Financial Mail AdFocus 2020

The brutal new battle for business

The theme for this year’s FM AdFocus is how intense competition in the campaign and communications industry has moved to open warfare as agencies and consultancies compete aggressively for accounts

During one of this year’s interminable Zoom or Teams meetings, a well-known creative director said to whoever was bothering to listen: “Everyone is telling us to pivot. The ad industry needs to do much more than that. We need to prance, pirouette and pas de deux, otherwise it’s over.”

Then a cat jumped on his lap and the meeting called to discuss new approaches to creativity in the industrydefaulted to what many virtual gatherings were doing —another spirited conversation about feline dexterity and companionship during the lockdown.

Advertising and marketing agencies have had a torrid 2020. The cruel domino impact of Covid-19 was felt in the earliest days of the economic shutdown. An immediate drop in consumer confidence led to a drop in sales, which in turn forced brands to slow or halt their communication, which led to smaller agencies closing or shedding staff and the more resilient ones having to dig deep into their reserves.

There is nothing to suggest the bloodletting is over, and brands will remain jittery about spending and will demand from their agency partners more output accountability and justification than they have ever had to give.

It’s the agency that can do this with precision, transparency and data-driven solutions that will succeed in the new environment. And they have a fight on their

hands. One that was already shaping up before the world got sick.

The big global business consultancies saw a gap years ago to move into the space occupied by the brand communications industry. Their argument was simple. For too long many brands had been bemoaning strategic weakness in the industry and an inability to solve problems up and down the value chain.

That, however, was the core offering from these hot-desking, high-charging behemoths, which thought upskilling in the campaign and communications space surely wasn’t difficult? It wasn’t. And in recent years a skills and acquisition raid has been happening to the point where intense competition has moved to open warfare as agencies and consultancies compete aggressively for accounts.

In fairness to the ad community, many big shops have upped their game, and choice for a client needing big business solutions backed by creative thinking is much harder, with the pendulum at times swinging back to ad land.

This new battle for business is the theme for the 2020 edition of the FM’s AdFocus as both sides of the equation make their case.

The awards programme this year was always going to be different. Some agencies decided not to enter, wanting to focus all their efforts on their clients, their staff and survival. It’s a position no-one can argue with. We look forward to welcoming them back in time.

To those agencies who participated, the common theme among all entries was how

tough and resilient they were forced to become in a short space of time. To that end, a new one-off category was developed that looked at exactly that —how agencies successfully adapted during 2020.

Our advice to the industry would be to reach out to this year’s overall winner, Triple Eight, and, keeping masked and socially distanced, interrogate what it did and how?

A special mention must be made to the new chair of the judging jury this year, Tumi Rabanye, whose management of the process in the virtual world was nothing short of magnificent. This project would also not be a success without the rest of the jury members who donate their time and expertise because they have a strong belief in the brand industry and its importance to the economy.

A further word of thanks is extended to Deloitte —our eagle-eyed auditors under whose supervision the judging takes place.

Years ago, in an earlier incarnation of AdFocus, lifetime achiever winner Graham Warsop said he was far too young to win, as his professional life still had many laps to run.

The same can be said of this year’s recipient, Bernice Samuels, MTN’s head of marketing. Her brand, despite the hardships of the past year, has just been named the most valuable in Africa. We ask her to accept the accolade knowing her professional race is far from run.

Financial Mail editor: Rob Rose

AdFocus editor: Jeremy Maggs

Project co-ordinator: Lynette Dicey

Surveys editor: Les Tilley

Layout: Busisiwe Ntsamba

Sub-editor: Danni Marais

Graphics: Colleen Wilson

Head of advertising sales: Eben Gewers

Sales manager: Kay Naidoo

Sales: Cortney Hoyland, Debbie Montanari, Nigel Twidale

Photographers: Freddy Mavunda, 123rf

Cover design:

Contributors: Samantha du Chenne, Brett Morris, Ann Nurock

AdFocus Awards project co-ordinator: Danette (Breitenbach) Capper

AdFocus Jury: Tumi Rabanye, industry consultant, 2020/2021 juries chair; Alistair Mokoena, country director, Google; Dr Beate Stiehler-Muldersenior lecturer, marketing and stakeholder engagement - department of marketing management, University of Johannesburg; Camilla Clerke –ECD, HelloFCB; Faheem Chaudhry –MD, M&C Saatchi Abel JHB; Haydn Townsend –MD, Accenture Interactive; Jay Badza –founder & head honcho, Orchard on 25; Lebo Motswenyane –founder, Lucky No.8; Lehlohonolo (Hloni) Mokhema –general manager, Absa Group Communications; Lesego Kotane –MD, King James Group Johannesburg; Michael Oelschig, MD,

Wunderman Thompson SA; Mmapula Mokoena –head of marketing, Yalu SA; Mpume Ngobese –MD, Joe Public Connect; Oresti Patricios –CEO, Ornico Group; Pride Maunatlala –head of marketing, TFG, Foschini Division, Foschini; Sindiswa Masuta –strategy business director, Grey Group; Thabiet Allie –CEO, TurnUp Music; Wendy Bergsteedt –group head marketing, coronation fund manager

Media Jury: Candice Goodman –MD: Mobitainment; Carmen Murray –founder, Boo-Yah; Koo Govender –CEO, Dentsu Aegis SA; Mbali Ndandani –Africa Digital Lead; Unilever, Margie Carr –MD, InTouch Media; Monique Claassen –client service director media domain, Kantar; Oresti Patricios –CEO, Ornico Group

Student Award Jury: Bonolo Modise –senior copywriter & creative director, FCB; Dali Tembo –CEO & co-founder,

The Culture Foundry; Dr Beate Stiehler-Mulder –senior lecturer marketing & stakeholder engagement, dept of marketing management, University of Johannesburg; Gregory King –integrated creative director, Promise Group; Mphothe Elizabeth Mokoena –homecare marketing director, Unilever; Makosha Maja-Rasethaba –partner head of strategy (Jhb), M&C Saatchi Abel; Trevor Ndhlovu –CEO, Black River FC

Deloitte auditor: Tinesh Govender

Printing: Hirt & Carter

BRAVE NEW WORLD

Consultancies muscle in on traditional ad agency territory

Agencies need to be fast on their feet to secure their place in a rapidly changing environment

Long before the Covid-19 pandemic brought the global advertising industry to its knees, the sector was already waging another war against the big business consultancies encroaching on its territory.

And now with brands desperately seeking unique and quickly implementable business solutions, more often than not as a survival strategy, that battle is intensifying and a new front has opened up in SA.

It’s worth examining how badly brand communications have been battered in 2020. Early data from the Publicis agency-holding company showed year-on-year ad revenue in China was down 15%. Countries in Europe had an average reduction of 9%; Germany and France fell 7% and 12% respectively.

SA fared much worse. At the beginning of the lockdown, figures by market research company AC Nielsen showed advertising spend was down by just over 20% and apart from tobacco marketing, which was down 100% because of the initial ban on sales, other sectors adversely affected were the automotive sector (-52%), beverages (-49%)and retail (-54%). Travel, sport and leisure adspend was down by just over 50%.

While spending has started to improve in late 2020, the industry is still bleeding and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, as marketing heads recalibrate their approach and ask for business solutions that conventional wisdom suggests goes beyond the scope and ability of ad agencies.

Of course, the agency world flatly denies this but it is being forced to deal with a new threat as big business consultancies like Accenture and Deloitte are now aggressively moving into its space.

Haydn Townsend, a former agency big-hitter, has crossed the big divide and is now MD of Accenture Interactive. His profile blurb, in part, says:“His focus is combining the power of Accenture’s business consulting, creative, digital and technology capabilities to

help organisations rewire their businesses — design, build, communicate and run the best experiences on the planet.”

If that isn’t a throwdown to ad agencies, what is? He says consultancies are not going for straight shoot-outs for what he terms agency of record work, but are combining traditionally unmeasurable communication with measurable components of businesses.

“Because of the C-level relationships and ability to show business return and not advertising return, consultancies are an existential threat to agencies that are ring-fenced by the communication components. The first step would be adding technology and data, but that is first base. Knowing how a marketing stack integrates with an ERP or CRM system is one thing —but being able to do it is entirely another. So, agencies will need to become technology companies that extend to the full experience. Once you show value there —the CEO will talk to you.”

Gil Oved is a high-profile SA entrepreneur who was the co-founder and co-CEO of The Creative Counsel ad agency. He says the centre of the brand solar system has changed.

“The primary need that brands now have is for their suppliers to create business value and lower their costs. This broader service offering is not what traditional ad agencies were built to do. Today’s clients need to measure hardcore metrics —business outcomes, revenue upliftand profitability, not the soft metrics like likability or engagement. In years gone by, given a lack of data, an ad agency could get away with anecdotal feedback and implied correlations, but with digital transformation there has come a bounty of data that allows any effort to be far more measurable.”

So, ad agencies have a fight on their hands, of that there is no doubt. Thithi Nteta is the deputy MD of ad agency FCB in Joburg. It is considered royalty in the ad business and works on blue-chip brands like Toyota and

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Coca-Cola. She says big consultancies play a role, but not an important one in the ad industry space, despite what she calls a knee-jerk panic when some big consultancies acquired creative agencies.

“Since then, I’ve observed a lot of experimentation on their part, as well as differentiation. Overall, making ads and commercials is still very much the advertising industry’s space but the briefs differ. Consultants are typically brought in to think of the business problem, business strategy, market entry and how to address those issues. Advertising agencies are typically brought in to look at campaign briefs. Consultants will always think of the client as a business, whereas advertising agencies may think of the client as a brand.”

But she suggests ad agencies do need to

start thinking differently. “The client perception about what a creative agency can offer is a hurdle the agency has to leap over. When agencies have tried to look at solving business problems, they are often not taken seriously because they are agencies, and they do not have the consulting credentials. So, in the mind of the client, there is this quite clear delineation of an agency’s role, and it falls only into the marketing bucket.”

Hers is a frank and honest assessment about the lightweight perception —often unfair —that agencies are burdened with and are trying brief by brief to change.

Dustin Chick is the managing partner of reputation management companyRazor. Reputation management is a fancy phrase for public relations, a discipline that sits squarely in the middle of business and creative

disciplines. He believes the entire conversation around brand development (and survival) needs to change.

“I think the first point of departure is to consider that big isn’t necessarily better. In effect this means we must change our conversation, and look at it from a client point of view. The most critical issue is understanding how to bring the best of talent to solve inherent business problems. So, it is less about the choice between business strategy and creative capability —and more about brilliant problem-solving. It’s about context, not just the strategic philosophy. What matters here is the quality of people and expertise. Those who work with client teams need to deliver outcomes that are strategically smart and relevant, creatively compelling and measurable.”

Johanna McDowell is the founder and CEO of Independent Agency Selection and the managing partner of Scopen Africa. A big part of her job is finding the right agencyfit for a brand. She says consultancies have made serious advances in markets such as Brazil, China and the UK.

“Big consultancies such as Accenture, Deloitte, IBM[and] PWC are starting to make headway in SA and we can expect to see more and more activity as they grow. However, they are mainly growing into the technology digital, business transformation space at this point as opposed to traditional above line creative spaces.”

So, are they adding value and posing a threat to traditional agencies? McDowell says: “Business transformation and technology are the heartland of the large consultancies, so

they approach business and marketing solutions from that standpoint as opposed to immediately looking for a creative solution and communicating it. In that way, they are adding serious value to their clients.

“The consultancies tell us their clients are asking for marketing reorganisation solutions as opposed to creative campaigns. This means that they are operating from a different place and are often able to engage at a much higher level within the marketer C-suite than an advertising agency can do. The good news is that one or two of the larger global agency groups —such as Dentsu and IPG for example —are already reorganising themselves to enable their agencies to provide far more of a business consulting service. They are doing this through supporting their agencies with layers of data and technology services that will provide far more meaningful information to marketers about their target audiences/ consumers, and this seems to be working.”

