. But that said, average users are starting to suffer from ‘message immunity’. Thanks to email overload, permission marketing and Google searchability, users are becoming more selective in what they listen to, watch and read. Interruption marketing like TV ads, radio ads that break up music and magazine ads that you just page past is dead. We need to think about and achieve a new level of interactive, engaging messages that have context and relevance.

Neal Farrell from Ramsay, Son and Parker was one of the key minds behind CarToday.com. He quickly states that we’re in a state of flux. The rate of innovation has created a state of excitement which has resulted in clutter and daunting amounts of confusion. We need to zoom out, focus and get things back to a realistic state of normalcy.

He’s a firm believer that the brand is king. When you go beyond the magazine and go digital, you’re adding value. You’re adding content for your readers and creating a tool to drive users to subscribe to your print title. And then back online again. Your online strategy can never work without the backing of your print brand. Why call your online entity carsarethrilling.com, when you can leverage 50 years of brand equity in a domain like cartoday.com?

Stop the Them vs Us mentality. Converge, converge, converge. Digital and print teams should be one team, that focuses on the same quality content, whether it appears on a print page or web page.

Extend your brand online. Finish a three page article with 7 more pages online. Feature more photos, more videos. If you’re at a conference, start publishing feedback online immediately and then run a full feature in the next print edition. Involve readers in a community around your niche content, ask them to vote and share their opinions.

Neal believes that one person should have a realtionship with the client. Not someone from Car magazine and another from CarToday.com. This is the answer to the question of print vs digital sales, and will remove the needless competition between the two … when they really should be one.

When it comes to online design, don’t forget your brand. How it looks on the shelf at CNA should look identical on your site. The biggest challenge: forget the tech, forget the money, forget everything else. If you can’t get the magazine industry to embrace digital, you’re going nowhere. Change management is the biggest obstacle. But once you get past this, the opportunities are endless: user-generated content, syndicate content, profile your reader/user base (get to know them intimiately), publish once and give access forever.

Video content allows three monetization techniques: pre/post-roll advertising (before or after video play), ’sponsored by’ advertising and branded content. Neil believes the last has the most value and the most opportunity for profit. Generally, Neil is disappointed at the current state of online advertising - taking just 1% of ad revenue in South Africa.

Now for some out the box stuff. Neal suggests that as content producers (rather than just magazine publishers) you could even be including IPTV, satellite TV and mobile TV in their strategies. The future is web, mobile, TV and whatever comes next - with the print publication as the anchor.

Back in Joburg today and tomorrow for a brilliant couple of days run by MPASA. First up, a conference called The Business of Magazines - an overview, examination and futurisation of the magazine industry in South Africa, both in print and (the part we’re looking forward to most) online.

Tomorrow night, the best of the industry will be recognised and rewarded at the annual PICA awards. We’re joining the whole shebang as media partners, with video and photo coverage going up on Zoopy throughout the conference and after the awards tomorrow night. Not to mention glimpses of the super-exclusive Cosmo after party

As I’m typing, we have a rather esteemed panel on stage, including representatives from Weg magazine, 8 Ink Media and youth forecasting consultancy Instant Grass.

The Weg guy is punting the value of niche publications in South Africa. According to him, there’s loads of space for niches to share generous portions of the readership pie. Those niche Afrikaans magazines that are struggling need to focus on quality translation - or face impending closure. He also believes in ‘being’ the Joneses, rather than trying to keep up with them.

Ivan is from TNS Research Surveys and is looking at the much-hyped ‘Black Diamond’. He asks who in the room has been to a ‘presentation dealing with Black Diamonds’ and hands shoot up from over three quarters of the room. The phenomenon of job-hopping by black executives is rife and the ‘emerged’ (rather than just ‘emerging’) black middle class is larger and more diverse than most people think. LSM, occupation, personal income, education, aspirations and ambitions, roots and world view are all variables that come into play. And though the Black Diamond group encompasses over 2.6 million people, marketing to them as a single group is a mistake that will not pay off for mislead advertisers. The various groups identified are: Mzansi Youth (18%), Start Me Ups (18%), Young Family (27%) and Established (37%). His overarching point: ‘the future is looking rather black’. The room laughs. Nervously. Because they know he’s right and suddenly notes are being scribbed furiously en masse.

