When Klipdrift's "Met Eish" advert was first flighted on TV two years ago, its creators had no idea the phrase would rapidly infiltrate the South African lexicography.
But once it was clear the brandy producer had hit the jackpot with the term, advertising agency Draft FCB rapidly began rolling out a below-the-line advertising campaign to maximise the benefits of the new South African identity for Klippies and Coke.
Billboards sprung up, along with Met Eish branding on ice trays and buckets, and other promotional material to reinforce the message.
"It wasn't developed with the intention of being a campaign," says Klipdrift's account manager at Draft FCB, Daryl Dixon. "It just took off."
It's not surprising that one of South Africa's more successful brand activation campaigns was not originally conceptualised as such. In the US and the UK, between 60 percent and 70 percent of advertising spending accrues to below-the-line advertising and the remaining portion to above-the-line, whereas the ratio is reversed in South Africa.
Perhaps because below-the-line advertising is wrongly equated with direct marketing, much of corporate South Africa hasn't yet realised the benefits of this terrain, or indeed of a multipronged approach.
"In so many companies, brand activation is 'let's pull a T-shirt over the heads of half a primary school and go take a nice photograph'," says Morné Fourie, the head of consumer and retail activation at Cape Town-based marketing communications agency Thirtyfour.
Fourie defines brand activation as the point at which advertising and sales meet. "We look at how product moves out of the store and design everything from there. It's building from the bottom up, rather than from the top end."
Dixon agrees that South Africa hasn't yet caught on to the international trend to move away from just TV ads. But he believes the impetus is growing to embrace what has been termed a through-the-line approach, which translates a single-minded concept across various media.
André Lombaard, the managing director of Ogilvy Brand Activation, says activation businesses around the world are growing much faster than mature traditional advertising streams. In particular, shopper marketing at the point of purchase is the fastest-growing form of marketing in the US, bigger even than online marketing.
"Our point of view of brand activation at Ogilvy is that it's a hugely important area that's set to grow," he says. "We are seeing a huge investment into that area."
Ogilvy is responsible for Coca-Cola's successful Brr campaign, which has extended across various media to the point of consumer sales.
Thirtyfour's founding partner, Andrea Mitchell, says South African companies tend to have separate agencies or capacity for above-the-line and below-the-line communication, and on top of that, separate digital agencies to do their Web build.
But as the traditional boundaries between these spaces blur, more advertising agencies are starting to incorporate through-the-line advertising as part of their client offering.
According to Dixon, fast-moving consumer goods companies are better able to pull off campaigns that cross the line than, say, financial institutions.
Globally, sectors that face regulations in relation to above-the-line advertising, such as tobacco and alcohol, have tended to lead the way in innovative below-the-line campaigns. If their unconventional strategies are popular, it's often because the campaigns don't look like advertising - a growing issue as consumers become more selective about the media they interact with, and eschew being told what to think.
One of the world's most successful integrated campaigns is the global Miller music tour promoting the Miller Genuine Draft brand. Now in its eighth year of operation, the tour takes ticket holders from various countries on a week-long tour of music concerts in the US and UK by private jet.
Unilever South Africa attempted to replicate the party-on-a-jet concept in an advertising campaign for Axe body spray and deodorant.
Winners of their promotional campaign and local celebrities were waiting to board the AxeJet in August en route to Ibiza, when it was discovered the plane had not been chartered. A third party had not made the necessary payment. After a long delay, AxeJet passengers made their way to Ibiza on commercial flights.
Fourie says the no-show of the AxeJet served as a reminder to South Africa's industry that "because of the logistics involved, we've got to plan perfectly. There is so much back-end work, we turn ourselves into actuaries because there's a whole bunch of permutations."
While hiring a jet is a somewhat pricy affair, activating a brand does not have to be expensive. A small budget can be augmented in simple, creative ways.
The promotion of the US golf ball brand Callaway in the UK is a case in point. Conceptualised by Thirtyfour managing director Andrew Sutcliffe before he set up the South African business in 2006, the Callaway campaign led to a 600 percent increase in UK sales.
It relied on simple techniques to create hype, such as throwing golf balls into journalists' gardens, and using decals to create the illusion that golf balls had smashed car windows.
Upon investigating, the target would find a message that the balls had been hit from California, reinforcing the selling point that Callaway balls fly further.
"All these things are very cheap activations," says Fourie. "It's about finding areas in daily life where you would relate to the kind of products we're trying to sell, and trying to market it to you in a way that is going to really punt what this brand is about Within a second or three, you really get the message."