Johannesburg, 05 Oct 1999
Tomorrow, emotional ads featuring quadriplegic Christopher Reeve will start to flight on South African television. On the same day, all the advertising space in the Business Day newspaper will promote a single company: Vodacom World Online.
That will be the start of an unrelenting campaign to promote the company and its worldonline.co.za portal. The joint venture between GSM provider Vodacom and the Dutch World Online International Internet company makes no secret of its intentions.
"We want to be first and we want to get there fast," says Allan Knott-Craig, Vodacom group CEO. Raven Naidoo, Vodacom World Online MD, has issued a direct challenge, promising that the World Online portal will attract more visitors than any other South African site. This is war.
The Yebo!net brand will remain, but as a provider of connectivity, Naidoo says. The Icon and GIA names, recently acquired, will not be so lucky and have already been almost phased out. But make no mistake, World Online will be the name you hear. "It will be the main brand, as it is internationally," Knott-Craig says.
The portal will offer the usual aggregated news, with Web-based e-mail to be added soon. Some less customary services are in the pipeline, according to Naidoo, including wireless access, a unified messaging system currently being tested and an e-mail-to-fax gateway. Plans also include the formation of World Academy, a Web-based training centre to provide MCSE and A+ qualifications.
But World Online is not targeting only consumers. Unlike USKO and The Internet Solution, which sold its dial-up divisions to Vodacom to concentrate only on the business side, Vodacom says it will do both. "We are looking at broadening our focus considerably," Naidoo says, promising to provide leased lines, e-commerce enablement and security services. The main focus is to be the SME and SOHO market.
Naidoo does not find it unusual to be moving into a space virtually every other company is vacating. "We consider SMEs as nothing but sophisticated consumers," he says. He believes taking advantage of the small business sector is a matter of size, something Vodacom and World Online combined have in excess.
As an opening special the company is offering a 12-month dial-up access contract for just under R500.
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