/tacanderson

The conversions will kill me. Between the metric system, the 1:7 dollar to rand conversion and the 9 hour time difference back to home I'll be doing more math in my head this week than I have all year.

The internet sucks. I was warned before I got here that it was expensive and not very good. I'm glad to have it though because I found out after I got here that my AT&T global data roaming plan isn't covered in Africa. Thanks again AT&T. 

So glad I'm not driving. Everything's on the wrong side. Every time I looked up and saw a car coming at us from the right side my heart jumped a little. That's going to take some getting used to. 

Racial Marketing

This could partly be because I'm a GenX American which means I was raised on a healthy dose of white guilt my entire life so take this with a grain of salt. Almost all the advertising I've seen contains white people. The notable exception right now is the World Cup promotions which obviously strive to represent a global mix. In the US most advertisers try to skew their ads to represent the area they'll be displayed in. This means if you go to Atlanta you'll see more African Americans on billboards than you will in Idaho. But in South Africa this doesn't seem to be the case.  

According to the Wikipedia, South Africa is 80% black and 10% colored (not totally sure what that entails) but only 10% white. That's the complete opposite of Boise, Idaho where I grew up. But the advertising isn't much more diverse. I'm willing to bet it's because there is still a huge gap between the haves and the have nots and advertisers are playing to their audience. I bet if you look at the color make up of the middle class and up you'd see a radically different mix than the general population. 

This isn't a knock against advertisers or the country and it's people, just an observation that the country World still has a long way to go. 

I'll post some more tonight or tomorrow morning and I promise to take pictures. 

This was one in a series of posts about my trip to Joburg South Africa. You can see all of those posts under the tag: Joburg.