The Flow Communications PR team recently handled public relations for the 6th Savanna Comics’ Choice Awards. Those who have been living under a rock on a planet that never sees light may not have heard of the Comics’ Choice Awards and will be forgiven, just this once. Everyone else knows they are Waldo’s burst-out-laughing-knees-meet-the-ground annual soirée and the event of the year.
And who is Waldo? Waldo is the coveted statuette won by all the awesome comedians – like Oscar, but funnier. The Comics’ Choice Awards is an awards ceremony like no other, a glitz and glam occasion that recognises South Africa’s greatest comedic talent.
People dress up and arrive with their model, actor, actress or rock star partner; cameras flash everywhere; people tweet “who” they are wearing; broadcast microphones with super-sexy presenters fly everywhere – it’s chaotic, electric, energising and amazing.
Flow’s brief was to provide a full suite of effective and dynamic public relations services for the entire awards campaign. This included:
- Targeted and effective media engagement
- Targeted and effective stakeholder engagement with media partners, the comics themselves, the sponsors, social media influencers and people who love comedy
- Event profiling to make the Savanna Comics’ Choice extended series of events the most talked-about social and entertainment phenomenon on the South African social calendar this year
- Amplification of sponsor positioning and messaging
- Engagement of social and other influencers to ensure maximum share of voice for the Comics’ Choice Awards
So far, Flow has achieved R70-million in PR value over three months, representing a 1:577 return on investment: for every rand spent, R577 worth of coverage was received for the Savanna Comics’ Choice Awards.
To achieve this, we strategically leveraged our media partners, Vuzu Amp, Sunday World and Kaya FM, by creating tailored content aligned to the partners’ brand tone and content skew, while pushing the awards’ key messages. This approach worked perfectly to create believable PR executions that effectively disseminated our key message.
With media partners acting as “low-hanging fruit” (the easiest to attract) when it came to syndicating our main messages, other media organisations supported us in further distributing these through the extensive use of television, radio, print, and online interviews and mentions of the nominees.
We aimed to keep coverage of the awards fresh, relevant and top of mind. Heritage, the business of comedy in South Africa, gender inequality, violence against women and the future of African comedy were among the human-interest angles we used to attach the campaign’s core messages.
Such was the interest created around the awards that more than 100 media representatives attended the event on the night of 3 September.