Doug de Villiers was previously CEO of Interbrand Africa and is now CEO of consultancy Fastrack. He’s firmly of the opinion that big consulting is giving big advertising a run for its money, and he doesn’t pull his punches.

“It’s primarily driven by the significant changes in consumer expectations, technological capabilitiesand the ability of the so-called ’new consagency’to run hyper-agile and real-time data to deployment experiences and aligned communications to an audience of one, with measurable high-impact results. While consumer audiences have for years been bombarded by an ever-increasing assault of one-directional volume competing campaigns across an ever-increasing number

of channels, they now have the power to decide what communications they want, when they want it, through which channel/s and importantly, how often they want it.

The traditional agency model with bottomless client budgets, subjective creative happy moments, a largely spray and pray approach to media and channel selection, a palpable fear of marketing technology and little to no meaningful performance impact measurement is finally running out of steam as brand owners focus on real marketing efficiencies and campaign experience and effectiveness.”

So, who is best positioned to win here? “Historically, there has been a respectable and respected divide between agency and consultancy, simply because creative agencies have largely lacked any meaningful strategic business understanding and/or credible impact metrics,”says De Villiers.

“By the same token, consultancies —though rich in data, analytical and strategic abilities — have lacked creative understanding and capability, and have, quite frankly, regarded creative as a dark art with little to no credibility. However, the world has changed as a result of rapidly advancing digital marketing ecosystems and related technology, thereby providing a much-needed common ground for both from data, through development, design and deployment and whoever adapts, and changes first, wins.”

Chick thinks the threat argument is overcooked. “The only threat is not recognising the role you play in a client’sbusiness and how you work with them to be better. Value comes from this partnership, and an open dialogue that appreciates the tough questions.

Most significantly, it is an issue of context and relevance. Traditional agencies are likely more connected to the heartbeat of an issue, and this value can never be disregarded. Agencies are more culturally grounded and join the dots between various clients and industries. Too often today, business issues are not about the what we do —but entirely about the how we do it and how we say what we do.”

Oved says the basic DNA of consulting firms is always about driving business value. “That is the basic premise upon which their industry was created. This, as opposed to the old school ad agencies whose DNA had been based on winning Cannes statues and being hailed for their creativity and artistic flair. My experience of working with consulting companies is that they always start with the question of ‘how do we add value?’It’s a core component to their existence and therefore that ability to ask and answer such questions and be held accountable for the evidence of achieving that value add is appealing for clients.”

Townsend says Covid-19 has accelerated digital adoption at unprecedented rates, which plays to the strength of consultancies. “In the US we have seen 10 years’linear growth achieved in three months. Apply this to every digital touchpoint combined with the accelerated roll-out of 5G, and you have a world where brands are being more influenced by the digital and digitised experiences they offer than the communication. So, the demand for brand services has not declined, it’s just that the most powerful lever is no longer advertising.”

Jeremy Maggs

Triple Eight wins at UK Purpose Awards

Last year pan-African agency, Triple Eight, emerged as the 2019 AdFocus Agency of the Year, winning an astonishing four awards. In 2020 Triple Eight has continued to rake in the plaudits, recently winning the Overall Agency of the Year Award at the UK PRWeek Purpose Awards, a high profile global award pitting them against multinational giants.

Founded in Joburg by Sarika Modi in 2012, Triple Eight is a women-empowered team of expert strategists in localised marketing and advertising. The agency employs 70 people in SA, Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe, servicing 45 global brands. They are known for their ability to drive strong market penetration for leading global brands through localised culturally-driven insights and strategies as well as innovative routes to market, something they have perfected by working in some of Africa’s most challenging informal markets.

Triple Eight has also made a name for itself with its focus on purpose and behaviour change, doing work that achieves both strong business and social results, through numerous healthcare and socially conscious community marketing campaigns.

Editor-in-chief at PRWeek UK and EMEA, Danny Rogers, said, “This is ... a unique and innovative

agency with social purpose at its core, and the producer of some highly creative and proven campaigns for social good.”

The Purpose Awards judges said

the agency has impact written all over it. One said it has “powerful campaign case studies and a strong commitment to innovation within communications. Triple Eight has a strong mission and is setting an incredibly positive design and innovation example in the industry. It is a clear winner for me.”

Another judge commented that it feels like the agency deserves special recognition for its purpose and said the agency should be commended for being “a growing female business in a part of the world where gender equality is hardly top of the bill”.

“Clearly doing great things,”was one comment, while a further judge lauded the agency for “some excellent activations”.

The company works with large brand clients including Unilever, Nestle, Reckitt Benckiser, Samsung, Clicks, Shoprite and Danone.

THE NEW WAR

Industry faces fight for survival

Ad agencies will have to start sharpening their weapons if they hope to defend themselves against their many encroaching rivals

If ever there was a year when the advertising industry is at odds with itself, 2020 is that year. Early estimates predict that the industry will lose $23bn globally due to the effects of the coronavirus.

Add to this the fact that clients’needs have changed. They’re looking beyond marketing solutions for business partners who can embed themselves across the entire value chain — we’re talking from product development to logistics, and finding better ways to do this all.

Essentially, the industry finds itself in an uncomfortable position —at war for its survival against the big consultancies offering new skills in the form of research and data gathering, and specialist shops and individuals who bring their own niche insights to the problems facing brands today —mistrust, fake news and consumer-generated content.

AdFocus’s intent for 2020 is to decipher this new territory, outlining the way in which brands and agencies should be shifting their thinking, what new skills have become imperative for the industry, and who will win this war.

As previous years have shown us, those agencies that have the agility, tools and talent will come out on top.

This year, AdFocus’s research took place with a sample of respondents working in the advertising, media and marketing industries, as well as in financial services, consulting and education. Just over a third of respondents work in advertising, with three in 10 working for an advertising agency.

To begin, respondents were asked the extent to which large consultancies and one-person specialists now play a role in the industry. Fifty-six percent maintain that large consultancies play a role to some extent and, overall, respondents believe that they play a bigger role in the ad industry space than individual specialists.

Comments included “the lines between agencies and consultancies such as Accenture are blurring”;“creativity has become about data

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perspective you are taking a view. They are posing a threat to the traditional agencies, and might add value to certain advertisers”.

Another respondent commented that “any kind of rival which forces us to raise our game is positive. In SA’s current climate and the business world, they have a more challenging time being taken seriously within the ad industry”.

That said, we can’t be complacent.

Those who believe consultancies pose a threat commented that, “with good creativity they can take work from agencies”and “since they add value via digital compatibility, this means they pose a threat to legacy or analogue agencies”.

and they have this skill,”and “they see a gap to move into the creative space and add an empirical skill set that agencies haven’t traditionally had”.

That said, not everyone agreed with this sentiment, with some commenting that “I have yet to see proper work done in the advertising space by big consultancies”and “big consultancies provide a macro view, but it’s the smaller agency that executes and runs the day-to-day: cheaper and more agile”.

The message coming out of this is that big consultancies don’t have all the necessary skills, and it’s only the large corporates who can afford them.It was also pointed out that the major agency groups are still controlling the advertising industry.

When asked whether large consultancies add value or pose a threat, 47% of respondents believe they add value, with 26% saying they pose a threat.

Perhaps the response that best summed this question up is “it depends from which

About 27% are not sure whether consultancies pose a threat or not, with some respondents believing their approach is “still formative and they have had some success but integrating their quite staid culture with a creative one is a challenge”.

Many believe the value provided by consultancies depends on the client and whether big consultancies and agencies can integrate their skills sets.

The other question to consider is whether one-person specialists are taking business away from agencies. Forty-nine percent of respondents believe that they are, to some extent, with 39% saying that they are “not really”taking business away.

Four percent believe they’re taking it away to a great extent, 6% believe not at all, and 2% are not sure.

The minority that maintain they’re taking business away to a great extent,say they are hiring the strongest creatives from the industry into their environment and that “they are hungry and where clients want a quick turnaround time, the big machines can’t cope.”

Moreover, while they may be one-person specialists, they are generally surrounded by a team of other talented people, thus becoming a “mini agency”, able to cater to a variety of needs.

The 49% majority who believe the one-person specialists are to some extent taking work away from agencies, have made comments such as “like big brands, big agencies will always deliver a level of trust. But individual agility and value (less expensive) will become an opportunity for entrepreneurship”and “many small bespoke specialist agencies that are nimble, with friendlier pricing and super-talented individuals, are giving agencies a run for their money”.

Agency understands the intimate details of data gathering and interpretation to some extent

With 39% believing that agencies are safe from specialised individuals, it was pointed out that “it’s unlikely that all of the required skills can reside in one individual” and “there is no real evidence, and marketers are reluctant to depend on one-person agencies —there is not enough infrastructure”.

One thing is certain: there is a new paradigm in the industry, and respondents were asked whether agencies can adapt and are adapting to it.

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great extent and to some extent).

That said, it cannot be argued that change isn’t on the horizon, with 51% saying they would rather take their brand business to one of the new emerging disciplines rather than a traditional agency, 15% saying they would not do this, and 20% unsure.

Fifty-three percent believe that agencies can adapt to a new paradigm to some extent, while 46% believe they are already adapting to some extent.

The sense is that agencies should be upskilling and catering for business solutions as opposed to only creative ones.

The good news for the advertising industry is that 84% of respondents believe that SA has the right skills set to meet the new demands that brands are expecting of them (a combination of those who believe this to a

Respondents were asked about their level of confidence in the ad industry as it currently exists. Fifty percent say they are confident in the industry to some extent, 23% to a great extent, 25% say not really, with 2% saying not at all. One respondent pointed out that the industry is “not results-driven, too big, too expensive and that strategy is only applied at the beginning of the client relationship”.

On the other hand, another respondent highlighted the fact that “SA has produced phenomenal creative work, even by global standards. Agencies should continue to do this, as the role of communications remains critical

to brand performance”.

Another mentions that “brands will always need creative storytelling, ads, digital content and PR. Brands will always advertise, so the ad industry will always be in demand”. Importantly, it was also reported that “a large portion of the industry has proved that it is agile and flexible, changing to adapt to this new paradigm”.

Those who have lost confidence in the industry made comments such as the industry has lost its sex appeal, that it no longer attracts the best talent, that it is confused and uninformed about the needs of clients, and that it’sunable to cope with digital challenges.

The industry is certainly entering an era were data gathering and interpretation have a crucial role to play, and respondents were asked if their agency understands this function, as well as whether the importance of creativity has lessened or increased in this new brand world.

To this end, 47% believe their agency understands data collection and interpretation to some extent, with 24% saying they understand to a great extent. Twenty-three percent say not really and 5% say not at all. A resounding 75% believe the role of creativity has heightened in this new brand world.

Ultimately, when respondents were asked whether they believe there is a war on for their business, 47% replied that, to some extent, there is. Twenty-one percent believe this war is taking place to a great extent, 24% say not really, 4% say not at all, and 5% are not sure.

AWARDS

AGENCY OF THE YEAR, SPECIALIST AGENCY OF THE YEAR, AFRICAN IMPACT AWARD, TRANSFORMATION AWARD AND ADAPTABILITY AWARD:

Triple Eight

Purpose-driven agency wins a whopping five awards

If you thought Triple Eight, the 2019 AdFocus Agency of the Year, cleaned up last year with four awards, it has surpassed last year’s achievement by winning an astonishing five awards at the 2020 AdFocus Awards.

This year, the agency won in the Specialist, Transformation, African Impact and Adaptability categories, culminating in the Overall Agency of the Year Award.

Triple Eight is a women-led and empowered socially conscious marketing impact agency with more than 70 women professionals in SA and the region, working for over 50 leading global brands.

It describes itself as a purpose-driven marketing impact agency, helping brands create shared value and develop high-impact and purpose-driven projects. Its big differentiator is that its campaigns are measured by both social and business impact.

It is defined by its mission to craft campaigns that inspire everyday people to use their spending power to make a positive difference in the world through the brands they choose. In Asian philosophy, 888 represents good fortune. Combined, Triple Eight, says MD Sarika Modi, is about good fortune for people, planet and profit.

