TV CRITIC's NOTEBOOK. e.tv's latest publicity failure for new local shows underscores South African television's growing PR disaster as global players (rightly) do the proper work and get the attention.

by Thinus Ferreira

This past Sunday e.tv had the time, money and made the effort for a drone to fly above the Joburg Theatre in Johannesburg for a so-called "glitzy" launch of two new local prime-time shows. 

What e.tv apparently couldn't bother with was actually properly communicating with the media, and trying to get any media coverage from the dedicated group of journalists and publications covering television.

Whether it's laziness, ineptitude, incompetence, a lack of understanding basic PR best practice and how the media functions - or some type of combination of these - it remains baffling and downright shocking how e.tv once again massively dropped the ball as it chose to apparently exclude the bulk of the country's media and journalists covering television, from anything around Sunday's event for Smoke & Mirrors and Nikiwe. 

e.tv's problem in my opinion - its dismal PR failure - to once again even just alert media and journalists that something like Sunday's event would be taking place (let alone invite!) and e.tv's publicity department's utter lack of even the most basic, bare-bones communication about the event to keep media informed, is not unique to eMedia.

It does however once again underscores how horrifically amateurish and bad South African broadcasters and South African streaming services are.

e.tv, as well as the SABC, VIU and MultiChoice's Mzansi Magic, M-Net, Showmax and SuperSport - all to differing degrees - compare quite badly to their international counterparts who are doing a much - much - better job at communicating with the press and building actual professional and proper PR relationships with journalists covering them and their content.

As shows like Nikiwe, from Parental Advisory Productions' Thomas Gumede and Lungile Radu, and Smoke & Mirrors replace Durban Gen and Imbewu: The Seed, e.tv couldn't be bothered in the slightest to reach out to media beforehand to set up any physical or virtual panel sessions for one-on-one or group media interviews.

e.tv - that doesn't have any online press room for publicity materials (neither does the SABC) and doesn't use any screener site - couldn't be bothered in the slightest to send media digital screeners in advance to build excitement or for review purposes, and never asked media if they would like to see an episode or more of Nikiwe or Smoke & Mirrors.

e.tv couldn't bother to provide a transcript, readout or recording of what was said by cast and crew at the event, which might yield coverage in the form of stories and reportage. 

e.tv failed to stream or do any kind of online video link for the stage proceedings to stakeholders, like journalists, who were not invited, couldn't attend or might be in other cities who are interested in hearing what is being said about e.tv's new TV shows. 

And make no mistake: This is basic, basic-level must-do's and must-haves. Why is it so difficult to pick up a phone and call journalists when you work in PR and communications, to say "We are having an engagement around show X" or to send any personalised email about it? 

Why are basic things, which are so simple, apparently so difficult and seemingly undoable?

While those in e.tv's publicity division presumably get paid to get coverage for e.tv programming, they succeeded in achieving the exact opposite: media apathy and irritation. 

e.tv also sends a very clear and powerful message: We're showing you that we don't care about getting you as media to care about our content and engaging with it, so don't. 

This is how much/little we value you and the value and importance we place on our own content and in specifically getting you to give time to this, so feel free not to bother with it, and rather go and give your time and attention to those who are making an actual effort with their content.

The work week remains 7 days and the hours in a week remain fixed for journalists to cover television.

Yet, now, there are many more TV places courting South Africa's media and doing the right things, and making the right moves to get the media's attention and - even more importantly - their time. 

That leaves less (or no) time for lazy, incompetent and amateur PR players who don't know the game and who don't bother about putting in the proper effort to level up to an international standard when it comes to getting coverage for local TV content.

If South African media are attending a Netflix media event, partaking in a Disney+ virtual panel session online organised for international press for new shows, or if they are watching screeners from the BBC or Discovery or HBO or Paramount or National Geographic, or doing Zoom or phone interviews and are writing and doing articles about international content, guess what?

They are not writing and not covering and not giving time to you - the local broadcaster and local TV channel and local streamer who can't bother with any proper PR effort.

