Africa Marketing Festival promises bigger, better, brighter Loeries

South Africa's favourite advertising awards event, the Loeries, has got a fresh new look – and organisers promise the 2004 event will celebrate and showcase world-class creativity with a special African verve.

The Loeries, to be hosted at Sun City in October 2004, will now form the basis of a newly created event, the Africa Marketing Festival, which will consolidate the Assegai Direct and Effectiveness Awards, the Raptor Sponsorship Awards and the Loerie Creative Awards within an exciting festival of creative ideas and development activity.

Launching the Africa Marketing Festival at the Saxon Hotel in Sandhurst last night, the CEO of the Marketing Federation of Southern Africa (MFSA), Mpho Makwana, said the move, which has been widely welcomed by the South African advertising and marketing industry, will go a long way towards enhancing the credibility of the awards by cutting through the current proliferation in the industry.

"After consulting extensively with local stakeholders and African colleagues, we have conceptualised a comprehensive and compelling event for the entire African and South African advertising and marketing value chain," said Makwana.

"The Africa Marketing Festival will be the premier African festival for creative ideas people, and is an exciting platform to reaffirm the role of marketing as a catalyst for African competitiveness, innovation and transformation."

This new strategy and event design takes cognisance of the debate that has been taking place over the last two years on transformation of the marketing communications industry. The MFSA Board of Directors resolved at its last meeting of 6 November 2003 to set aside financial resources towards an industry transformation scorecard and barometer which will be launched in the new year.

This will ensure that industry transformation (Black Economic Empowerment, Employment Equity, Ad Spend Equity and Affirmative Procurement) will be dealt with much more comprehensively allowing the Africa Marketing Festival to focus on celebrating excellence in all aspects of marketing communications.

The Africa Marketing Festival will offer a bouquet of developmental events and initiatives – including a comprehensive conference, an exhibition, advertising showreels, training courses, practical workshops, industry round tables, and a range of structured networking forums for business, government and civil society.

The consolidation of all of the MFSA Awards programmes under one umbrella emphasises the trend towards convergence and integration, whilst the festival will allow focused attention to be paid to specialist disciplines such as creativity, design, sponsorship and direct. The Festival will also enable a greater focus on the winning work via an exhibition showcase of all finalists.

"The Africa Marketing Festival and Loerie Awards enables the Marketing Federation of Southern Africa to deliver its mandate of promoting the importance of marketing in a democratic, free enterprise economy," said Makwana. "This event offers an unparalleled opportunity to celebrate and showcase world-class marketing thought leadership and creativity that is contextualised in Africa."



Editorial contact

Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide / South Africa
Susan Brunner
Tel: +27 11 880 2271

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