Last week the organisers of the Loerie Awards, the South African advertising industry’s most esteemed awards, had to do something that had never been done before. In light of new information, it stripped creative agency MetropolitanRepublic of the seven awards it had won at the 2013 prizegiving.
MetropolitanRepublic, whose clients also include Google Uganda, FNB, Wimpy, and Sanlam, was awarded its seven Loeries for a campaign for MTN, called the MTN Everywhere Library. The service, it was proposed, would let children in all parts of Uganda have access to books through even the most basic cellphones – even those without internet connections.
However, the campaign never existed. What was presented to the judges of the Loerie Awards was just a pitch for a concept. Management at the agency says that the submission came from overenthusiastic juniors, but there was no intention to fool anybody.
Alistair Fairweather of the Mail & Guardian writes that the embarrassment could have been avoided with a simple tech fact check. In his column he points out that any technical person would immediately see a glaring fault with the technology proposed to deliver the books to phones.
If you’ve ever used your cellular provider’s tools for checking your balance or sending a please-call-me, using a code like *101#, then you’ve used something called USSD. It works on all phones – from basic keypad feature phones to touch screen smartphones – and it was supposedly the technology the MTN Everywhere Library used.
Fairweather points out, though, that the maximum length for a USSD message is 182 characters. Reading an average-length novel 182 characters at a time might prove a challenge. Worse, still, each page would require at least 2 – 5 seconds to load. Even a first-generation Kindle pages faster than that.
However, the Loeries judges can save face here. These technical details bypass most people, and those who think up imaginative concepts are often not faced with the technical hurdles associated with grand ideas. A great recent example would be Phonebloks, a viral video that did the rounds showing off a modular concept for a new kind of smartphone. While the idea is charming and presentation fantastic, most technical people scoffed at the idea simply because they know of the huge technical challenges involved.
As technology becomes more pervasive, though, these oversights might become less of an issue, and more realistic ideas will come out of of that. And maybe those children in Uganda and other parts of Africa will eventually get to read books on their phones, regardless of where they are.