Sadly, it appears that a lot of South African PR people there to promote television, still think the job is fine if they send out one-size-fits-all email blast press releases, that it's fine not to respond to media queries, that it's okay to never call, have media "events" where they are themselves in attendance but can't tell the media, and still thinks "influencers" is a substitute for press.

They are wholly clueless about much larger - and growing - circles being run around them by the international PR set.

It's utterly unconscionable that e.tv publicity - tasked to communicate with media - utterly failed to do so for Sunday's event for Nikiwe and Smoke & Mirrors, that e.tv doesn't have any press publicity site, couldn't bother with digital screeners, couldn't/didn't want longtime members of the press at the event and couldn't do any Q&A media sessions either physical or virtual. 

On Sunday night, e.tv - which clearly has the media's email addresses - had the audacity to send them a download link for event-taken photographs - an event e.tv publicity didn't tell them would take place, didn't invite them to, but now thinks media will suddenly publish photos of.

Ever not been invited to a wedding or engagement party of a "friend" on Facebook, and then discovering about it through seeing wedding or engagement photos a day or days later? What does that say about the relationship? 

Bizarrely, e.tv seems to want a wedding gift in the form of media coverage, for a wedding there was no invitation to, and something e.tv publicity deliberately didn't even want to, or bothered to, communicate to say that it would be taking place. How cringe.   

When (or if) South African publicists working in television eventually wake up, start to do research, start to ask the media what's going on and what rival TV places are doing, they will discover that they've been left behind and fell behind with what's been happening and what's being done and what has been made accessible to South African journalists.

Local South African television deserves better and more media coverage. 

Unfortunately, that requires the publicists who are sleeping at the job to wake up, to improve, to do the actual work, and to level up to the standard where the international publicity machine for television continues to operate, properly and consistently. With much better communication.  

After its retrenchment process South Africa's public broadcaster now has just 1 single publicist responsible for SABC1, SABC2 and SABC3 as media warns: 'Black holes coming where SABC content used to be and got exposure'.

by Thinus Ferreira

Following its restructuring and acrimonious retrenchment process the SABC has now appointed and allocated just a single publicist responsible for liaising with media and who must do publicity for SABC1, SABC2 and SABC3 combined.

Meanwhile members of South Africa's media maintain their stance from months ago and who warned that it won't be practically workable, again saying that the new "structure" is going to inflict massive damage on the broadcaster's overall aim of maintaining and growing exposure for its TV programming going forward.

As part of its retrenchment process in which 621 staffers lost their jobs at the South African public broadcaster at the end of March, the SABC tore up its decades-old structure for publicity and marketing of its TV content and unilaterally swept away its entire existing corps of allocated publicists working at SABC1, SABC2 and SABC3.

In several cases, as longtime SABC publicists exited at the end of March, so did their specialised media contact lists as well as their established network connections with media and transactional relationships and influence.

According to SABC insiders, one chosen publicist from SABC1 who would have been kept on, declined the job and she moved elsewhere.

The public broadcaster has now appointed Caroline Phalakatshela to handle all media enquiries and the entire publicity portfolio for SABC1, SABC2 and SABC3 with her job title that is now PR specialist.

Caroline Phalakatshela, a longtime SABC2 publicist, has now been saddled with the basically impossible task of doing publicity work and handling all media enquiries, schedules, programming information, updates, publicity photography, show synopses and press kits for all of the programming on SABC1, SABC2 and SABC3.

This includes the entire collection of locally-produced TV soaps and telenovelas across all 3 channels - 7 in all.

SABC brand managers will also be expected to help with publicity, although their job is to look after each channel's brand management and brand campaign executions.

It's not clear how Gugu Ntuli, who heads up the SABC's corporate communications division, or Merlin Naicker, the SABC's latest head of SABC Television, decided that just one specialist publicist for SABC1, SABC2 and SABC3 is workable, practical, or doable, or how just one publicist is adequate for this gargantuan task.

The SABC decided that the jobs of individual publicists for SABC1, SABC2 and SABC3 are redundant and their jobs were all scrapped in the structure proposed and devised by Gugu Ntuli and Merlin Naicker. 