In a typical year, more than 70% of the agency’s work is purpose-driven. But in 2020, as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, 100% of its work has been purposeful.

What Triple Eight is particularly good at is strategising campaigns differently and effectively to ensure they achieve both business and social results. “This is our trademark and clients invest with us in these campaigns over many years because of the results,”says Modi. “For purpose to be sustainable, it needs to contribute to return on

investment —or it will become redundant. As such, we measure, monitor and evaluate the success of each campaign based on the triple bottom line.”

While purpose has become a global trend for many brands and advertising agencies, for Triple Eight it is its very core, rather than a trend or fad. While the agency works in purpose-driven campaigns, it has a strong purpose itself, which is the empowerment of women and communities.

“Being a young, women-led agency positions us as progressive and more representative of the consumers who make the purchase decisions in the brands we work with,”says Modi. “We consider ourselves SA’s most inclusive agency, embracing both diversity and inclusion, and fast-tracking the

gender equality agenda.”

As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, the agency’s activations business was closed. The team was therefore diverted to focus on innovation and impact instead, a strategy which resulted in arguably the agency’s most effective work to date, and a substantial increase in revenue, says Modi.

It developed the Wash-n-Well handwashing stations and Sani-Alert Sanitising Stations.

“We’ve sold thousands of these stations across eight countries in Africa, empowering millions of people in the fight against Covid-19, while benefiting brands through advertising and education,”she says.

Its innovative Nestlé Nespray WhatsApp Mathbot, meanwhile, helped lower-income families with maths education during the

lockdown and school closures —at the same time driving sales.

The agency is becoming increasingly influential: it has long-running partnerships with governments in Africa and direct lines of communication to director-generals within the ministries of health and education in each country. This year, it was endorsed by the AU Centres for Disease Control & Prevention and the UN Development Programme for its Covid-19 work. It was a key contributor to communications and education for the official SA Covid-19 Response Task Team. The agency was also responsible for launching the largest handwashing campaign in SA via the Dettol Protects the Frontline campaign, an initiative which received global funding in a partnership with the health department.

Gaining the trust of big global multinational brands is a significant achievement for an entrepreneurial agency, so it’s not surprising that Modi is particularly proud of Triple Eight’s exceptional client retention. The agency’s first programme started in 2012 —and is still running. Other clients include Unilever, Reckitt Benckiser, Shoprite, Clicks, Samsung, Nestlé, Kellogg’s, Danone, Standard Bank and Johnson & Johnson, to name a few. The agency acquired 12 new clients during the pandemic. Despite a significantly uncertain business environment and the temporary closure of its activations business, the agency grew its client base more than 30% and increased its revenue by 23% in the period under review.

Specialist Agency of the Year

The other finalists in this category included Retroactive and Levergy. Both Retroactive and Triple Eight, said the judges, demonstrated

innovation and had identified a niche for themselves.

Digital sports agency Retroactive not only survived the impact of Covid-19 but even managed to grow from a revenue and profit perspective. It is investing its profits into building MatchKit.co, a DIY website builder that enables athletes to showcase their sporting abilities and achievements. The platform offers an easy-to-use e-commerce site where fans can buy bespoke branded merchandise. The site has generated revenue from the outset. The agency is clearly doing a great deal right given the number of industry awards it has received since its establishment two years ago.

Levergy, part of the M&C Saatchi stable, is a sport and entertainment agency. A series of blue-chip account gains at the end of 2019, and the continued commitment of its anchor clients, have helped the agency record impressive growth and profitability. Levergy added nine new clientsin the period under review. It has also received numerous awards, including regaining the Agency of the Year accolade at the Sports Industry Awards.

Transformation Award

Invariably the transformation category elicited robust discussion on what the term truly means and the depth of transformation required of an advertising agency. The judges concurred that the enablement of diverse decisionmaking is what matters most.

Though the current focus touched on the BEE scorecard, there was consensus that as an industry we need to move past the scorecard given that it constitutes table stakes today. What matters more is the lived experience in

the industry —not only at an entry level, but up the ranks where critical business decisions are made.

The winner of this year’s AdFocus Transformation Award, Triple Eight, demonstrated in a compelling manner that transformation is a lived experience which transcends race and CSI. The agency is a level 1 BBBEE agency and is 100% black women owned. Of the six managers in the business, five are black women, and more than 80% of its employees are black women.

But more than changing the gender narrative in the marketing industry, its real contribution to transformation is its work in uplifting communities.

The other finalists in this category included DUKE and Joe Public. A 100% black-owned, independent agency group, DUKE has always aimed to be a great agency that has black ownership, rather than being a great black agency. The group recently launched Duchess, one of SA’s first 100% black women-run production companies, which aims to work with black-owned independent suppliers.

Joe Public became the largest majority black-owned independent agency group in SA in March through the acquisition of 34% of Joe Public by Senatla Capital and a 29% acquisition by Ikamva Lakhusava (an entity made up by three of the agency’s leading black executives). Transformation, however, was a priority at Joe Public long before this deal was even conceived, given its philosophy that sustainable transformation is a critical ingredient in delivering on its growth purpose.

The agency has a number of initiatives and programmes in place, for both staff and its suppliers, and over the last 12 months has achieved a number of milestones regarding the transformation of its people, clients and partners.

African Impact Award

This was an inspiring category to judge, and successfully demonstrated just how much opportunity there still is on the continent. It served as a reference point for breaking out of the silo mentalities we so often tend to apply locally, forgetting all that the continent has to teach and share, says AdFocus jury chair Tumi Rabanye.

There is no question that Africa is rich in opportunities and offers vast potential for growth for agencies, which is certainly the approach of the winner of this award. Triple Eight’s entry in the African Impact category stood out head and shoulders above the other finalists, primarily due to a successful

AWARDS

demonstration of both its purpose and the extent to which it is developmentally led on the continent.

Beyond SA’s borders all of Triple Eight’s projects relate to social, health care and economic upliftment issues facing each country. In addition to SA, the company operates in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, Mozambique and Malawi, tackling causes such as reducing maternal and infant mortality and morbidity; the prevention of HIV, sexually transmitted infections and early pregnancy; rapid emergency response to cholera outbreaks and natural disasters; hygiene and handwashing programmes; antenatal care classes; malaria education; women empowerment; and clean-up programmes, among others.

The other finalists in this category included BCW Africa and Dentsu Aegis. During lockdown BCW launched an initiative across the continent called #stayINreachOUT, which challenged people to reach out to their personal circle of contacts and commit to reaching out to them regularly. The agency also launched an engaging “nomination video” concept using the elbow bump greeting to promote the #stayINreachOUT initiative, which reached close to 30 countries, generating over 850 organic mentions.

Ensuring it supported its people across the region was a priority for Dentsu Aegis during the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown. The agency set up a platform for its staff across Africa, including its regional partners and affiliates, which allowed staff to support each other through an uncertain period.

White papers were created for clients to assist them to be agile and adaptive within a changing environment. Dentsu Data Labs launched a Covid-19 Intelligence Centre across Sub-Saharan Africa to help solve clients’ complex business cases using data sources.

Adaptability Award

This was the inaugural year of the Adaptability Award, which was introduced to recognise the extent to which agencies adapted to navigate the challenging Covid crisis and acknowledge those agencies which rose above the panic and disruption of an unusual year by successfully adapting to this new paradigm.

Covid-19 has presented the ultimate proof point that we do indeed live in volatile, unpredictable, complex and ambiguous (Vuca) times. The crisis has been an opportunity for the true mettle of the agency-client partnership to be demonstrated by delivering work that is responsive to the moment and purposeful.

For this award, the judges were looking for demonstrable agency-client collaboration that positively shifted the conversation. It took into consideration how the agency has adjusted to the new reality, its responsiveness to the lockdown levels, and how staff have been empowered to forge ahead despite the challenges. The spirit of this category is as much about responding to the new reality as it is about the courage of industry players to co-create the future.

What was particularly interesting to see was what different agencies defined as adaptability. Some rated their IT systems, which allowed people to work remotely; some talked about their immediate response to the lockdown; and others described the support they provided to their people.

There were three finalists in this category: FCB Joburg, HaveYouHeard and Triple Eight.

Even before the lockdown, FCB JHB had implemented a Covid-19 policy. An evacuation drill conducted on March 23 revealed that 94% work continuity and connectivity was realistic

in just 90 minutes. As a result of reduced client budgets and to prevent job losses, all senior managers and executives voluntarily elected for salary reductions of between 10% and 15%. Free counselling was provided to all staff and a number of motivational initiatives were introduced.

The agency proved its agility by successfully launching campaigns from brief to execution in as little as two weeks and conducted a significant amount of pro bono work for NGOs between April and mid-August.

HaveYouHeard sent its staff home to begin remote working two weeks before the lockdown was announced in SA. The business impact of the lockdown was brutal and the agency lost 50% of its revenue overnight. But, proving its mettle and resilience in the middle of a global recession, the agency has been hunting for new business and successfully clawed back 70% of lost revenue, all the while retaining its full headcount.

Triple Eight, however, was a clear winner in this category. In its favour was the fact that it already had all the right building blocks in place even before the pandemic, and a level of preparation which allowed it to be adaptive despite the fact that its activations business came to a complete standstill during the lockdown. Pivoting its business in the way it did to focus on innovation and impact resulted in a substantial increase in revenue.

Though the initial idea was that the Adaptability Award would be a one-off, the judges agreed that this is certainly a category worth keeping into 2021 as it emphasises the consistent adaptability required to navigate the Vuca environment.

LARGE ADVERTISING AGENCY OF THE YEAR Joe Public

Creative excellence, strong growth and true transformation

This was a highly competitive category to judge —and the category where the agitation for change and evolution was most palpable. It was also the category where the most queries from judges emanated.

One of the topics under discussion during the adjudication was the urgency and depth of transformation required at large agencies, particularly as seen through the lens of jurors with leadership experience in these businesses and on the client side. No decisions were taken without consideration of what the collective envisaged for the implementation of the codes of good practice.

So it was perhaps no surprise that Joe Public, the largest black-owned independent agency, is this year’s AdFocus Large Advertising Agency of the Year.

However, transformation is far from the agency’s only achievement in the past year. By partnering with brands who share its values, the agency achieved its best new business growth in the last five years,by creating value-added services and generating new revenue streams. New clients included Cell C, Mars (Royco) and The Unlimited, including project work for Bonitas and Uber.

Recognition in the Scopen Agency Report as the most highly rated agency in terms of client satisfaction and growth (December 2019) is testament, says the agency, for its continued long-standing relationship with its clients. Its most established clients include Clover and Mahindra (both 17 years), Jet (more than eight years), Nedbank (more than seven years), and Chicken Licken (four years).

New revenue streams were created with the establishment of Joe Public Maximise, a media planning and buying entity, and Joe Motion, a motion graphics, animation 3D, digital assets production and post-production studio. Its proprietary brand planning process, Growth CompassTM, which allows the agency to provide business purpose to its clients, also gained steady traction.

In June, Joe Public announced the addition of Joe Public Cape Town, an independent agency within the group.

Achieving recognition across a variety of industry awards is clear evidence of the agency’sdelivery of creative excellence for this period. It was named Agency of the Year at the Loeries, Pendorings and Ciclope Africa Awards shows for two consecutive years.

The agency’sgrowth has allowed it to increase investment in upskilling and growing its people, while making steady progress with its sustainability mandates, including helping underprivileged communities.

The agency initiated and developed One School at a Time, a registered NPO, in 2007. In 2011, it appointed a full-time MD to run the initiative. Its aimis to create a highly functional, quality education system in targeted township schools to give students a better chance of success when they leave school.

Finalists in this category included last year’s winner of the AdFocus Large Advertiser of the Year, M&C Saatchi Abel, and TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris Joburg.

