When BMW needed a media event for the announcement of their sponsorship of Springbok rugby they looked to Mann Made Media for a unique creative concept and world-class execution.

The agency developed a strategy that sought to parallel the thrill of driving a BMW with the adrenalin rush that a Springbok rugby player experiences when running onto the field. This thought was contained in the creative theme, ‘From Tarmac to Turf’. To dramatise this, the agency teamed up its most enthusiastic rugby jocks together with its most gifted technical boffs. The result was a carefully designed and precisely staged audio and visual installation that recreated the visceral experience of walking down a tunnel alive with the sounds of anticipation, and then running into a packed stadium that explodes with a panorama of passionate supporters. Using superb sound design, bespoke technology motion detection, and a four metre tall, 180 degree plasma wall of tens of thousands of CGI fans to achieve the effect, the announcement of this momentous sponsorship scored some excellent reviews with the media.

“Mann Made Media delivered a world-class experience to the media and VIP guests who attended the event,” explains Guy Kilfoil, General Manager: Communications & Public Affairs at BMW South Africa. “BMW is a premium brand which focuses on passion and innovation and both of these characteristics were a visceral part of the creative execution delivered on the day. So believable was the stadium experience that even some of the Springbok players in attendance commented on its authenticity.”

Of course, moving always brings some temporary inconvenience. From Thursday, 25 November 12 noon, our old office phone number will become unavailable. However, please don’t hesitate to contact us using the cellphone numbers provided on our contacts page.

Plans have already been put into place to ensure that Jobs already in progress are completed on time without undue interruption from the moving process.

While some finishing touches will be ongoing for a little while to come, we will be operating from our new office officially from Monday 29 November.

It’s great to win a Loerie Award, because it reflects the level of creative teamwork that can be achieved by an agency and its client. Pushing the creative and technology boundaries against incredible deadlines is what we do at Mann Made on a regular basis, but when those efforts result in two Loeries Finalists then it becomes doubly worth it.

For helping us get this far we’d like to thank the clients that made it possible – Toyota for our interactive Wonderwall installation, and Standard Bank for our WAP-enabled Connections Game.

Of course we realise that a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush, but in the meantime – before the winners are announced – it’s nice to at least have two birds in the running!

The combination of Apple Xsan and a robotic Tape Library makes Mann Made Media fly

When we talk about ‘corporate memory’ we are most often referring to the cultural history of a company or organisation. Too often this memory rests in the minds of older employees as anecdotes, or as tapes, pictures and documents locked in the physical archives of discarded boxes stowed away in dusty basement rooms.

In both instances unlocking the power of this resource can be haphazard and unproductive and so much of this innate value can lie untapped and inaccessible.

This is just one reason why the explosion of digital data storage is invaluable to us at Mann Made Media – not only for the operational value of instantly retrievable video and multimedia materials, but also as a service we offer our clients.

To date we have archived around 88 Terabytes of data since we started our digital archiving system just two years ago.  This is the equivalent of over 18,700 DVD’s. (If we had to archive that way, we’d need a stack of DVD’s about 260m high!) At DVD video quality, 88TB would be enough to hold just short of 6 years of continuous video.

To put this in perspective, it is estimated that the total Internet traffic for the year 1993 amounted to approximately 100TB.

But the real value of archives is what you can do with them, and when you consider that the Apollo 11 Landing Module needed just 74KB of memory to land on the moon you can appreciate what we can achieve with vision, creativity and a vast library of visual resources at our command.

Which is why we’re happy to see this vast repository of client collateral as one small step for Mann, one giant leap for Mannkind!

Many of his plays have been professionally produced around the world including London, Sao Paulo, Dublin, Krakow, Copenhagen and Johannesburg. Most recently, his play The Trojan Women was produced off Broadway in New York.

Nick has received a number of awards including the Writer’s Bursary from the Arts Council of Great Britain, a clutch of international awards for Takalani Sesame radio and TV, a small flock of Loeries for his experiential work, and the international Philip Pullman Young Minds Book of the Year Award for his memoir Thirty Years in a Turtleneck Sweater.

Nick is excited by the opportunities presented at Mann Made Media. ”It’s great to work with a solid team of inspired people who are unhindered by the weight of experience. They are constantly coming up with astounding, original and technically innovative ideas that they have the skills and the energy to bring to life. I am enjoying myself, and looking forward to the future.”

Nick’s appointment signals a new era for Mann Made Media, as a wealth of creative and strategic experience is coupled with the company’s legendary passion, technical innovation and creative fearlessness. This new formula offers a refreshing alternative to those experiential clients looking for high quality, cutting-edge creative and production services.

This was the question posed by our clients at Standard Bank PPB Africa after we produced their recent Sales Summit. As usual with creative clients who want to push the envelope, the brainstorm results were surprising and exciting.

We conceived a multimedia pack of written materials containing instructions, questions and feedback forms, together with a call for video and stills footage feedback and commentary from all members of our video audience right across Africa.

The core idea is that rather than passively watch the video productions, the audiences are invited to give real usable feedback in multimedia formats that will be broadcast on internal TV. It will also create real on-the-ground feedback data that can be used in future conference gatherings, and finesse the sales activities of all countries in the future.

Once again we are fortunate to be working with an innovative client who is looking for cutting-edge thinking from their communications partner. We are delighted to be moving forward together.

For the Mann Made Media team, one of the most interesting and rewarding experiences of working on this project is in discovering and leveraging an absolutely massive market of consumers and talent that was previously unknown to us.

Look out for Aki and Pawpaw appearing on an AG Cellular mobile screen near you soon.

We manage our post production facilities as a state-of-the-art data centre, and take reliability and security very seriously. For example, did you know that all jobs are “ringfenced” by a permissions-based system that ensures only authorised staff (including freelancers) are allowed to “see” the job they’re working on? We also set up our systems to enforce strict policies about external media such as writeable discs and flash discs. So your company information is always safe in our hands.

To ensure that we are able to deliver to our clients 24/7, with no delays, our system has all kinds of redundancies built in. Hard drive failures, power failures, server crashes, even RAID controller failures – all these are catered for, and our system will carry on running in the event of multiple problems.

Finally, all our data is backed up to a separate system every single night, automatically, and copies are taken “off site” every week, for added security. Even if we were to suffer a major system crash or any other catastrophe, our post production facility would barely stumble – and your deadlines won’t be compromised.