For decades the SABC has had specialised and allocated publicists working on SABC1 and that channel's properties, for SABC2 and its content, and for SABC3 and that channel's shows.

Over the past decades, all three channels at times outsourced and appointed external PR companies to rep the channels in addition to the permanent channel-allocated SABC publicists. 

Over decades various PR companies have also been paid to work on specific soaps, or shows for SABC1, SABC2 and SABC3 and helped with organising quarterly previews and press screening events when the SABC still bothered to preview content to the media and advertisers.

The SABC channels over the years all employed at least two or more publicists for the workload, with divisions headed up by a publicity managers well - except for SABC3 that in the end made do with just a single publicist who now also lost her job.

Now Caroline Phalakatshela - as well as brand managers who might as well balk at the added publicity responsibilities suddenly folded into their new job descriptions - are responsible for what a lot more people did until now.

In December TVwithThinus asked the SABC why it wants to completely axe all publicists at all of its TV channels and why the SABC no longer sees this crucial job as important.

Gugu Ntuli said that "The current processes underway are exploring all options and I'm very certain that whatever has been tabled will be duly considered and the right structures will come into effect".

South Africa's media, who depends on SABC publicists as the go-between for interviews, media enquiries and the latest programming information, however disagrees that "the right structures" are now in effect.

After media previously described what's going to happen and what has now, in fact, happend as a "wholesale burndown", the South African press continue to say that the SABC has been extremely "short-sighted" and "arrogantly clueless" to get rid of all SABC TV channels' publicists in its retrenchment plan.

"Don't know what Gugu's thinking. We got no communication [before], or even now as to what's happening or how things are changing. I suppose just less SABC stuff going on the pages. We already get so little," an editor told TVwithThinus this week, whose publication includes SABC programming and TV listing and who relies on publicists to "send us stuff and to know who to send it to by what deadlines".

A longtime senior publicist working at a PR company with decades-long experience with how the SABC's PR divisions used to operate said about the axing of the swathe of PR people at the SABC that "this was a big mistake".

"It doesn't seem as if the people responsible for it had the remotest of ideas what the PR programming function entails, why its crucial or what these people actually really did".

"It's thankless and often-unseen work but you only start to notice it when it's gone and these gaping black holes appear where your content used to be and got exposure," said the person.

This person also warned: "Competitors and competing brands with the SABC and their shows are all too happy to flood in to fill the void andto  take up the space in the media attention that media gave to them [SABC]".

Another independent publicist weighed in and said about the SABC's move: "It seems non-sensical but a lot that's been happening at the SABC over many years just don't make logical sense."

"They just tried to save money by letting of people. But they don't seem to understand what the term 'earned media' means or maybe never google-ed it to understand about the value of the hundreds of thousands of rands that the SABC gets in brand awareness, when something about a SABC show appears in ex-SABC media. It's something that far outweighs publicists' salaries."

"That article or clip in a newspaper or online, or that soundbyte or show listing about any SABC programming is worth gold and they don't seem to understand that publicists at their channels are the worker ants pushing that to the media."

"Now media will rely even more on what they receive from e.tv or MultiChoice from their DStv channels and stuff if they don't get what they need in time from the SABC."

ALSO READ: 'Wholesale burndown': Concerns growing over the South African public broadcaster's 'quite short-sighted' and 'arrogantly clueless' plan to get rid of all SABC TV channels' publicists in its retrenchment plan.

ALSO READ: SABC retrenchment plan to eliminate the broadcaster's corps of TV channel publicists who communicate about its content, job to be centralised under a marketing manager and few brand managers.

'Wholesale burndown': Concerns growing over the South African public broadcaster's 'quite short-sighted' and 'arrogantly clueless' plan to get rid of all SABC TV channels' publicists in its retrenchment plan.

by Thinus Ferreira

Concerns are growing inside the SABC, as well as with media outside, about the South African public broadcaster's apparently "quite short-sighted", "wholly misguided" and uninformed plan - labelled a "wholesale burndown" - to get rid of all publicists across all of the SABC's TV channels as part of its latest retrenchment plan. 