Despite the impact of Covid-19, M&C Saatchi Abel had an uptake it had not expected, including new business gains and increased billings as a result of the Standard Bank account win. Its Joburg campus has gone from a team of just over 60 to almost 200, while its

Street Store, force-for-good initiative is being recognised by Fast Company’s Global World Changing Ideas in seven categories.

It produced some outstanding work for clients such as Nando’s, Takealot, Superbalist, Lexus and Standard Bank during the period under review. And despite the loss of the Heineken account at the end of 2019, the agency managed to achieve 18% growth, and retained all its staff over the Covid period.

This category provided clear evidence of the impact of Covid-19 on the industry. Finalist TBWA\Joburg’s revenue declined by 9% when one of its biggest clients, MTN, cut its budget significantly. Despite this, the agency had a remarkable year of achievements: voted the Agency of the Year at the IAB Bookmarks 2020, it was the best-performing SA agency at the One Show 2020 and D&AD 2020, as well as at Cannes 2019, and was ranked as the 27th Best Agency in the World in 2020 by WARC.

The agency won a number of clients during the period under review —many of them in touch pitch situations. It should also be commended for offering its time and resources pro bono to the Solidarity Fund in 2020.

Lynette Dicey

MEDIUM AGENCY OF THE YEAR: DUKE Group

Growing business and gaining clients in tough climate

This was a highly competitive category from a judging perspective. What stood out for the judges in this category was the consistency in the standard of entries, demonstrating that medium-sized agencies have clearly identified their points of distinction.

The finalists in this category, DUKE Group and The Odd Number, both clearly articulated these points of distinction, with the result that this was the category where the scoring was the closest and the judges’debate the most robust.

DUKE Group, this year’s winner, is a 100% black-owned, independent agency group formed out of DUKE, a five-year-old creative agency; Positive Dialogue, a 12-year-old public relations agency; and Mark1, an 11-year-old digital and media business. More recently, the group has added Duchess, a newly minted 100% female production company, to the fold. Impressively, the agency has never been funded and remains 100% owner-led and managed.

Last year it initiated a new group-wide position of “thrive in tumultuous times”. Little did they realise the extent to which they would be tested on this positioning in 2020.

Given the dramatically altered consumer public relations landscape with the onset of the pandemic, Positive Dialogue switched from a retainer to a fee-based system. Its largest client at the time, Marriott, reduced its spending to zero within two days of the lockdown, with the result that three staff members were retrenched. Revenue has subsequently recovered to its pre-Covid level.

DUKE Group’s approach relies on a Warren Buffett quote: “It’s wise to be fearful when others are greedy. And greedy when others are fearful.”

In the last 18 months, the agency has made some significant investments in people: industry heavyweight Ahmed Tilly (formerly the chief creative officer at FCB Joburg) joined as creative consultant, acting as the chief creative officer across the group, while Suhana Gordhan, another creative heavyweight, was

appointed executive creative director. Gordhan has worked at agencies such as Ogilvy, the King James Group, Black River FC, VML, Net#work, BBDO and FCB.

The work produced by the group is testament to the integration of the business. In one short year the agency has gone from just a few shared clients to the majority of clients now being shared across the entire group.

DUKE has long said no to pitches, a position it continues to hold to this day. Despite this stance, it has continued its trend from previous years of picking up great clients without the creative pitch process.

In 2019, DUKE Group was a finalist in this category. The previous year —as DUKE —it was a finalist in the small agency category. Last year we said that once the new group structure was bedded down, we would have a clearer idea of the shape and potential of the expanded entity.

That is certainly the case now. One of the best barometers for an agency is growth.

DUKE rose to the occasion for the period under review and, despite a particularly tough period, grew its business by 23.8%, something it can be justifiably proud of.

The Odd Number, AdFocus’s Small Advertising Agency of the Year for 2019, has grown in size over the past year and now falls into the category of a medium-sized agency.

Despite the disappointment of losing the Adcock Ingram account during the AdFocus review period, this loss was mitigated by the acquisition of exciting new clients, which has resulted in overall growth of a phenomenal 60.4% over the past year. The Odd Number’s largest accounts by revenue include Nedbank, Game, Brand SA and Assupol.

Both The Odd Number and DUKE Group are agencies to watch in the future.

Lynette Dicey

SMALL AGENCY OF THE YEAR: Rogerwilco

Staying on top thanks to foresight and nimble planning

Small agencies were arguably the hardest hit by the pandemic. The entries in this category demonstrated the greatest resilience and grit in difficult times, particularly given how tight their margins are and the high-risk nature of this industry sector. The judges were awed by their audacity to show up and tell their business stories in a climate where many of their peers would have been shutting their doors.

Hats off therefore to this year’s winner of the AdFocus Small Agency of the Year Award, Rogerwilco Digital (RWD), an agency that had seven campaigns suspended from March as a result of Covid-19 cutbacks, not to mention the loss of two accounts, but still managed to record a 39% increase in revenue —a testament to its commitment to getting back to work as soon as humanly possible and delivering quantifiable return on investment for its clients.

The bulk of this growth resulted from upselling existing clients such as the V&A Waterfront, The Crazy Store and Nestlé. Ask anyone at the agency what they attribute this growth to in one of the most challenging business climates the world has ever seen, and they will point to its agility and client-centric approach.

This growth ensured that the agency did not have to retrench staff or cut salaries during lockdown, despite the fact that new business opportunities were significantly diminished for the greater part of 2020.

RWD demonstrated its agile approach when it came to its early preparations for lockdown. After reviewing data from China, the company was already working remotely on a rotational basis from early March, testing systems and connectivity and putting processes in place that would allow for a seamless transition.

Of course there were challenges, but with regular check-ins to keep the teams motivated, the agency has taken with it new lessons such as the fact that staff do not need to work from a central office, and that communication and transparency around all aspects of the business are key to pulling together through

the tough times.

The agency’s commitment to diversity has become a strategic cornerstone of the business. An internal diversity forum ensures that historically disadvantaged individuals have a fair chance within the business, which is guided by its diversity policies. One of these is to consciously hire more previously disadvantaged employees. The agency is 51% black owned, with 31.5% black women ownership.

An internship programme ensures young talent is given the opportunity to experience all areas of the business. In addition, employees are encouraged to further their own vocational studies and upskill themselves to keep abreast of the rapid changes in the digital landscape, which better equips them to advise clients on staying relevant.

Industry development is another passion at RWD and to this end, the agency launched the “SA Digital Customer Experience Report”, one of its highlights of 2020.

Finalists in this category included Hoorah Digital, which was founded in 2018 and since then has worked for clients such as Sanofi, Nestlé and MultiChoice.

Hoorah has experienced 53% revenue growth over the past year, picking up a number of projects and three retainer clients:

Nestlé, MultiChoice (Showmax) and Phumelela Gaming, though it lost the latter account in April 2020. It also lost Futurelife in November 2019.

Hoorah’s partnerships and collaborations with young and up-and-coming black-owned agencies such as The Odd Number is testament to its commitment to transformation and diversity, and gives talent at these agencies a chance to showcase their work on a global platform.

Think Creative Africa was also a finalist in this category. The agency positions itself as insights-led, solving business problems from a uniquely African perspective. It has experienced growth of 22.3% year to date, which it attributes to its four core pillars: love ideas, respect people, understand self and grow business.

Living these values, the team believes, is what enables it to deliver impressive work for clients, despite being a small shop.

Its revenue increase was thanks to a number of new projects which came on board, with just one account loss.

As a team of young African creatives, Think Creative Africa produces content based on a thorough understanding of what is required.

Samantha du Chenne

NETWORK MEDIA AGENCY: The MediaShop Get-up-and-go business kicks Covid on its head

Networked media agencies demonstrate their ability and commitment to the industry as a whole by the extent to which they transfer skills. The impact of Covid-19 was significant on these agencies as a result of budget cuts and a spike in digital media usage and buying. Networked media agencies are not only competing against other media agencies, but also against two key global players in a fight for their very survival. Selecting the winner in this category was therefore no easy task.

This year’s winner, The MediaShop, runs its business according to the mantra “great minds think differently”. So, at a time when the whole world seemed to be in chaos, it used this thinking to stabilise the organisation through the Covid-19 crisis, retain six of its major clients, clean up at industry awards, start a sister agency and win a digital creative pitch. Its new sister agency, Lucid, is a digital creative agency that will service clients’digital creative needsas well as bringdigital and creative closer together —something the agency believes is crucial for the industry.

Clearly not an agency to lie back and lament the bad times, The MediaShop is positive about its business performance over the past year, saying that given the tough economic climate, its performance was favourable. With adspend down by 1% overall year-on-year, the agency experienced a slight decline year-on-year of -1%, due largely to billings decreasing by 39% in April.

The MediaShop has previously won the AdFocus Transformation Award, so it’s perhaps no surprise that transformation continues to be a priority. Boasting a level 1 broad-based BEE rating, the agency is 55% black-owned and 45% women-owned, and 69% of its staff are black, the majority of them women. These high figures translate into the management team, and executive committee training is another priority. Almost R3.8m was spent over the past year upskilling staff via various initiatives, while nine new trainees were brought into the business. Senior staff members volunteer their time on the boards of industry bodies and

awards and also provide media owners with free presentations,working with smaller out-of-home partners and growing spend with them to ensure local investment in these businesses.

Shortlisted agencyCarat attributes its success to its people and its ability to understand what consumers really want and need, versus what brands believe they want and need. Client relationships are run as professional partnerships or “key client communication partners”. This shift has opened up a host of revenue streams for the agency, and created a converged approach to solving business problems. On the whole, it was a good year for Carat,which recorded 13% growth; the agency experienced no account losses and acquired the Vodacom account in January 2020. Vizeum SA also made the shortlist this year. The agency reports that while the Covid-19 pandemic really shook things upafter a highly successful 2019, its agility and tight team culture helped it navigate the crisis and keep the agency stable. While it experienced a decrease in growth of -7.34% over the past year, it also picked up new business in the form of African Export-Import Bank, which mitigated the loss of the Telkom account in November 2019.

Sadly, we did not announce a winner in the independent media category given that we

only received one entry this year from Mediology, last year’s AdFocus Independent Media Agency of the Year. Despite a top-class entry from Mediology, the judges exercised their discretion not to make an award in this category in the absence of comparisons. This decision illustrated the depth of challenges for independent agencies in the Covid-19 climate. A further insight was around how urgently and deeply this category can evolve to reflect the changes in the market, along with the measurement metrics.

However, kudos to founder and CEO of Mediology Ana Carrapichano and her team, who were vocal about the challenges of independence and the resilience it takes to stand the test of time. Successful media agencies are those that show agility. Carrapichano believes independent agencies such as Mediology are in a stronger position than multinationals, because they are able to make decisions quickly and without pressure to reach high growth targets.

Mediology recorded a 37% increase in revenue in the year to March and since lockdown has picked up new business in excess of R60m, a significant achievement in an environment where budgets are not growing.

Samantha du Chenne

PARTNERSHIP OF THE YEAR: M&C Saatchi Abel and Takealot

Behind dream team lies a tale of trust and honesty

The collective wisdom of the jury was exhibited to its best advantage during the judging of this category. There were two entries this year that were both outstanding: Joe Public United and Chicken Licken, and M&C Saatchi Abel and Takealot— both on the face of it potential winners.

The jury, however, was swayed by persuasive arguments from a jury member who comes from a very different background and presented a unique perspective on the entries in this category.

The relationship between M&C Saatchi Abel and Takelot is a compelling tale of a decade-long partnership that successfully helped build Takelot from a business based in a storage garage to the Amazon of SA, generating close to R1bnin sales a month with an average year-on-year growth of 60% and a 32% increase in new buyers. Based on the principles of belief, honesty and trust, the relationship has grown Takealot into the largest e-tailer in SA.

“If there were a blueprint for M&C Saatchi Abel’s ideal client-agency relationship, the one we have with Takealot and its powerhouse CEO and founderKim Reid would be it,”says the agency. The success of the partnership relies in part on the brutally honest relationship between Reid and agency founder and CEOMike Abel. M&C Saatchi Abel has been Takealot’s agency from the outset, and seen it through various iterations.

