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Larry's back in town

A refresh for MTN's marketing strategy.

By Lesley Stones
Johannesburg, 15 Dec 2014
Larry Annetts, MTN SA, is introducing new ways of doing things by looking at the 20-year-old organisation in much the same way as he would look at a start-up.
Larry Annetts, MTN SA, is introducing new ways of doing things by looking at the 20-year-old organisation in much the same way as he would look at a start-up.

Reviewing the career history of Larry Annetts makes you suspect he's spent the last two decades drawing the short straw.

He's the man MTN dispatched to Uganda and then to frenetic Lagos to spread the message about its new networks. From Nigeria, he was posted to Iran on a three-week assignment, and unexpectedly stayed for seven years.

Now he's back in South Africa, and you have to wonder if previous missions have left him drained and looking for a cushy number at home.

Absolutely not, he says. He's arrived with tonnes of vigour on a quest to revitalise the marketing in South Africa, dissing its current techniques as staid and ineffective.

Annetts become the chief marketing officer (CMO) of MTN SA in June and is treating the 20-year-old business like a start-up, tabling fresh ideas and rankling anyone who thinks things should be done the way they always have been. Yet most of his team loves it, with one colleague saying Annetts has brought back the buzz.

He's certainly much worldlier after all his foreign postings. "The first time I left the borders of South Africa was when we won our licence in Uganda," he says.

He didn't even own a passport, so he got an emergency passport and boarded a plane to Entebbe with a bag full of SIM cards.

When you see you're trending on Twitter, you know you must be doing the right thing. You need a new way of saying the right thing that makes people sit up and listen.

Larry Annetts

He tells a great tale about landing at 01h00 to the gut-churning sight of nobody waiting to meet him. A long taxi ride and numerous abortive attempts to track down his colleagues taught him some lessons about being prepared that he still seems to forget sometimes.

Shaking up South Africa

A breeze blown in by Larry Annetts is refreshing MTN SA's marketing strategy.
Ideas had become old-fashioned, he says, and he's funking it up with tactics that have scored in the young and roaring economy of Nigeria.
Users can look out for Caller Tunez and its big brother Music Plus, for downloading full tracks and streaming music. Magic Voice - where you can speak in a voice of your choice - is also on its way.
More usefully, Annetts is working with the developers of Magic Voice to help users avoid 'exorbitant' roaming fees when they travel. A free app will tap into data networks to let users make cheap calls on another network when they roam.
Since working with multiple partners is a core part of his strategy, MTN is also discussing collaboration with Multichoice and Times Media, which is launching the Vidi video on demand service. Expect more discreet advertising too, rather than massive newspaper adverts or intrusive SMSes.
"South Africa needs the right services because we have a youth demographic hungry for data services but you can't just throw something out and hope people snap it up, because they're not just going to take anything," he says. "You have to get into their mindspace. Grouping people into big segments was very 1990s and we've passed that. We have to get to the segment of one, where each person is treated individually."
Yet convincing advertisers to be subtle can be tricky. "My team thought I was having a crack at them because they weren't using these discreet ways. A few of the staff think I'm not South African because of the way I don't accept everything they say," Annetts says.
He proved his point with a campaign for a new offering. Traditional advertising won 3 000 users in the first week. When he tagged a message about the service onto the end of balance enquiries, two million people responded.

In Nigeria, Annetts drove the go-to-market strategy for MTN's network rollout. Five years later, his summons to Iran happened so quickly that he just threw some things in a bag. They were the wrong things, because he arrived in snowy Iran armed with nothing but short-sleeve shirts.

When the three-week posting was made permanent, Annetts couldn't leave to collect his belongings because of visa issues. "I had to send my driver in Nigeria to pack up my house," he laughs. His bags went into storage, and were dusted off when he returned to Nigeria in 2012 to help MTN survive a price war. "We were losing a lot of market share and I had to come up with a strategy to differentiate ourselves and get the consumer eye off pricing," he says. "We went for the youth market and started focusing on innovation and had to come up with quick hits."

Magic voice

He started with Caller Tunez, where a user replaces their normal ring tone with a pop song. "To push that service, we got close to some Nigerian artists and signed up ten of them as brand ambassadors," Annetts says.

He speaks enthusiastically and openly, trying to be self-effacing, but not quite succeeding because he's so delighted with the successes he's achieved. He breaks off into another memory, laughing about how he learnt the words to a pop song and sang it in the shower each day. Then the artists invited him to a concert, and called 'this white boy' on stage in front of 10 000 Nigerians to lead the singing. "After that, all the Nigerian artists talked to me and every time they wanted to launch a new song, they brought it to MTN."

It's funny, but the figures are deadly serious. Caller Tunez gained 30 million users within a year and made MTN the biggest distributor of music in Nigeria. It's excellent for the artists too, who can make $100 000 a month from one song.

Another success was the wacky Magic Voice app. That lets callers speak in a voice of their choosing and appeals to practical jokers. The funny part is it earned MTN $1 million within a month.

Initially, Annetts returned to South Africa for a short stint to share some of his ideas. In the third week, he was asked to stay. He agreed, but with one caveat: "I said I'm not having my driver pack my underpants again, I'm going back to do it myself!"

First published in the November 2014 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine.

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