Multiple of the institution's divisions and enterprises across the entire SABC have been affected by the section 189 process to downsize the over-staffed SABC's personnel costs, with some like SABC News that quickly itself became the news last month when redundancy notices were handed out.

While the South African public and media last month saw SABC News anchor and reporter Chriselda Lewis chastise apparently clueless and uninformed SABC top execs like COO Ian Plaatjes in videos that quickly went viral, many more SABC staffers in many other divisions are extremely unhappy as well.

While they are dealing with the same issues, they haven't spoken out about their plight, trying to keep up a dignified front despite tears, anxiety and fear about their futures behind-the-scenes.

According to sources, these staffers - from SABC Radio to commercial enterprises and many other divisions - are bearing the brunt of over-zealous bosses who are "cutting down to make numbers".

At the SABC's Northern Cape-based radio station, XKFM, all 11 staffers for instance got retrenchment letters, with staff openly wondering how the broadcaster will possibly be able to continue to broadcast in the !Xu and !Khwe San languages if they're all gone.

On top of so-described "cold retrenchment letters", rank-and-file SABC staffers are now dealing with their own fears, resentment and anger, as well as what they claim is top executives and their line managers' alleged uninformed cookie-cutter approach to "cutting down numbers on spreadsheets" in various divisions simply to "reach the desired headcount".

Staffers say that instead of knowing what workers are really doing, finding out what their real job descriptions entail and listening as to why certain jobs are actually essential to the SABC, "we're willy-nilly put in the expendable category so they [managers] can keep their jobs safe".

One such "division" facing complete annihilation within the SABC's broad-based retrenchment plan is the SABC's coterie of publicists - the PR people at SABC1, SABC2 and SABC3.

These SABC1, SABC2 and SABC3 publicists are the ones who deal with media enquiries about programming, issue schedules and programming highlights and updates, write and send out the press releases about programmes, and who liaise with media about interviews with talent.

They handle stills and photo request ("high res please") and is the first port of call and often the stopgap frontline receivers of the unending barrage of media requests that neither programming managers at the SABC's TV channels nor anybody else wants to directly deal with.

Inexplicably, the SABC has given all of these publicists their marching orders.

The move has caused the media at newspapers, magazines and online media who depend on publicists as the go-between, to openly wonder who is actually going to do the work and take over the thankless task of dealing with the myriad of important, and less important, media enquiries that constantly stream in and that would quickly overwhelm the SABC's corporate affairs communications team.

Instead of axing all of its programming publicists at the SABC, the broadcaster in fact needs to have and do much, much more in this field.

Over just the past 5 years the SABC, ensconced in a seeming isolated bubble of its own, has been vastly outstripped and outpaced when it comes to the issuing of programming highlights, the availability of basic publicity material for shows, press events, season-related photography and proper media engagement and liaison.

The SABC doesn't even have a press portal where media can log in to download imagery, episode synopsis, schedules, logos or related press materials that have all become a basic de facto must for international and other TV channels, as well as streaming services like Netflix.

Long-forgotten at the SABC are set visits, while competing TV channels fill journalists' diaries with real-world, on-set junkets, and during 2020, with a never-ending stream of local and international virtual media engagement and set visits.

While local and global TV channels as well as streamers soak up the available attention and time and inundate journalists' inboxes with links to digital screeners of new and upcoming programming and series in order for them to watch and review shows before broadcast, the SABC does nothing.

As video streaming services like Netflix SA, Showmax, Amazon Prime Video and others started to flourish in South Africa - alongside pay-TV channels from BBC Studios to NBCUniversal, HBO and many others that are repping directly into South Africa with their overseas PR teams or have appointed dedicated locally-based PR companies - the SABC keeps fallen further and further behind when it comes to putting actual resources behind programming publicity for SABC1, SABC2, SABC3 and SABC News.