The agency believes its primary role has been to transform Takealot in the eyes of consumers from a nameless, faceless website into something more human; an entity consumers would trust with their credit card details to deliver what they had ordered, on time. However, for the agency to execute effective campaigns and strategy for Takealot, it needed to really understand the client’s business —and to do that, it needed an intimate understanding of the company’s inner workings, the stuff most businesses protect at all costs.

“I don’t think we have a partnership in our company today that is as close as the M&C

This award is sponsored by: and:

Saatchi Abel relationship,”says Reid. “We don’t expose our statistics to anybody else —but we do expose them to the agency, so that they understand each and every part of our business and so that, if something is changing, they get it.”

Through repetition and a consistent focus on what Reid calls the friction points — security and courier delivery, primarily —the work to humanise and reassure customers that online shopping is safe, easy and satisfying began to pay off. It’s been a collaborative process that takes both an attentive, hands-on, open-minded client and a focused, creative agency with business savvy to execute.

“It’s a very open, trusted relationship that [we] have built over time,”says Reid. “It takes a while for people to get and understand exactly what you’re trying to build. The nice thing about our relationship is that I can call them and say:‘I think this is shit, what were you guys thinking?’or ‘This is great, let’s try and to more of it’. At the same time, we’ve had pushback from the agency when it thinks we should be doing something differently.

“We don’t just see them purely as an ad agency.We go to them for exactly that, but I’ll often go to Mike with an issue on a business problem that we think needs creative input.”

Mutual respect and trust have also been a

cornerstone of Joe Public’s partnership with Chicken Licken. “We trust them to know their business and they trust us to know ours — there is no micromanaging an approval by council when it comes to execution,”says the agency.

The partnership has clearly served both parties well.Chicken Licken has had double-digit growth year on year in the four years that Joe Public has been handling the account, while the agency has an array of creative awards for its work on the account.

Johanna McDowell, founder and CEO of Independent Agency Selection, the sponsor of this award, says though Joe Public and Chicken Licken is a newer relationship than that of the winner —just over four years old —the partnership has resulted in some spectacular successes for both parties. “There is a sense of great mutual respect for each other and a drive for excellence. It was a very well put together entry, answering all of the key points in a structured way,”she says, adding that they missed coming first by a “hair’s breadth”.

The partnership between M&C Saatchi Abel and Takealot, on the other hand, is a fascinating story of success and hard work, trust and honesty, says McDowell. “Though the agency-client relationship is underpinned through a long-term friendship between the respective CEOs, that friendship would not have been enough for this business relationship to last for a decade without some seriously successful business results. [There has been] some lovely work along the way as well as exceptional bursts of growth for Takealot over the period as well as for the agency. A very worthwhile winner.”

More than any other category, this one illustrated just how invested we become in brands as consumers and the extent to which they become part of our psyche. For their part, the jurors clearly illustrated that they were both practitioners in the industry and consumers, by sharing literal examples of how the respective partnerships had left an impression on them.

Lynette Dicey

PR AGENCY OF THE YEAR: Eclipse Communications

More strings to its bow provides the winning edge

The Covid-19 pandemic presented almost unprecedented opportunities for public relations agencies, given that many of the responses around the pandemic required a communications intervention. This category demonstrated clearly that with every crisis comes a great opportunity to speak differently —and PR is a great tool to deliver this message.

Though this was a hotly-contested category, Eclipse Communications stood out as a clear winner. For a PR agency that opened its doors 22 years ago, Eclipse has had no problem in keeping up with fundamental changes in the media industry, evolving its services to ensure clients get full service solutions to their everyday communications challenges. From humble beginnings with just two clients, the agency has grown exponentially —turnover has increased by 300% in the past five years alone. It achieved 50% year-on-year growth of large retainer clients, with a focus on the entertainment, ICT, engineering and financial services industries.

The agency’s five biggest accounts are Netflix, Enel Green Power SA, EIE Group, M&C Saatchi Abel and Cape Union Mart.

However, the Covid-19 pandemic was a definite low point for the business, resulting in staff retrenchments, client losses and project delays. On the upside, over the past 20 months the agency has grown its digital business from a zero base in October 2018 to a point where its digital and content divisions now equate to 10% of the company’s annual turnover.

If there is a secret to Eclipse Communications’success, it would be that it is driven by its commitment to diversity in terms of the people it hires, the skills it offers, the cross-functional teams it builds and its entrepreneurial spirit which provides an agile and innovative response to the needs of its clients. Also central to its success is that despite its flexibility and responsiveness to change and the evolving needs of its clients, it has remained at hearta communications agency. Co-founder Steve Powellequates this diversification to the agency having “more strings to its bow”. Global pandemic aside, in 2020 the agency has launched two new business offerings: AMPlify and Collide. AMPlify will cater to the arts and entertainment industry, while Collide specialises in digital and print design as well as virtual and hybrid events.

Edelman SA was also nominated in this category. The PR agency managed to grow by 34% this year, supporting its clients throughout the lockdown period. Since its establishment in Joburg in 2013, Edelman has had a positive track record, quadrupling in size over the past seven years. This is attributed to the agency generally maintaining its clients with little churn, as well as its approach to hiring staff. Its focus on diversity and entrepreneurship means it often hires outside the traditional PR mould, resulting in a broad complement of skills.

Also a contender was Razor Public Relations, a member of the M&C Saatchi Abel group. Razor was launched in January 2020 just before the global pandemic, with no clients or employees. Yet it had a challenge in mind: for the PR industry to create better and more meaningful work. Since then, it has acquired work from some of the country’s biggest brands, including Investec, Tiger Brands, the Wits Donald Gordon Medical Centre, the SA National Editors’Forum and Dimension Data, illustrating yet again that out of every crisis there is opportunity.

SHAPESHIFTER OF THE YEAR: Melusi Mhlungu

Have the courage to be your own creative self

Now based in Miami, this year’s Shapeshifter is remarkable for his bravery. As a highly awarded creative, he could have settled for success locally —he certainly has the credentials to show for it. However, not content with making a success locally, he has had the courage to move to new shores where he is continuing to create superb work.

Melusi Mhlungu, the winner of this year’s AdFocus Shapeshifter of the Year Award, has learnt a lot about shapeshifting —and the value of staying the same —during his recent tenure at David Miami in Florida, US.

He admits that on arriving at the agency, away from home and firmly out of his comfort zone, he had doubts about whether he was good enough to be there. In the face of his intimidation, he started trying to be like the other talented creatives there,forgetting what made him different.

“It took a while for me to build my confidence and become myself again —the Melusi the agency had seen and wanted. It changed everything for me and taught me the most valuable lesson to date: staying true to myself,”he says.

Ultimately, it is advice Mhlungu would give to any young creative. “Don’t try to be the next anyone in the industry. Be the next you.”

His career started at FCB Joburg, where he worked on brands such as Coca-Cola, Toyota and Vodacom. He later moved to Ogilvy Joburg, working predominantly on DStv and KFC. It was here that he was offered the opportunity to join the team at David Miami, where he gained further experience working on Budweiser and Burger King.

Mhlungu is currently working as a creative director at Ogilvy Chicago. “It’s been a crazy time to move jobs and cities, and I’m really just finding my feet and getting to know my team and our brands,”he says of the recent move.

For Mhlungu, his experience in the US has been priceless. “I’ve grown so much as a creative over the past few years and learnt an enormous amount,”he says, adding that while he misses home and his family, he is grateful

for their support, which keeps him going.

It was in the US that Mhlungu experienced his biggest career highlight.“Working on the second Super Bowl commercialfor two years in a row was exciting enough,”he says. “On one of them I worked with Kathryn Bigelow, the first female director to win an Oscar, which was very exciting.”

Not surprisingly, his career has been accompanied by lows too. “There have been a lot of disappointments,”he reveals. “If I had to choose one, it would be attending an awards show with 15 other finalists early in my career and winning only one bronze. It crushed me, but it was also a turning point in terms of the type of work I started producing after that.”

For someone who loves people — entertaining them and having conversations — Mhlungu believes he has found the perfect place for himself in advertising. “After all, advertising is really entertainment, and it’s about having conversations with your audience. It’s telling stories, stories that only you as a creative can tell. They’re stories that are relevant to your brand and at the same

time, relatable to people,”he says.

Advertising, he believes, gives him a chance to do something new every day, and this is what he loves the most about the industry.

“Each new day provides another chance to try new combinations. It’s a constant challenge to beat the idea you had yesterday. There aren’t many jobs out there that give you that opportunity and I feel lucky to have it,”he says.

That said, the industry is going through a tough time and Mhlungu says that the Covid-19 pandemic is the biggest challenge it has faced for some time.

Of course, with challenge comes opportunity and Mhlungu sees this as an opportunity for creativity to once more lead and get clients the results they need at this time. “Now, more than ever, clients are in need of creativity that yields results.”

AdFocus jury chairTumi Rabanye says Mhlungu is an inspiration to the local industry. “Despite his myriad successes, he has remained disciplined and humble.”

INDUSTRY LEADER OF THE YEAR: Pete Khoury

Leading his team of ‘pirates’into the wild seas every day

This year’s AdFocus Industry Leader of the Year is chief creative officer of TBWA Hunt Lascaris, Peter Khoury, a man who has played a leading role in delivering growth to his clients’bottom line while accumulating more than 200 awards at international and local award shows.

He’s the chair of the Creative Circle and sits on the Facebook Creative Council for the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region as well as the Loeries board.

Khoury was a unanimous decision as this year’s industry leaders, standing out as a result of his steady consistency despite operating in a highly pressured and often egotistical environment. The judges agreed that —even observed from a distance —it’s clear that Khoury is a chief creative officer that really cares about his team and nurtures them to their full potential.

He is one of the few creative directors with the ability to grow and elevate others while maintaining his own grounded and humble attitude —all the while being utterly brilliant at what he does. A man without airs and graces, he is universally admired in the industry and as such, a worthy recipient of the title Industry Leader of the Year.

His journey into advertising was by no means a foregone conclusion. When he was 15 years old, Khoury went to Video Lab to see what they do there as he loved animation and was keen to pursue it as a career.

He was advised to study at the AAA School of Advertising when he left school. His mind was made up when AAA came to his school to show the students what it did, including a stop-frame animation that a AAA student had done for Coca-Cola. He was sold, only realising when he eventually got to AAA that the course was more about the curation of ideas than animation. Fortunately, he loved it.

He quickly realised that if the idea was lacking, no matter what you did, it would only be as good as the idea. “I wasn’t interested in executing other people’s shit ideas as an animator so I doubled down on advertising,”he recalls. “This is the same reason that I’ve never

moved into film directing —I’m not interested in executing somebody else’s mediocre ideas.”

As a leader he believes in practicing what he preaches and leading by example. He says it’s important to create an environment where everyone has a voice and is equal before the idea, while making an extra effort to ensure the introverts speak up —because often their ideas bring balance to the room.

Good leaders, he says, take the time to teach and share their knowledge and secrets, to help those who work under them become better than they themselves are.

Khoury is renowned for rolling up his sleeves and getting stuck in. “As a leader I have found that the more you know the details of what it takes to pull something off, the more specific you can be when briefing, questioning, presenting and explaining. This knowledge comes from a consistent attitude, over many

years, of wanting to learn all the rules so I could break them. I used to get frustrated when people gave me technical reasons for not being able to do something. I didn’t like not knowing the details of these reasons because I wanted to challenge them.”

As a young creative he soon realised that creative directors gave more guidance to either the art director or copy writer depending on what there were by trade. “I realised I never wanted to be that kind of creative director. Instead, I wanted to be able to give anyone I oversaw the best in-depth feedback and direction in their specific area of responsibility. To do that meant that I had to learn and master everything in the process so that I always had a practical and informed point of view.”

That meant that in addition to learning to art direct, he also learned how to write radio ads and headlines, edit, animate, direct, illustrate,

design and sell ideas. At the same time he learned to overcome his introverted nature.

