Black goldmine awaits brave

Two young men amble into a cafe in one of South Africa's sprawling black townships, plonk themselves at a table and order a plate of cow's head, tripe and dumpling.

"And while we're waiting, bring us some Castle Lite," one of them tells the waiter in a mix of English and Zulu.

This beer advertisement is part of a growing trend for "township ads" as South Africa's white-dominated marketing industry scrambles to catch up with social and economic changes 11 years after the end of apartheid.

Keen to tap into the burgeoning black youth market, South African firms are dumping traditional commercials aimed at rich white males for ads that capture the township vibe, with its exotic food, local slang and illegal drinking dens.

"It's about cultural insight, about language, about using images that people can understand and relate to and moving beyond old cliches about black people," said Lebo Motshegoa, who advises advertising companies on the black youth market.

Beer, mobile phones, shopping malls and even property are now big business in townships like Soweto and Alexandra, as these former black ghettos, once notorious for political violence and poverty, move upmarket.

Yet experts say few executives in South Africa's blue-chip companies have much of an idea about township life and are struggling to market their products to the millions of increasingly cash-rich shoppers that live there.

"For too long companies focused on the rich white guy with his BMW, ignoring a huge pool of ordinary black people," said Motshegoa.

"Now they're starting to realise how much the black youth market is worth, but don't know how to communicate in a way people will understand."

People living in the huge ghettos were for decades written off by companies as too poor to buy their products. But since the country's first democratic elections in 1994, crime has started to fall, housing has improved and black people are getting better jobs, thanks to fairer education and affirmative action in the workplace.

Many townships now boast supermarkets, shopping malls and banks.

Some experts say the country's advertising industry has been slow to reflect that change, but is now waking up to the fact that new markets need new strategies, and are even using township street slang, or "scamto" on airwaves and billboards.

Scamto is a mix of Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho and English spoken by young urban blacks, which includes nicknames for top brands: a BMW is a g-string, Jack Daniels is a Jealous Down and J&B whisky is a Jesus and his Brothers.

The change in South Africa's advertising industry has been driven by an influx of young black creatives and executives plugged into township street culture.

The new focus on "black" strategies has rattled white marketing students, who are earnestly learning scamto and listening to kwaito - a homegrown version of hiphop - to boost their chances in a sector where demand for middle-class whites is waning.

Some young blacks feel efforts by white companies to imitate township culture are patronising and offensive.

But others argue the industry's recent interest in the townships showed black urban youth was at last being taken seriously by the mainstream economy.

- REUTERS