The public broadcaster has failed and not kept pace with bolstering, building out and smart-tuning its various TV channel publicity teams or strategies with its severely eroded group of publicists - in number the smallest they have ever been in 2 decades since the glory days of Suzette Pretorius - currently overseen by Zandile Nkonyeni as head of PR for SABC TV channels.

Quarterly press previews for SABC1, SABC2 and SABC3 that used to be de rigueur for years have all but disappeared half a decade ago with SABC3 that used to be the lone holdout of a once proud and effective media engagement tradition until that channel also folded the informative practice.

Meanwhile, SABC3 is down to just one publicist for an entire channel, SABC1 struggles with juniorisation of staff where publicity materials are often late, irrelevant or mistake-filled and where just 2 publicists try to answer media requests of the SABC's biggest TV channel; while SABC2 publicists would be told external PR companies are handling certain properties who would then fail to deliver or to actually properly liaise with media.

According to SABC insiders - people with knowledge of some of the plans and sentiments expressed inside the SABC but who are not directly involved and who are speaking on condition of anonymity - Merlin Naicker, the SABC's latest head of SABC Television, apparently wants "publicity" and marketing for all of the SABC's individual TV channels to shift to reside inside the corporate communications team headed up by Gugu Ntuli, the SABC's head of corporate affairs and marketing.

Here, other insiders who also spoke on condition of anonymity, told TVwithThinus that there is "in a bizarre way no place" for any of the existing publicists at SABC1, SABC2 or SABC3 within the envisioned structure.

While none of these publicists have been approached or asked about this for this report, the understanding is that there would only be 2 media relations positions and a general, so-called "communications manager" or a job description to that effect, in Gugu Ntuli's proposed restructured division.

This makes it extremely unlikely that any of the SABC1, SABC2 or SABC3 publicists currently on "death-row" have any realistic chance of being kept on post the SABC's retrenchment process. 

It also makes it extremely unlikely that the SABC in-house will be able to do any kind of half-decent programming publicity effort for these channels' content - something that the SABC is already struggling to do properly because of a lack of staff and resources.

Outsourcing it to one or more external PR companies would mean hat publicists with no history or knowledge of brands or shows would be in charge, and likely also cost more to drum up earned media exposure for SABC shows - again defeating the purpose of a retrenchment exercise.

Ironically while the SABC needs to do much more publicity for its TV channels and their content line-ups, it is deliberately choosing to downsize a crucial job within the broadcaster to less.

"It's quite short-sighted" and "wholly misguided" said one source, with another longtime executive who described it as "a wholesale burndown of the last of what is left of publicity for TV if you can still call it that, here".

The SABC this week on Tuesday held a virtual media engagement through Microsoft Teams to unveil a new "SABC Tours" video.

Afterwards, during the Q&A session, TVwithThinus posed a question and asked why the SABC is apparently fine to completely do away with publicists at all of its TV channels, why the SABC no longer considers the crucial job of TV channel publicist as important, and how the SABC thinks that it would be able to keep the press properly and effectively informed about what it is showing on television without actual programming publicists.

"The current processes underway are exploring all options and I'm very certain that whatever has been tabled will be duly considered and the right structures will come into effect," said Gugu Ntuli in response to the question.

ALSO READ: SABC retrenchment plan to eliminate the broadcaster's corps of TV channel publicists who communicate about its content, job to be centralised under a marketing manager and few brand managers.

BROKEN SYSTEM. Why I care as little about the Broken Vows telenovela from Clive Morris Productions as e.tv's publicity division ... if you even care to know.

If you're looking for coverage here of e.tv's new telenovela Broken Vows ... sorry. You won't find any.

And to spare you the driftwood of this lament following after this sentence - unless you want the gory details - is that once again e.tv hasn't done itself any favours in promoting Broken Vows in its inexplicably bad publicity strategy.

For the second time in months (after it also employed the same playbook page for Hustle in latter 2016), e.tv did a press screening of a new local show, but only for Johannesburg media.

In the apparent isolated and bubble-world of e.tv's reality, it seems that e.tv broadcasts just in Jozi as if it's a community TV channel like Soweto TV.