“I kept learning and trying things out so I could better explain myself, ask better questions and direct people in a specific way,” he says. This was what has allowed him to delve into the deep craft of something while pushing the limits of what’s possible to deliver iconic, distinctive and memorable work.

When it comes to creative leadership, you have got to know your stuff, he says. “Busking just isn’t going to cut it —at least not in a high-performance company. If you want to keep A players around they need to be fulfilled, which means you have to operate at their level and beyond, nurturing an environment that encourages debate and rewards commitment and excellence —where they can see you nipping, tucking, crafting, simplifying and taking the time to lay down the breadcrumbs so you can sell and defend their great work.”

As to where the industry is going, he maintains that while tech will lead the way, great storytelling will seal the deal. “Our clients pay us for what they need now but our future revenue lies in what they are not yet asking us for, and we need to lead the way or we’ll be relegated down the food chain.”

The advertising industry continues to face numerous dilemmas, or tension points, where success boils down to the industry’s attitude towards those tensions: procurement vs free engagement, sea of sameness vs originality, growth vs money, fake vs true, addiction vs expression, people vs brands, privacy vs access, now vs next, and reset vs innovate. “Inside these tensions are a wealth of great

answers —but only if we are asking great questions,”says Khoury.

Making diversity work —in terms of culture, tech and expression —is going to be a challenge, he says, despite the fact that as a country we’ve been doing it for a lot longer than most. Ultimately, however, the industry will overcome its challengesby leveraging its greatest strength: lateral thinking.

What inspires him, he says, is bravery; bravery which doesn’t just have a time and a place but is rather a way of being, and people who see their own self worth as their power.

“I love misfits, people who make it big and shouldn’t have, with all the chips stacked against them. They proved the world wrong.”

He admires people such as Stanley Kubrick. “Not only did he speak through his work, he simultaneously created a foundation where film making and artistic expression could go. Kubrick embodied what it means to be a creative; through his dark and witty depictions and sometimes complex subject matter, he created the unseen by tapping into the untouched.”

He relates the story of two competitive fashion houses: Christian Dior was a creative director with a great eye, sense of style and an intuitive feeling for what would resonate. At his disposal he had a studio of people producing beautiful things at scale. Then there was Cristobal Balenciaga, a master craftsman, with a reputation as a couturier of uncompromising standards, who was even referred to as “the master of us all”by Christian Dior.

“I admire them both, but I admire them as one entity, Christian Balenciaga or Cristobal

Dior, either works. Success in a creative company today is about finding a balance between both these approaches. The ability to scale, creating compelling, resonant work fast, but also the ability to offer deep craft and specialisation in certain areas, keeping you ahead of the competition and trends. Both these areas of delivery need to be world-class,” he says.

While Khoury is motivated by creating work that gains respect and recognition around the world, what he is most proud of are those instances where his work has had an impact on society and its mindsets or beliefs.

He refers here in particular to the Sasol campaign, which introduced the world to the possibility of a milk bottle that turns green when the milk is off; Joe, the volunteer coach of the SA Olympic team who had more passion than ability; MTN Clap; the Ayoba 2010 World Cup campaign; a Braille burger that allowed blind people to see their food for the first time; and breaking ballet stereotypes by creating a series of bite-sized ballets straight from trending stories and serving them back into culture.

He’s also proud of his role in helping start hot shop MetropolitanRepublic, an agency that for a time took on and outperformed the Goliaths of the industry, as well as what he has achieved at TBWA\Hunt Lascaris over the last five and a bit years. The latter was rated overall Regional Agency of the Year at Loeries in 2018 and 2019, and second EMEA Regional Agency of the Decade at Cannes Lion in 2020. Like many great leaders, he refuses take all the credit. “I am most proud of all the TBWA pirates that made this happen. Together we go into the wild seas every day. Sometimes we get beaten and tossed aside. But we get up and do it again. It didn’t come easy, nor will it get any easier. But we’re a great collective of people, so I know we will keep bringing our best every day.”

He’s looking forward to watching the protégés that served under him rising into ever more influential positions within the next decade or two. “Who knows, I may even be working for one of them by then,”he says.

As for life post advertising? Well, that will see him reigniting Zero One One, a lifestyle brand that he co-owns and started in 1999. You’re likely to find him in his workshop creating limited editions and one-off beautifully crafted bespoke pieces that people will pay him a lot of money to acquire. But that’s a long way in the future.

Lynette Dicey

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: Bernice Samuels

Powerhouse marketer and industry game-changer

This year’s winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award was a unanimous choice and is someone for whom every jury member has the utmost respect and admiration. Her professional career spans large multinationals within the telecoms, broadcasting, information technology, financial services and brewing sectors.

Not only is this powerhouse marketer behind a number of iconic campaigns, but she has consistently delivered impactful and sexy work —in the process helping to create a number of creative rock stars.

This year’s Lifetime Achievement Award goes to Bernice Samuels, chief marketing officer at MTN.

Marketing was not on her radar until she’d first accumulated a few degrees. Samuels grew up as an only child in Wentworth, Durban and spent 18 months on exchange in Kansas, US after she matriculated. She returned to SA to study genetic engineering at the University of Cape Town. Having registered to do her master’s degree, her plans changed when she received a telegram from SAB, her bursary sponsors, informing her that she was expected to show up for work —in Joburg.

The plan to study further was put on hold, while Samuels worked at SAB until her supervisor agreed that further study was an option. Deciding to focus on something different, Samuels elected to do a postgraduate diploma in business administration at Wits Business School and then went on to do an MBA, studying part-time in her final year while working at IBM Consulting Group.

However, it was a position as a business development manager at M-Net that was her first real big opportunity —a position which would ultimately lead to one of her career highlights when she launched Channel O in Africa.

Her next job was at MTN SA, where she had the opportunity to challenge the company’s place in the world through the launch of MTN’s first youth offering, Free to Speak, including what kind of image and personality it needed to project. It was unlike anything MTN had

done before.

In 2007, having been promoted to chief marketing officer at MTN SA, Samuels broke the conventions around her —but at scale for the entire MTN SA brand. She was responsible for launching the MTN Gocampaign, an experimental campaign which soon became part of SA culture. She defined the campaign as “fresh pizza”,which basically meant creating enough content so that it felt like there was a new ad every day. More than 80 TV commercials were created in that year. She understood the campaign’s intention and gave the agency and creatives the space to intuitively deliver on this, while simultaneously preparing the MTN business to leverage it from the inside. Ads like MTN Clap and MTN Stickies, both produced under her watch, went on to win awards all over the world. The Go campaign won the marketing campaign of the year award. For the first time in MTN’s history, the brand overtook Vodacom as the number one telecoms firm in SA in terms of brand love and market size. Samuels was also

instrumental in MTN’s decision in 2006 to sponsor the 2020 FifaWorld Cup, preparing the business case that convinced the board to approve the recommendation that saw MTN become the first African global sponsor in the history of the event. When she joined MTN in September 2000, the stock was R9 a share. When she left in 2009, it was R137 a share.

Samuels joined FNB as chief marketing officer in 2010. At the time, FNB’s innovation pipeline was almost ready to launch at scale. These unique innovations were intended to reposition FNB in the banking sector. Samuels led the “help”positioning campaign that not only repositioned FNB in the banking sector, but ended up repositioning the banking sector. This was followed by the Can Your Bank Do That —Switch to FNB campaign, where FNB attracted more than 1.7-million new accounts in a year, unheard of in the sector. People just didn’tmove from one bank to another at that time, they stayed with their current bank and sucked up the frustration—until Samuels convinced them otherwise.

The bank launched an app, but to use the app customers needed devices and data. Samuels went into overdrive. She took everything she knew about telecoms companies and collated it with banking, implementing at scale and speed.

The Switch to FNB campaign then introduced hapless Steve, the call centre agent from Beep bank, and enjoyed unprecedented success. Again, the campaign was awarded many times over the years in a plethora of marketing and advertising awards shows. The Steve campaign became the best radio campaign in SA history, and continues to hold that title to this day.

In 2015 she joined SAB as an executive director of strategy and business development, where she ledits profitable revenue growth management team and the strategic pivot from “win in beer”to “win with beer”. This saw the introduction of new products including Blue Label beer, Castle Milk Stout Chocolate Infused and the relaunch of Lion Lager. When AB InBev’s offer to acquire SAB landed, she worked on the convergence team tasked with successfully closing the SAB-AB InBev transaction by October 2016.

She was persuaded to rejoin MTN Group in 2017 to help the company galvanise its marketing operations across 21 countries and its then 230-million subscribers.

At the time the MTN brand was disparate, inconsistent and had saliency scores far below its marketing spend. Samuels got to work creating distinctive assets, and laid the foundation for memory structures that could extend into all of MTN’s operations.

Samuels has subsequently led MTN to a position where it has been rated the most valuable telecoms brand in Africa by Brand Finance for three consecutive years and more recently, the most valuable African brand. It has also been rated the most admired African brand (unprompted) by Brand Africa in 2020, and in 2019 it was the number one telecoms brand at the Loeries, winning the most Loeries ever won by MTN in a single year.

This year, for the first time in MTN’s history, the company launched a multimarket, multilingual, multichannel campaign that went live simultaneously across all 20 markets where MTN is present. The Wear It For Me campaign, from briefing to launch, took just six weeks to produce, all under lockdown. Samuels led the global team and produced assets that came in from the top down —but also created toolkits so that markets could localise and implement from the bottom up. Her collective career experience has

enabled her deliberate, disciplined and strategic approach to marketing, she says, an approach she believes many marketers today lack. “The profession of marketing is losing its integrity,”she maintains. “Nobody talks about customer immersions any more;instead, they spend a great deal of time talking about what a company can produce, in the process getting quite technocratic. What is being forgotten is the job which the customer is trying to accomplish and how we actually tap into customers’needs, hopes and aspirations to buy into products.”

Marketers need to understand more implicitly what the customer is living through if they wish to get the nuance of the message right. To retain a seat at the C-suite table, she adds, they need to be proficient in all areas of the discipline.“My fear is that marketing has become advertising and it’s so much more than that,so much richer than that. Ideally, what is required is some kind of certification which is recognised by the industry as rigorous and valued as such.”

The advertising industry, she believes, continues to play a vital role at a tactical level but is constrained by its failure to advertise its unique selling proposition —which then leaves it wide open to procurementdepartments haggling over price. Maintaining that brands are fundamental to commercial success — something she has proved over and over again during the course of her career —she says Africa needs to start building its own brands to create economic opportunity.

Describing herself as an introvert by nature, Samuels says she has had to learn to become more extrovert. She is pedantic about getting it right and says she is consumed by the quest for perfection and excellence. “I’m never satisfied,”she concedes. “I’m always looking for ways to spit and polish.”

She demands much of those working for her, but never as much as she demands of herself, living by the mantra thatyou never win silver; you lose gold.“I set very high expectations for myself; there’s always a stretched goal in place,”she admits.

Haydn Townsend, MD of Accenture Interactive Africa, says Samuels is one of the bravest clients he has ever had the privilege of working with. “Her ability to spot a good idea all the way from the big idea down to the executional level is incredible. It’s been said that your client is the final creative director, so it is perhaps no surprise that under her client leadership I did some of the best work of my career. Her skill is instilling confidence in creatives and strategists alike, knowing that her input will make the work better and not kill it. That is an incredible super-power to have as a marketer.”

Wendy Bergsteedt, group head of marketing at Coronation Fund Managers, says Samuels has always been a tenacious marketer. “The bravery in the work that she’s produced with her partner agencies over the years is admirable. She has meticulously served the brands that she’s represented.

“Bernice has been an icon in the marketing industry with a solid track record of getting outstanding work over the line. Creatives who have engaged with her are testament to this fact. Bernice is a principled marketer who’s made some bold moves —and what are principles if they don’t hurt sometimes?”

