Is traditional media still relevant?

I spend my Sunday following South Africa's premier endurance event, the Spec-Savers Ironman. It made its 8th appearance in Nelson Mandela Bay. Now, for the none triathletes, the Ironman forms part of a world circuit. The athletes have 17 hours to complete a 4km sea swim, 180 km bike ride and a 42.2 km run. 

What I found fascinating was that the Ironman, did not use traditional media to cover such a premier event -  Comrades and Two Oceans both used traditional media (Television Broadcast:SABC 2) to cover the respective events. Today, Comrades is a house hold name and one can argue that traditional media helped to establish the 'The Ultimate Human Race' amongst South Africans.

The Spec-Savers Ironman used social media (Twitter and Facebook) to keep followers updated, but more interestingly, they used Universal Sport Network for live streaming of the event. This for me is a clear indication that technology is forcing mass media to reconsider their target audiences. Technology makes it possible for and event, such as the Ironman South Africa, to broadcast to very specific audiences that have nothing else in common except that they share an interest in triathlons! That for me is focussed publicity.

Woolies and the hot cross buns

Halal Hot Cross Buns (www.iol.co.za)

Last week saw some members of the Christian community angried at Woolworths for putting a halal certification mark on packages of hot cross buns sold ahead of Easter.

In emails, Facebook messages and Twitter posts, the fired-up Christians argued that hot cross buns have special meaning in their religion, and so the halal symbol (which indicates the food is permissable for Muslims to eat, under Islamic law), should not be used, according to the Mercury. 

A tweet from Tony Seifart read: “Woolworths SA clearly has no respect for the Christian Faith to make hot cross buns halaal.”

Was Woolworths wrong to try and make hot cross buns available to all its clients? According to the Mercury article (29 March) people feel that Woolworths is not being insensitive to Christians. In fact, they are being sensitive to the food certification requirement to accommodate all communities by including the halaal and kosher marks.

We need to ask ourselves how important are symbols in our society? From a marketing/ communication point of view, we can not ignore the meaning of symbols in our multicultural society. It might not be important to us personally, but we should never loose sight of the bigger picture.