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Media communications gives Women in Business initiative unprecedented coverage

Redline, the stakeholder communications company in the Draftfcb South Africa stable, recently concluded a highly successful publicity campaign – reaching an audience of 5 million – for the Women in Business initiative.

This initiative aims to motivate and inspire young women to further their studies and vie for South Africa's top jobs, currently dominated by their male counterparts.

A major part of the initiative is a one-day conference held annually and organised by students from the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business. This year it was held in Cape Town on August 1.

The issues discussed included: how to secure funding for further education, how to target big business, training (‘Is an MBA enough?') and succeeding in male-dominated industries.

Lisa Dawson-Biggs, Business Unit Director at Redline, says while the conference was intensive and extremely informative for those that attended, the Graduate School of Business wanted to reach a much larger audience considering the national importance of the issues being discussed.

“Furthermore considering the conference is an annual initiative, it was important to put a media strategy in place that laid a platform for extensive media coverage for the initiative on a sustainable basis.”

Dawson-Biggs says Redline took this initiative as a pro-bono client because it shared its views on gender empowerment – in her opinion one of the biggest economic issues facing SA today.

However, considering there was little money available for above-the-line advertising Redline proposed a publicity-centric strategy that leveraged the on the public profile of the some of the organisers and speakers, including Mvelaphanda Holdings CEO, Yolanda Cuba; an MBA alumni, Ziggy Owei; Director of UCT Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Mike Herrington; and author/broadcaster, Patricia Glyn.

“We subsequently leveraged our strong media relations on radio and print platforms targeted at a specific audience and were pretty amazed with the results considering we had just a few weeks to devise and execute the strategy,” says Dawson-Biggs.

Redline's Cape Town arm is currently one of Cape Town's fastest growing communications agencies having recently concluded a deal with the Metropolitan group (including its African operations) and the Rainbow Group. In addition to financial services, Redline specialises in technical industries and leveraging sponsorships.

30 Oct 2007 09:01

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