Peter Khoury, chief creative officer at TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris, is another creative who has worked with Samuels a number of times over the last 15 years on brands like MTN and FNB. “Bernice is in a league of her own and one of the smartest, boldest and most progressive marketers in our country right now. She is informed, ambitious, and knows a great idea when she sees it –and how to pull it off. She is always one of the bravest people in the room because she sees the status quo as an opportunity to disrupt and change things up to the benefit of her brand — ‘her brand’ because for Bernice, it’s personal,”he says.

Awarding the title of lifetime achiever to Samuels is slightly ironic, given that she is nowhere close to retirement and continues to display unparalleled energy levels. A larger-than-life personality, she is an uncompromising client and a remarkable leader with a distinct and memorable energy –certainly a worthy recipient of the AdFocus 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award.

Lynette Dicey

STUDENT OF THE YEAR: Dominic Hobbs

Judges swayed by refreshing and diverse approach

This year there were three finalists, all from different institutions: the University of Johannesburg’s (UJ) graphic design department, the Creative Academy and Red & Yellow. Vega decided not to enter any of its students this year, given the disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. We hope to welcome it back next year.

This year’s finalists, Dominic Hobbs, Jenna Cawood and Jessica Graham, were all particularly strong contenders for the Student of the Year Award, and good examples of the resilience displayed by the class of 2020.

This is the fourth consecutive year that UJ’s graphic design department has had a finalist. Its entrants, however, have never actually won the award as it has always ended up being scooped by students from Cape Town, Stellenbosch or Durban. That’s no longer the case.

This year’s winner is Hobbs, a student doing honours in communication design at UJ. He is particularly motivated by social activism, which he has made the focus of his final theory and practical projects.

Hobbs presented an incredible portfolio, said the judges. His approach to media, and the ease with which he mixed medias and disciplines, is exciting. His entry showed the extent to which he applied himself in a refreshing and diverse way.

Hobbs’s graphic design lecturer, Christa van Zyl, reveals that what makes him stand out is his maturity, a passion for communicating clearly and a love of excellent design, typography and illustration.

“Due to his background in music, he has a very good sense of rhythm in his design, as well as a natural affinity to layout, typography and excellent conceptual ability.”

She adds that his work is experimental, yet understandable. He is an excellent illustrator and interested in experimenting in mediums and new software, says Van Zyl.

Graham is doing a BA in visual communications at Red & Yellow, majoring in graphic design. Next year she will attend the University of Cape Town to do a postgraduate diploma in disability studies, as she intends to further her knowledge of disability theory so

that she can apply it to her activism and creative design work. Shehas also applied for the M&C Saatchi Abel graduate programme to further her design knowledge.

Graham, said the judges, was noteworthy as evidenced in her work. It was clear that she has worked hard and presented her work in a distinct and brave way, showing what can result when talent is nurtured. Her entry was robust and engaging, and she put her heart on her sleeve.

Her portfolio exhibited meticulous attention to detail and was the largest of all the entries, coming in at an impressive 74 pages, rich with love and absolute precision.

When her lecturer was informed that Graham had made it to the finals, the response was: “She is our top student and though she doesn’t like to be identified as such, she is disabled. Despite the extreme challenges of living with her disability, she is plucky and resilient, hard-working and passionate about design. She inspires us all.”

Student jury memberElizabeth Mokwena from Unilever says she was inspired by the students’use of creativity to address many of the socioeconomic and political issues SA faces, with each bringing a unique point of

view to topical issues. “I found the passionate critiquing of student work on its ability to un-stereotype the creative industry very refreshing. It was clear from the onset that ‘safe and same’is not the standard.”

All three finalists will be a huge asset to the advertising and creative industries, maintains AdFocus jury chair, Tumi Rabanye.

“The danger, however, is that their extraordinary talent will be absorbed into an agency and then boxed into a junior role.

“The industry has a responsibility to keep talent of this calibre inspired and nurtured to its apex.”

NEW ERA, NEW SKILLS

The expertise required for a new paradigm

Versatility is the name of the game in a rapidly changing, digitally driven world

More and more, marketing is being dominated by a digital-first approach and the need to create authentic content over a more traditional approach. Given this paradigm, do local advertising agencies have the necessary skills to meet these needs?

The immediate need is for agencies to adapt rapidly, says Glen Meier, CEO of Boomtown. “Given that the last six months have sped up digital transformation by at least two years, the traditional model of art director/copywriter needs to be evolved.”

He believes that what is required is an agile blend of multidisciplinary creatives who can work across disciplines from concept through to crafting digital content,and strategists who can straddle brand strategy, communication strategyand even digital strategy and integration.

Content has become something of a catch-all phrase —it’s a bit like saying “digital”, maintains Jason Harrison, group MD at M&C Saatchi Abel.

There are multiple facets to content and both marketers and agencies need to liberate themselves to different approaches to it.

“While native content has become a huge focus area, it requires a very different skill set and approach to landing messages. It’s less about what the brand wants to say and more about what is useful to people’s lives,”says Harrison.

Given the exorbitant amount of digital landfill which currently exists —and which simply gets swiped away in an endless thread —relevance and usefulness must be the clarion call for “content”, he insists.

Marketers and agencies who don’t get that memo will find themselves increasingly irrelevant.

Harrison says the skills that will be required for this paradigm are nothing new: business and technical writing skills —like great public relations agencies have done for ages; editorial skills —like great magazine publications have

done for ages; technical and platform skills — like great digital agencies have done for ages. The future will be about combining them into a powerful unit to unlock those capabilities.

Meier says engaging digital content still needs big ideas based on deep insights, while knowing what works best across digital-first platforms.

The ideal will be thinkers who can design for digital and produce their own “moving content”.

Traditional creatives will need to broaden and grow their skills to also be able to produce content. “Designers can no longer only be corporate identity or below the line designers, art directors can no longer only be concept crafters —they all need to craft digital content,” says Meier.

The local industry’s smaller budgets and far riskier environment meanadvertising always has to work harder —which means you start understanding the nuances and gaps much better, which is when specialised skill sets start generating greater results, says Jason Stewart, co-founder of specialist word-of-mouth marketing agency HaveYouHeard.

Agencies can no longer just offer content and community services given the rapid rate of change, he points out. “E-commerce is now a requirement —whereas pre-pandemic it wasn’t. Agencies need to know how to drive sales through both traditional and untraditional means, including across the online terrain,

understanding that their content and community strategies now feed into this pipeline of sales.”

This is a new area of expertise that should create an explosion in offerings, Stewart predicts. Technology provides many more content and community options —podcasts, livestreams, digital radio broadcastsand streaming video, to name a few —all of which require new skill sets both in production and how to integrate into a holistic campaign, and then how to amplify.

“Some platforms don’t allow advertising, which means you need a team that is able to develop and sell content through an understanding of what is desirable to that market or platform. Another example is esports, which offers a big, untapped opportunity for SA brands,”he says, adding that there is less of a skill set need here than a need to really understand this culture and its environment.

A further data set that will be required is data analytics and consumer insights. However, there is often insufficient time and skill applied to the available data, says Stewart.

For its part, HaveYouHeard is recruiting expertise in all the usual places, but also some highly unusual, non traditional ones in its search for digital or tech hustlers whose passion is the online world rather than advertising.

THE ETERNAL DEBATE

Could big data threaten traditional advertising agencies?

Management consultancies and ad agencies both have their merits in a technology-driven world

When you ask an advertising agency whether it considers management consultancies a threat to its business, theresponse is invariably in the negative, typically with a scathing comment about the inability of consultancies to recognise creativity even if it hit them square in the face.

But the realityis that both the traditional management consultancy model and the advertising model are under pressure. Agencies are under pressure to find ways to be profitable, with their remuneration model under increasing scrutiny. Consultancies, on the other hand, are increasingly focusing on driving value in addition to their traditional focus on cost optimisation. Consultancies that have not included creative tools in their arsenal of offerings will battle to be sustainable, believes Haydn Townsend, MD of Accenture Interactive Africa.

He should know what he’stalking about, as one of the few people in SA to have bridged the divide between advertising and consulting. Before taking up his current position, Townsend was group CEO of Wunderman Thompson SA. He has more than two decades of experience in advertising, during which time he worked on multiple brands in multiple categories, across numerous disciplines.

Globally, Accenture —through its Interactive unit —has made no secret of its future plans. Accenture InteractiveCEO Brian Whipple has been quoted as saying that the unit’s purpose is to take Accenture’s consulting credibility with CEOs and “port over to the significant spending of the chief marketing officer”.

Whipple does not call Accenture Interactive a consultancy in the traditional sense. Instead, he calls it a new breed of agency, specifically an “experience agency”with an underlying philosophy of starting with the design of what an experience should be, rather than an advertising creative idea or a cost-savings idea, or even an organisational structure. Its

approach is to start with the consumer to find a purposeful, meaningful experienceand then use the medium, technology and creative to support the experience. Essentially, its primary business is offering creative business solutions enabled by technology.

To help it achieve this goal, the company has acquired a number of creative agencies in recent years. Earlier this year, Ad Age ranked Accenture Interactive as the largest digital agency worldwide for the fifth consecutive year.

In SA, says Townsend, management consultancies are gaining traction with clients, but not in a binary way. “The approach of a consultancy is so fundamentally different that we’re not going up directly against the marketing budget in a typical pitch construct, but rather adding creativity to technology and business consulting which moves marketing spend in combination with these.”

He uses the analogy of a cellphone contract to explain what he means: the contract is the most expensive part of the purchase, rather than the device itself. Using this analogy, consultancies have been managing the contract part of this business, while advertising agencies have been the manufacturers of the sexy phone. However, consultancies are increasingly bundling the sexy phone into its contract offering.

The problem with traditional advertising agencies, maintains Townsend, is that they don’t typically run deep enough into the

client’s business. “We’re seeing such a fundamental shift in terms of how brands are being built and the reality is that communication and advertising are not as powerful as they used to be, which means that traditional advertising agencies are now swimming in a shrinking pond.”

Diving in deep

Townsend believes consultancies are better equipped than advertising agencies, given the fact that experience in a digital world is a far stronger lever than traditional advertising. “To deliver this experience, you need to touch deep into an organisation’s core... It is at this level that agencies run out of legs,”he argues.

“Experience has so many contact points associated with it. Consider, for example, delivering an e-commerce experience for a retailer. Ultimately, the experience crosses over so many touchpoints and dependencies: the website, the call centre, the distribution centre, the cold chainand many more. Redoing an entire 1,000-page e-commerce website experience is barely 10% of the solution — albeit an important 10%. Communicating that contributes even less to the big picture... So, until agencies can go that far back, their contribution will become increasingly superficial.”

Which ultimately means that traditional agencies are facing an existential threat as a result of their inability to deep dive into technologies such as cloud migration, machine

learning, e-commerce or robotic process automation, he maintains.

“Agencies are trying to do backwards integration into technology but it’s rarely effective as they can only, at best, go up to the running of marketing technology and not the building of it or the system integration required,”he says.

As technology infiltrates nearly every aspect of our life, the reality, he says, is that brands today are being built in a fundamentally different way. The agendas of the chief marketing officer (CMO) and chief information officer (CIO) are intersecting more than they ever have before, with predictions that the CMO will soon be spending more on technology than the CIO. In an attempt to bridge this gap, the role of a chief marketing technology officer is even being considered by some companies.

“The role of the CMO and CIO will eventually merge, at which point marketing is no longer purely about communication but rather about unlocking business value through technology,”says Townsend, adding that those businesses that continue to rely solely on the traditional CMO agenda will find it hard to survive.

The tipping point right now, he says, is the use of technology as a brand lever and that’s where consultancies have the advantage over agencies, given their expertise in this area. “One of the problems with traditional advertising is that you can’t relate above the line work back to the bottom line.

“However, when you are able to correlate creativity with a tangible value, it’sa

completely different picture.”Creativity will continue to be an important lever –it’s just going to be used differently: because it’s connected to a value output, it instantly moves up the value chain, he says. Consultancies know they need creative skills, which is why they’re buying them, understanding that it’s going to take too long to grow them organically.

