My mampara award today goes to Tshifhiwa Shonisani, journalist for the Citizen newspaper. Reporting on Steve Hofmeyr's recent illness (Title: Singer Hofmeyr out of ICU and 'much better'), Tshifhiwa says "Hofmeyr, a singer of Afrikaans songs, ....
That's like saying Elvis Presley is a singer of Rock songs. Or like saying JK Rowling is a writer of children's fiction.
If you'd done your homework, Tshifhiwa, you'd know that Steve Hofmeyr is probably one of the wealthiest singers in South Africa right now off being a 'singer of Afrikaans songs'. He is a South African superstar.
Strike two is that your writing is uninspiring, bland and insipid. You could have done a lot more with that story.
Jacques de Villiers conducts sales training seminars countrywide
You'd think that Vodacom would hire a top-notch advertising agency to help it with its advertising. And, you'd think that agency would in turn hire top-notch staff. Here's an example from its recent advertising campaign. As you can see by the picture, 100 BMW'S should be 100 BMWs. Either the advertising agency is hiring copywriters and editors that can't read their own diplomas or it was a genuine mistake. It seems that most of the English-speaking world doesn't know when and how to use an apostrophe.
I'm sure that Vodacom knows about this mistake and someone has been called up on this.
In mitigation, I find that when one uses capitals, it is a lot harder to check the spelling because our eyes are used to lower case, serif fonts (like Times Roman).
Have you noticed that three people can proof read a piece of work and it is only when it is printed that the mistake is self-evident. Your gut falls through the floor, doesn't it?
I'll never forget when I was a rookie advertising man, we had a disaster with Premier. We produced Premier's newsletter (a tabloid newspaper). The headline was supposed to be "Premier changes its identity".
When 100 000 copies were printed, it came out "Premier changes its indemnity". Thank goodness I was just a spectator in this balls up. However, my boss aged overnight. We still don't know how it got changed because our proofs were correct. This was, of course, before Apple Mac ;-)
Jacques de Villiers is a persuasion architect specialising in sales and marketing.
This week, both Pat Pillai of E-TV news and David O' Sullivan of Radio 702 lost it with their respective guests. Finally, the objective veneer cracked and their feelings came out. I reckon 47-million South Africans applauded them because we're just as gatvol as Pat and David.
Pat Pillai was interviewing the CEO of Eskom (I think) on this load-shedding debacle that's facing us. After a feeble attempt at justifying the reason for their being no electricity for tax-paying South African citizens (we never expected the demand to become so huge ...), Pat just raised his hand and said, "that's unacceptable" and cut the mampara off. Loved it.
By the way Eskom, Clem Sunter on his worst day could have predicted this would happen. Didn't it occur to you that by mothballing power stations, sending electricity to dictatorship run countries such as Zimbabwe and dropping bolts into nuclear power stations would have a negative effect on us? You're my first Mampara for the week. And saying you weren't thinking about adding more power stations in 1994. Of course you weren't, you were just thinking of more power, weren't you?
Yesterday (Wednesday), Mampara number two was interviewed by David O' Sullivan - a Metro Police spokesperson regarding the lack of metro police at crucial breakdown points like the Grayston offramp.
The traffic lights were out because of Mampara number one's (Eskom's) load-shedding strategy.
The gridlock was crazy. Chris Wilkinson comes on air and says that everything is "under control". That's when David lost it entirely. Love you for that, man.
Jacques de Villiers is a sales trainer, professional speaker and consultant in South Africa.
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