Where's the local lingo?

It's an old question. Is South African advertising, well, South African enough? Johannesburg adman Sipho Luthuli says not.

“Most of the ads churned out in this country are flying right past the heads of people they are intended for. I think we are in it for awards, rather than selling the products of our clients.”

Luthuli argues that advertising should be using more local language to bridge the divides between different races.

“Tsotsi-taal for instance,” he says, “can play a crucial role in that. It is a uniquely South African creation that cuts across the cultural, social and racial divide. Why can’t we use it more in our advertising?”

Given the success of campaigns for Polka and Klipdrift, you'd think that advertisers would make more use of local lingo. It's a question we asked in an article on marketingweb earlier this year.

The way we use language expresses both our reality and our identity. Language is one of the ways that we are able to deepen our sense of national self without having to go into the kind of flag-waving schmaltziness that ultimately descends into glibness. So why don’t advertisers and marketers make more use of South Africanisms?

Why not, indeed?