The free magazine ‘Hello Festive Season 2012/2013‘, dropped into our post box, attracted my attention for the endless pages sponsored by the City of Cape Town, in what is intended as a publication to help one decide where to celebrate Christmas and New Year, and where to spend time during the summer holidays in Cape Town, bearing the subtitle ‘the ultimate lifestyle guide‘! It is the worst possible boring representation of Cape Town, the sponsor pages having been compiled by the City of Cape Town’s new Marketing department, and is not a ‘lifestyle guide’ at all!.

Rory Viljoen, Director of the City of Cape Town Place Marketing, as he likes to call his department, comes from Distell and Coca Cola, so it is hard to imagine that he could be responsible for such nonsense information to be presented in a publication that is unlikely to reach every Cape Town ratepayer or services payer, only 16500 copies having been printed, I was told by Hello Cape Town Magazine Marketing Consultant Jessica Nosworthy.  She also told me that it is the third year that the City of Cape Town has advertised in the publication.

The first of the twenty eight City of Cape Town pages in the seventy page magazine covers ‘Investing in Cape Town’, with a sub-heading of ‘Investment Opportunities‘ and markets Wesgro, but the content does not list any investment opportunities, being solely focused on listing the services that Wesgro can offer investors, hardly of interest to Capetonians. This is followed under the same heading by a feature on Cape Town Activa, described as a ‘world-class ecosystem for entrepreneurs and job-seekers that will transform Cape Town into a city that is open for business and attractive to outside investors‘, but it does not explain what exactly it does, other than it being a lobby platform for small business owners.   It clearly was extracted from a media statement, referring to ‘yesterday’ in announcing the launch of Cape Town Activa, but not edited for the publication!  Descriptions are provided for the CIty’s plans to develop Cape Town until 2040;  to redevelop the Athlone power station; to upgrade the Company Gardens, The Durbanville Rose Garden, the Westridge Gardens in Mitchell’s Plain, and Maynardville in Wynberg; the completion of the Green Point Athletic Stadium; Cape Town’s appointment as World Design Capital 2014; a newly introduced Travel SMART program to encourage local residents to share driving to work, to cycle, to walk, to use the MyCiti Bus, and find any other way to save fuel, and thereby keep vehicles off the roads; a new Smart Living handbook, which is available for residents to reduce their impact on the environment through their usage of electricity and water, handling of their garbage, by planting indigenous gardens, reducing the size or removing their lawns, by installing solar water  heating, etc; and the Solid Waste Management Department encourages residents to reduce their waste, to recycle or re-use their waste.  Most of these descriptions are technical and not written in a citizen-friendly style.  Conspicuous by its absence is the City’s R38 million annual funding of tourism via Cape Town Tourism.

At an official cost of R18000 per full page full colour advertisement, the sponsorship could have cost the City of Cape Town, and thus its ratepayers, more than R 500000, a complete waste of marketing money.

I had requested more information about the distribution areas for the magazine from Jessica, as she was the only person in the company answering her phone, and she promised to send more details. Five minutes later her boss Ari Spinner called back, demanding a meeting to hand over the details, sounding paranoid about the information falling into the hands of a ‘nasty competitor’, should I be interested in advertising in the magazine.  He refused to e-mail any details, and rudely told me that my English was not understandable when I had to repeat my postal address a number of times for him to post copies of his publication, when his heavy Greek accent makes it hard to understand him.

If this is the calibre of Viljoen’s marketing skills for Cape Town, the tourism industry should be severely concerned about the City of Cape Town having taken the role of Destination Marketing from Cape Town Tourism, and having set itself up to do the marketing for our beautiful city! Instead of communicating with its public as intended, the City of Cape Town has demonstrated its lack of marketing skills, and its ability to waste R½ million of ratepayers’ monies! The publisher has misled his readers, as there is barely any ‘lifestyle‘ information in the ‘guide’, other than a listing of clubs and bars!

Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com Twitter: @WhaleCottage