For once, I woke up early and caught my mother cooking breakfast for us. As I was sitting to the table, I saw a bread packet, but not any other bread packet. It had MTN adverts. For those of you that don't know, MTN is one of the biggest mobile phone networks in the world, and is from South Africa.

There are two yellow adverts on the packet: one says something in Zulu which I believe has something to do with "Make your mother smile", and the second advert, in English, reads "Recharge now with the R5 voucher and put a smile on someone's face".

This is publicity of their new recharge voucher, and it perfectly makes sense. R5 is about US$0.67, which is flippin' cheap for airtime, and they are advertising it on a necessity which is bread (which is also more expensive than the recharge voucher, at R7,99), a type of food that everyone eats, from the poor to the rich, and the R5 voucher will be wanted mostly by the lower income population. Very clever marketing, MTN.

Previously the R5 was only available from Cell C, which probably gained more popularity between the low-income households, of which there are many; this is South Africa guys.