Howzit rolls with the 'glocal' : retaining the global, celebrating the local By Katrien Potgieter Since Kagiso Media took on managing advertising sales and content for Microsoft’s South African offering of the MSN portal in May 2010, reinventing it and dubbing it Howzit MSN, the South African web portal has found itself consistently between the first and second spot on the country’s list of most popular web portals. What exactly got them there? To find out, I sat down with Microsoft’s advertising and online lead in South Africa, Nazeer Suliman, to talk about Howzit MSN’s response to the latest trends in consumer behaviour. The times we live in are increasingly typified by inescapable digitisation and the consequent consumerisation of technology. Author Pete Hissen, in his book The New Normal, points out that the new norm in information organisation is characterised by fluidity and an organic, network-like structure, and is consumed by a ‘digital native’ who is obsessed with multitasking and only partially pays attention. These Millennials prefer a bottoms-up way of sharing information (as opposed to the controlled, top-down paradigm epitomised by corporate societies) in order to cope with the proliferation of available information, as the threat of information overload looms on the peripheries of their techfixated young minds. Hissen notes that the real issue is not actually one of information overload, but instead a failure in the filtering of information. It’s the way that big bodied information hosts like MSN are responding to this continual explosion of information in the fast-changing times we live in that is shaping their success (or failure). Right off the bat, Suliman references Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, about the adaptive unconscious and our capacity to ‘thin-slice’ information and gauge what is really important from a very narrow period of experience. This, says Suliman, is key to how consumers filter information. In an age of information overload, Gladwell contends that experts often make better decisions with snap judgements than they do with volumes of analysis, but according to Suliman, this idea is not really that groundbreaking. “If you go back to advertising theory, it has always talked about consumers having conceptual screens, so you screen out things that are not relevant, and of course you’ll hone in on things that are ... because there is this multitude of messages that you are being bombarded with on a daily basis, consumers will just naturally screen out, filter out irrelevant information. The idea of selective perception is a known fact.” COUP●JANUARY●2012●30