I have been fascinated with the different ways of advertising that have been used to promote cellular services in Africa. There is kind of a cargo cult approach, in that western style billboards are used. As you can see from the picture above, however, a lot of billboards remain empty - these have been empty since they were erected years ago. When the audience is semi-literate and unlikely to own a car, new approaches need to be taken.

 

Celtel have a more direct approach. The use of yellow and red is so strong, especially when they paint buildings in the same colour. The effect is to reinforce the notion that celtel is everywhere - every village you pass through has at least one red and yellow sponsored building.

 

Less innovative is the approach taken by cell-Z; the mobile arm of the landline monopoly, Zamtel. They are obviously trading on the fact that cell-Z is a ‘home grown’ product. Alas, Zamtel have such an awful record, I doubt any Zambian will take pride in the brand - bit of an own goal here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Zambia is about to have presidential elections. The incumbent, Levy Mwanawasa, has a fairly hefty campaign - note that his poster is bigger than all the others. What really caught my attention was the first letter of the vertical ‘Vote’ text. It is clearly created in Microsoft Word, as Word has no tick symbol when you select the “Insert Symbol” option. Unless you know to change the font to “Wingdings” the closest you can get to a tick is the square root symbol. I wonder if Mr Mwanawasa knows that his poster is encouraging people to insert mathematical symbols next to his name. I wonder if these will count as spoilt ballots - Florida here we come.

 

Finally, the best form of advertising I saw was shitengi cloth. This cloth is used by women for every purpose from making dresses, wrapping babies onto their bodies through to making curtains. By the end of this trip I realised that the thing I saw most of was not celtel or the presidential square root but the Catholic Women’s Association. By creating (and presumably giving away) this print to thousands of women, the association had created a brand awareness others can only dream of. So, if you want to advertise a product in Africa, I recommend printing up some cloth - forget the advertising boards.

 

Finally, a gratuitous picture - I loved this Zambian airways advertisement. After covering 5000+ kms on hideous potholed and dirt roads, the notion of getting off the tar is very appealing.