Cherryflava

Cherryflava 2009 report card: Our year in review

Posted on 22. Dec, 2009 by Jonathan Cherry in Streetflava

Rock gods Fokofpolisiekar were our first guests on the Cherryflava Peep Show

The year 2009 was a bit like a teenage first date for us – cheap and fast with a rushed, awkward goodbye.

It was a year of recession, pig flu, the death of Michael Jackson, the rise of Tiger’s wood, a new president, solid rugby results and some brand new triumphs for us.

If we have to give this year a theme it would have to be ‘experiential’. We seriously hate the word, but there was a concerted focused on experience branding this year, from the design of our own products to the unconventional strategy work that we did for our clients.

Jason Stewart's BRAND HOOLIGANS presentation in Long Street

We launched ourselves deep into the dark, murky world of marketing conferences with the debut of BRAND HOOLIGANS and SecondBase and even started our very own live TV talk show – The Cherryflava Peep Show.

BRAND HOOLIGANS - the experiential marketing conference

We’ve hosted and had a few drinks afterwards with some esteemed guests, including: Fokofpolisiekar, Justin Bonello, Porky Hefer, Mike Schalit, Andrew Baxter, Rui Esteves and Brad Armitage, Mike Ratcliffe, Dave Levinsohn, Justin Letchert, SeanO and Jody Aufrichtig. That’s not forgetting the Yuppiechef blokes (Andrew Smith and Shane Dryden), the legends from World Wide Creative (Fred Roed and Jason Bagley), Andrew Cordoza, Nikki Friedman, Gareth Cotton and Jason Stewart.

Brands we worked with this year included: Woolworths,  British American Tobacco (Switzerland), Sony (South Africa), Cape Town Partnership, Tradewinds, Paula Wilson PR, CScout (New York), Big.Words.Scare.Me, Steenberg Winery, UCT Graduate School of Business, Virgin Active, Brewers & Union, Digicape, Nokia, The Grand Daddy Hotel, Cofferoutes, Zoopy and Jax Panik. Business-wise we have grown significantly in 2009 despite the recession and with our new strategy of product sub-branding and the packaging of our consulting services, the foundation has been laid for a great 2010.

The Skim nailing one of those 'donut and hot chocolate' things in Spain

Thanks to Sony we went to Spain and ate far too much carpaccio for our own sensitive constitutions. While there we realised that South African’s are not too shabby when it comes to hosting events and that immigration officials at Heathrow Terminal 5 are some of the rudest people on earth.

On the publishing side we finally upgraded the website from Typepad to Wordpress (with a few major snags along the way) and completed another year of our regular CapeTalk 567 Ad Feature on Wednesday mornings with Aden Thomas and the Cherryflava feature on MFM92.6 morning show with SeanO and Lize Kay.

The year 2009 will be remembered as a tough one, but overall we’ll give ourselves a B aggregate for the year. A good percentage of the hard work done this year was done as preparation for 2010 / 2011.

We’re going to take a little break from the office and the blog for a couple of weeks. We’ll post sporadically but will be back to a full schedule on 11 January 2010.
See you all safe and sound next year. Have a cracking festive season and thanks so much for supporting Cherryflava in ‘09.