An overseas study trip worth a whopping R100 000 to go and learn from the best in advertising is the alluring prize up for grabs for the Prestige Award winner in this year’s Pendoring Advertising Awards. This is the special prize designed to celebrate the Awards’ 20th birthday.

Pendoring is full of new plans, so typical of a 20-year-old. The focus this year is to encourage the creation of

Pendoring 20 years

advertisements that celebrate and showcase the originality, creativity, humour and appeal of the Afrikaans language, which is 90 years old this year. With this goal in mind, the Pendoring directors decided not to include the “Truly South African” category in which any of the 11 main languages could previously compete.

“Pendoring was originally not founded to promote advertising per se, but to reward original, creative and excellent Afrikaans advertising. The “Truly South African” category over time shifted the focus away from Afrikaans. It didn’t encourage advertisers and agencies to create striking Afrikaans ads. On the contrary, most entries in this category were in English,” says Japie Gouws, chairman of the Pendoring board and managing director of the ATKV group.

“Afrikaans is 90 years old this year. We want to celebrate the vitality of this dynamic young language with advertisements that all South Africans can enjoy, regardless of their culture and language. Afrikaans is such a rich source from which to draw to create ads with impact. So it needs to be promoted. Our country would be so much poorer without it.

“Apart from the fact that Afrikaans ads speak to Afrikaans consumers in their own language, it also contributes to the colourfulness of our country in general. Who could forget the Cremora ‘koffiekapitaal‘ ad with Jan Spies saying that Cremora tastes ‘pure plaas’.

“More recently the Klipdrift ad with its phrase ‘met eish, ja’ quickly became a popular and much-loved ad. And what about Sasol’s glug-glug ad with the granny saying their grandchild is probably not going far when his pram raced off with screeching tyres. (‘seker nie ver nie’)

“Afrikaans shouldn’t be ignored or neglected as if it were a minority language and the advertisers need to know that. Actually, Afrikaans is doing extremely well in our country,” says Gouws.

“Afrikaans is the home language of seven million people in South Africa, according to the 2011 census and, contrary to popular belief, it is not a ‘white’ language. Only 40% of Afrikaans speakers are white, while 50% of all Afrikaans speakers are coloured, 9% are black and 1% Indian. To add to that number, there are 13 million South Africans who use Afrikaans as their second language. That adds up to 20 million South Africans who can speak Afrikaans. That is definitely not a minority language!”

Furthermore, according to Gouws, the 2013 matric results showed that Afrikaans is the home language of 55 000 matrics and 140 000 took Afrikaans as a second language subject. “These young people also need to be approached by the advertisers in their own language. It is too big a segment of the population to be ignored. It is a known fact that advertisers who speak to their target market in their home language will show a greater return on their marketing investment,” says Gouws. And that is where Pendoring fits in.

Besides the overseas study trip worth R100 000 for the Prestige Prize winner, the winners of each category will receive a golden Pendoring trophy and R6 000, and the runners-up will each receive a silver Pendoring and R2 500. The top student will receive R10 000.

Join the Pendoring Facebook group or follow @Pendoring_ on Twitter and use the hashtag #Pendoring. For more information on the awards visit www.pendoring.co.za

• Entries open on Monday, 4 May 2015.