Greg from Instant Grass is next behind the microphone and immediately makes a strong statement: ‘these blacks again … we have to continuously talk about them’. The nervous laugh ripples through the room again. Greg says that the black market is misunderstood and, surprise: Black Diamonds do NOT equal the black market. Life is more complicated. Greg’s company tracks ‘tribes’ of people (not traditional ones, cultural ones). The Facebook generation, the BEE brother, the hustler, 100% Kasie, Jozi Queen and more. The problem, according to Greg, is that the Black Diamond is a convenient marketing solution. Black people now apparently go horseriding, quad biking and live in our neighbourhoods - making it easy for the lazy marketer to send messages much closer to home. Greg believes in walking in the market’s shoes, which doesn’t mean taking taxi tours to Soweto and looking at people through glass. It’s about talking to them, putting things in context and understanding the complexities by developing your brand through a small group of people, which can then lead to larger groups. Consumer engagement is the first step in the right direction.

Natalie from 8 Ink Media steps up. Their group runs National Geographic Kids, Seventeen and Real Simple magazines. She’s talking youth market. The fact that 45% of the country falls into this bracket and are collectively responsible for R75 Billion spend per year. That’s pretty big. Facebook surfaces again, just to prove the point of the power of youth. More stats: 67% of tweens own a mobile phone (89% of teens and 93% of young adults own phones too). And 5.8 million registered Mxit users. The iPod also comes up as evidence of youth gravitational force. Seventeen and National Geogaphic Kids mags have apparently had huge growth spurts, with a highlight being the Seventeen urbanScouts - 13,000 readers who feed trends back to the magazine, which in turn help the editorial team to focus on what’s hot and happening. The Seventeen website and mobizone are doing superbly, apparently. According to Natalie, their mobizone is the biggest (in terms of users) in the country. From their NG Kids survey, with 400,000 tween respondents, 70% of the kids said they had their own bank account and spent their money on: computer games, DVDs, clothes, movies and cellphones. The biggest spend went to toys and entertainment. The smallest being airtime and travel. Food came second - thank goodness!

Fashion guru Dion Chang introduces his Flux Tred Report for 2007. He believes the pendulum has swung from the one extreme (pre-apartheid) to the other (post-apartheid) and is now starting to settle in the middle. Chang’s new catchphrase throws a very interesting curve ball into the marketing mix: cultural commuting. He’s a third generation Chinese man, having gone to a private school and completed post-grad studies in France. In fact, he speaks better French than Cantonese. So although he looks Chinese, he can’t really be marketed to as a purely Chinese individual. There’s a duality for a lot of South Africans, coming from a completely different home/family environment to live/work in an entirely separate arena. Commuting from township ‘mentality and connection’ (culture of ubuntu) to suburbs (high walls and electric fences). Your neighbour might call the SPCA when you try to slaughter a cow for traditional purposes. So there is a very real physical and psychological commute that takes place on a daily basis for a large portion of our society. Gender and class divisions make the situation even more complex.

Lots more to come today. Next up: Mike Stopforth from Cerebra representing all of us in the online boat and hopefully helping these ink-and-paper guys catch up.

Jetted back into Cape Town last night. Spent four hours in Joburg airport, after being shuffled off our plane because of the runway incident in CT. What was at first a slight inconvenience soon turned into a fiasco of note.

Apparently one of SAA’s budding female (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) trainee pilots took a wrong turn and managed to put the plane into some sand off the runway with the tail blocking both the incoming and outgoing runways. This managed to close the entire airport down for some four hours. Affecting three SAA flights alone, not counting the other airlines.

Meanwhile, back in the O R Tambo airport in Johannesburg, chaos reigned! No visible SAA staff to guide or reassure passengers, just some vague announcement that passengers should get off the plane, enter through domestic arrivals and then re-enter through domestic departures, before reporting to the SAA booth at gate E? An old man and an elderly lady (who were quite clearly struggling to get up and down the stairs and were being assisted by other people) should have been offered wheelchair assistance by SAA at the very least.

While Nationwide and Mango were giving their passengers refreshment vouchers and communicating with them, SAA advised that they were three times as big as all the other airlines and therefore could not possibly hand out refreshment vouchers. Staff on the ground were phoning management for assistance as (in their own words) “it is chaos down here” but were quickly told that they should simply wait for an announcement to be made in due course.

Further announcements advised that flights had been delayed indefinitely due to technical problems in Cape Town.

Reactions from stranded passengers ranged from placid sitting and waiting, to screaming tantrums with bad language being thrown at all and sundry. Some people were missing major parties, some wedding rehearsals and others were having their pets hauled back to the kennels for another day. Most were busy trying to make alternate pick-up arrangements with no idea of any ETA.

Whilst we all agree that this was an accident, the general consensus was that SAA management had absolutely no consideration for their passengers whatsoever.

With all the time on our hands, we couldn’t help but imagine what could happen in a real disaster - airport closed for a week perhaps?

2010. Ahem. SAA needs to pull up their socks. Or we all need to buckle up for a bumpy ride ahead.