Site of the Week: Pjotro (Nokia)
by Fred on 12/05/06 at 11:41 am
2 comments
I read on Biz-Community that SA’s broadband adoption rate jumped by 30% in the 3rd quarter last year to 3,6 million users. South Africa is now one of the fastest growing emerging internet markets in the world.
The question is: How does this impact marketing strategy in South Africa?
Should we jump on the bandwagon and start spending millions on fancy websites? Well, actually, no. The fact is: websites don’t cost millions. Print and TV advertising campaigns do, even though you can’t monitor how many people react to them.
Check out this website: http://www.pjotro.com/ (Website of the Week)
It’s a website created by Nokia to drum up interest for its N series phones. It’s worthwhile checking out (even though it takes forever to download!) It’s a site that allows you to make ‘Pjotro’, a guy in a ‘musical suit’, dance around and make your own little music tune. You can then save the tune and pop it on your phone as a ringtone. Fun, creative and functional, and it kept me busy for around 10 minutes.
I would estimate that this website cost around R100, 000 to make. Before you suck in your breath, consider this: a full page ad in the newspaper would cost around that much. One single advert on a Sunday. Maybe around 20,000 people would actually look at it, and probably a fraction would retain the message. I think very few people would spend more than 10 seconds on it.
Nokia’s little microsite has been launched worldwide, with a viral campaign pushing it through, and millions of people are seeing it. No advertising, just word-of-mouse.
Nokia has undoubtedly spent a lot of money on their website, but take a look at some of the more creative SA sites (Prezence has some great sites). One of these sites will cost on average between R15, 000 and R50, 000. You can track exactly how many people go to each website, what they do on your site, where they come from and how many people become customers as a result.
In South Africa, the increase in high-speed Internet users means there is a very viable way of jumping onto the broadband bandwagon. People are getting online, and enjoying themselves.
If you can be a bit creative, then make your website interesting – and it doesn’t have to cost R100, 000.
Fred Roed is the marketing guy in the Ideate crew. He runs a web marketing company called World Wide Creative and loves writing about people out there doing marketing right. View more articles by Fred.
Shane
May 12th, 2006
An excellent website – my estimate is leaning towards the million mark.
steve
May 15th, 2006
On de uver hand derren, Sure the “broadband” market is expanding, but south african “Broadband” is hardly broadband, with most home users on 192kpbs, just over 1 meg per minute. Most SA users are still on dialup, so perhaps flashy sites aren’t where it’s at. I love a good flash site – leoburnett.ca is incredible, but i think web developers aren’t creative in their use of size,
I can’t comment on the site, because it is still loading ten min later.
I always wondered if you can’t have a script on your landing page that checks the download speed, and selects the correct size site for your connection, like a stripped done html version for dial up users. Also I think the demographics of internet connections in SA, are that dial up users are not as techno aware as adsl users, although that is probably changing with lots of marketing of “cheap” “broadband” by the telkoms and mwebs.