As it's non-sensical geographic discrimination continues, e.tv could again not bother to tell journalists covering television nationally - but not living in Johannesburg - that there would be a screening for its latest local TV show, or make a basic arrangement for press based elsewhere in South Africa to see it too (like for instance at e.tv's office in Cape Town and Durban).

e.tv apparently doesn't believe - and please excuse the passive aggressive schmaltz - that Broken Vows from Clive Morris Productions needs more exposure or publicity, which is fine. It will now be ignored.

With more TV channels and shows on South African television that what one can reasonably get to, and with a lot of places doing a lot of PR effort to try and get the word out, this TV critic, for one - and I know there's others - won't give Broken Vows that couldn't be bothered to get itself as much media attention as it could have, any.

When e.tv held a media screening for Broken Vows late last week, e.tv's publicity department - where publicist leave without saying goodbye and people actually star in their own shows on rival pay-TV channels - didn't care that the media that it supposedly foster or presumably want to foster relationships with, won't be able to see it.

I can't help but feel that it's part of a bigger laissez-faire attitude at e.tv. More than a week ago I asked e.tv's publicity department for publicity images of Broken Vows. I was then told someone would help. By this past Friday, a week later, still nothing.

Hilariously, sadly, after Thursday evening's press screening where the Broken Vows cast, production executives and e.tv execs were also present, there was one story from the Johannesburg media who attended. One.

That one story didn't even report on any of the comments of Clive Morris or e.tv who all spoke, or who else said what, or how the show actually is that media were shown.

Neither has e.tv yet bothered to issue any press release or statement about who said what at the actual Broken Vows press screening, or to give out talking points or comments about the show. And it's clear there won't be.

Media who actual care and who are interested in the TV of it - instead of some smarmy Johannesburg media who attended the screening at the Four Seasons Westcliff Hotel for the glitz and the liquor but as usual did nothing - were also not able to capture and report what was said themselves.

But hey, this strategy obviously somehow works for e.tv and the broadcaster's publicity division.

Late on Friday afternoon, at 4pm, e.tv send me a link to watch Broken Vows after I asked early on Friday morning if media and TV critics elsewhere in South Africa were also given an opportunity to see the Clive Morris Production show beforehand.

When e.tv showed me the wonderful courtesy of sending me a link at 4pm on a Friday afternoon, I decided that I'm not spending my time and giving my effort to watch an e.tv show over my weekend in my personal time when e.tv showed just how little it actually cared to bring Broken Vows under longtime media's attention.

Not one of the almost dozen journalists and TV critics covering television in South Africa and not living in Johannesburg even knew that e.tv had a Broken Vows press screening when I reached out to ask them if they perhaps knew anything.

While M-Net issues press releases during episodes of The Voice SA, Mzansi Magic does so for Idols during and immediately after episodes, e.tv does absolutely nothing for shows like Ultimate Braai Master and others.

e.tv only issues press releases for SA's Got Talent days after there's been a winner for instance, and barely does anything for eNCA programming (you have to discover for yourself there's an African round-up show again on the channel for instance, if you happen to bother to search yourself).

Whatever the reason, this type of "day late dollar short" strategy clearly works for e.tv, since it continues.

Who it doesn't work so well, is for the media covering e.tv, where the red letter channel is one of more than 123 channels available to South Africa's 19.1 million TV households and its combined 44.1 million TV viewers.

I will continue to cover Broken Vows from a news perspective, for if or when it makes news, ratings news, or otherwise lands on my radar because of something happening with, or around, the production.

What I won't be doing is actually watch Broken Vows, tune in for it, or make any effort to try and follow it when there's so many other shows demanding my attention. Forgive me for not being able or willing to tell you as the reader if it's any good and if you should be watching it.

e.tv couldn't be bothered, and neither therefore can I.

Like a Victorian bobby on the beat at a horrific crime scene, waving off actually interested passers-by, e.tv has made it patently clear that Broken Vows doesn't want or deserve any attention from the media people like me: "Move along, move along. Nothing to see here."