Agencies which understand big dataare able to implement marketing technologies and recognise the fusion between strategy, creativity and technology —and as a result of the latter manage to get a slice of the client’s IT budget in addition to their marketing budget — are likely to have a better chance of survival, predicts Townsend.

Mike Abel, founder and CEO of M&C Saatchi Abel, says the agency versus consultancy debate is interesting because consultancies seem to be hiring advertising people and buying agencies, not vice versa. “It seems that they want what we have; the ability to ‘turn logic into magic.’”

Agencies, he says, are often unique in their ability to find lateral solutions to problems and solve them creatively. Consultancies don’t traditionally hire for this. Instead, they favour strong left-brain people who bring process and sequential logic to analysing and validating a problem. “When it comes to innovative and fresh solutions, they are not historically the go-to guys. It’s either the agency, or it happens internally at the client.”

Abel says agencies and consultancies do lose people to each other, but infrequently. “The environment, culture, orientation and

dynamics within an agency and a consultancy are so different that in many ways it’sa different career as opposed to a different company. I think consultancies are moving more into our space with the growth of data and artificial intelligence, as creativity and innovation will be the last defence against machine learning and applying these spat-out solutions.”

However, that’s not to say there is not a sweet spot between agencies and consultancies. “There certainly is a common space,”agrees Abel. “Agencies are great at spotting solutions, whileconsultancies are strong at identifying and validating problems. So, there is a yin-yang to an extent.”

The trick, however, is that you need to do both really well. “There is little point identifying a problem without being able to conjure a solution and, similarly, there is little point in finding a ‘solution’to the wrong problem. So, there are many benefits to collaborating and a big-enough market in each territory for us to add value without hunting greater share of client wallet.”

The reason clients often hire M&C Saatchi Abel instead of a consultancy, he says, is because they know the agency has invested in hiring the right people to deep-dive and analyse the underlying issues the organisation faces, and having the right creative minds to then solve these problems. “This has been our orientation since we started the agency a decade ago as we identified the need back then to do both,”he says.

COMMENTARY & INSIGHT

ROLE REINVENTION

A push for change

Agencies need to be strategic partners, not just the ad team

Even before the advent of a global pandemic caused a seismic shift in consumer behaviour, advertising agencies were under pressure from clients to change. Not only is the agency model under pressure, but agencies are having to reinvent their processes to remain profitable.

Shifting consumer demands over the past few years has prompted brands to focus on brand purpose and performance marketing, says Thabang Skwambane, FCB and Hellocomputer Joburg MD and vice-chair of the Association for Communication & Advertising (ACA).

“Marketers increasingly expect agencies to be highly connected to consumer behaviour, media and content consumption trends, generational influences, cultural norms and authentic communication that delivers results,” says Skwambane. “These expectations are driven by a need for more data-driven insights, analytics, testing and optimisation.”

More than ever, he says, agencies are being pressured to deliver more results across a broader set of strategic business objectives, while the use of cost consultants and stringent procurement practices has pushed the industry into a position where talent and the creative product are compromised for low-cost, commoditised services.

“This means that as an industry we are struggling to develop and grow talent and deliver high-quality work against increasingly demanding expectations.”

As a result, agencies are producing more, in less time and at decreasing margins, placing their businesses under severe strain.

Marketers and advertising agencies have been front and centre of this forced change, agrees Gareth Leck, Joe Public United CEO. “A few of the critical changes we have seen include marketers pushing their agencies to be more agile and adaptive in how they operate and respond to their clients’needs. This is driven by the fact that the past six months have been a series of moving targets.”

As a result, he adds, marketers have had to

make on-their-feet adjustments to their existing strategies and have required reciprocal agility from their agencies to meet these “new normal”needs. The crisis has also pushed agencies to be more proactive and supportive in helping their clients navigate these choppy waters with strategic and creative thinking that is sensitive and relevant.

Increasingly, marketers are looking for agencies to be strategic partners responsible for business and brand growth rather than just an ad agency with teams making ads, says Alison Deeb, MetropolitanRepublic CEO.

“This is a fundamental change which is akin to the way many large companies are changing the role of chief marketing officer to chief growth officer (CGO). Not only is the CGO responsible for communication with customers but also for bringing these consumers new and innovative ideas that grow the bottom line at the same time that they’re growing brand love and advocacy.”

For many clients, speed and scale are no longer a choice but a prerequisite, says M&C Saatchi Abel CEO Jacques Burger. “The new economy brands are showing us that agility is key to winning —you have to keep up with a fast-moving consumer or risk falling behind and losing relevance and market share.”

Agility and the ability to quickly scale to the demands of a project are becoming a new standard, he says.

Does the agency model really need to change? IAS founder and CEO Johanna McDowell says agencies are by nature in a constant state of change and in times like these they need to be even more flexible and speedy.

“Nonetheless, they have their own business imperatives and need to keep running their

agencies in a sustainable way while consistently delivering on the needs of clients.”

Agency remuneration model

The agency remuneration model has long been a bone of contention between agencies and their clients. “Marketers consistently tell us that they don’t understand the hourly rate/number of hours worked system as they believe this works in the agency’s favour and not in the client’s favour,”says McDowell. “Agencies tell us that their margins are getting smaller and smaller.”

In response, IAS recommends that agencies look at ouput-based pricing rather than rate cards. “But, of course, agencies can only do this if they have a detailed scope of work from the client which is not always easy to obtain,”she says. “In our experience, if an agency is delivering great work that delivers measurable results, then the marketer has no problem paying the agency’s fees.”

While remuneration in the ad industry has traditionally been retainer-based —the client pays for a resource or skills set on a per hourly rate basis —clients are increasingly asking for project-cost, output-based models, says Deeb.

The latter model means that while agencies are still paid on a regular basis, they’re paid per output of deliverable rather than input of hours per resource. Other clients are keen to hold the agency accountable, which means that “skin in the game”is part of the remuneration model.

“Again, this model holds the agency accountable not only for output but for the quality and measured results of the output, including the impact on brand health scores, sales volume increase, net promoter scores

COMMENTARY & INSIGHT

and so on, all of which become an integral part of the key measurables,”says Deeb.

“Not only is the agency performance now more directly related to the performance of the marketers’KPIs, but agencies will no longer be on retainer if the results are not clear to the C-suite of the business.”

Given the financial crisis of the current environment, it’s natural that every line item on the income statement gets scrutinised as clients look to ensure they get maximum return on investment, says Leck. What this has done, he believes, is forceagencies to make sure they’re not wasting their inputs on outputs that are not delivering the highest degrees of return.

“I honestly think this is a good thing,”he says. “What it has meant is that unnecessary fat has been squeezed out of the system, and has ensured that the agency fees being paid are for what is most important.”

In fact, he believes it’s time to revisit the remuneration model. Joe Public is reviewing how it works in terms of fee models and is looking at new models that are based on clients paying for outputs, rather than for inputs (hours).

Burger believes that ultimately there will be less layers in agency teams, fewer people with vague roles and more specific, bespoke remuneration solutions than broad-based mark-up or hours-based structures. However, he argues that this does not mean that agency remuneration opportunities are necessarily on the decline. “Clients are willing to pay a premium for a distinctive creative product or smart solution,”he says.

Marketers, adds McDowell, will willingly pay for the people who work on their business. But woe betide an agency which has team members in the room or on the client business for the sake of numbers only. “Every team member must make a contribution that is

tangible and relevant for the client,”she says. “Agencies need to ask many more questions of their clients, constantly checking in for feedback to avoid the onset of bad habits.”

A positive outcome of this changing paradigm in adland is that agencies are getting closer to their clients’key performance indicators. This, says Skwambane, is creating a mutual dependence oneffective creative communications, delivering on both business and marketing objectives and how the media mix has performed.

In addition, agencies are being measured on cost-efficiency and are being scrutinised heavily by cost consultants and procurement practitioners. Output-based remuneration, he believes, is a solutionas it precludes the need for financial reviews of costing by the agency.

“The shift in performance marketing in many areas has led to highly data-driven outputs and a change in channel selection, with optimisation and attribution modelling becoming more of a requirement to prove effectiveness of communications,”he says.

Agencies have no choice but to adjust as brands continue to bring marketing capabilities in-house, argues HelloFCB+ MD Danielle Sneiders. A shift towards shorter-term project work and a fee based on inputs is creating commodity-driven transactional relationships which typically lack any form of strategy.

“Marketers need to consider ways to incentivise the agency within their aligned goals and metrics to drive results,”she says. “Remuneration models should align to the brand and business goals, with risk and reward being shared by both parties.”

In turn, says Sneiders, agencies have to adjust to deliver on volume-driven shorter-term, specialised or consultancy-type quick turnaround project work, using fewer but more experienced resources to develop cutting-edge capabilities and talent. At the

same time, they need to eliminate unnecessary costs and improve process efficiencies.

“Increasingly, agencies are relying on experts in their fields to deliver against client needs to fend off the ever-encroaching consultancy impact, developing a distributed network with the ability to dial up and down with a balance of full-time and virtual staff.”

A marketer’s perspective

Do marketers really believe that agencies need to change? Conceding that this is probably the most-asked question in the advertising and marketing world, Absa’s chief marketing officer David Wingfield says he’s not even sure what the question means. “What do clients really want? Do they want agencies to do work that has a business result, that they can measure, that is standout? Do they want more agile, faster? Or do they want more digital?

“If that’s what they want, then agencies have been trying to do this since time immemorial. Nothing has changed, except that clients now demand more of this at less cost. I’m no longer sure that agencies want this and breakthrough ideas —they want a cheap, fast factory to do what they want.”

Agencies, he says, were solving business problems in the 1980s and 1990s.

Agencies don’t need to necessarily change, he argues, they just need to stop doing what they are told and keep the big ideas coming. They should be measured on the value they add to the brand’s bottom line and brand scores. Equally though, he says, this will come from clients honestly measuring and discussing the relationship —and healthy relationships typically create better work.

Wingfield concludes by saying that there is not a creative and idea talent deficit in SA, but rather a skilled client marketing deficit.

Lynette Dicey

ALWAYS RELEVANT

Role of international best practice in a post-Covid world

A focused brand strategy that transcends borders is a must for agencies to deliver value and return on investment

In a post-Covid world, just how relevant is international best practice? Do the same rules still apply, or are advertising and marketing in uncharted waters?

Best practice continues to be relevant, maintains Derek Coles, MD of McCann188, even though the role of brands in society has changed significantly in the last decade, from a symbol of consumerism to a force for social good. And itcontinues to apply in the local context, he says, because in a globalised world we’re all part of the same conversations. “What makes Africa unique, though, is our urgent need to tell our own stories after centuries of silence.”

While head of strategy at M&C Saatchi Abel Makosha Maja-Rasethabaagrees that we’re connected —a fact the pandemic emphasised —she says the cultural contexts remain fairly different, so though there is a great deal we can learn from each other about how to respond to Covid and the changing behaviours it has brought with it, there are some instances where you have to consider how SA differs from London or Australia, particularly given the socioeconomic impact of Covid on local consumers. “You’ve always got to take the SA cultural context into consideration,”she says. Des Jones, chief strategy officer at TBWA\SA, says international best practice is not about something that is copied and pasted, but rather something to be learnt from and built on. “The local retail sector provides some great examples of this: Walmart entered the market and tried to cut and paste its best practice from elsewhere, with less than stellar results. Spar, on the other hand, simply brought its principle of mutual co-operation and applied it to create a uniquely SA version of the model —one that the rest of the Spar world now looks to learn from,”she says. Distinguishing between common practice and best practice, she says the former is about following what others are doing, while the latter is about a proven strategy for the most

effective way of doing something. “In my world as a strategist, effectiveness is everything. Best practice is not subjective but is based on facts that are related to a client’s bottom line, market share, brand objectives or brand equity and health.”

International best practice is work that transcends borders, maintains Joey Khuvutlu, MD of Hellocomputer. “It’s the kind of work that when you see it, you get it because it makes sense at an emotional or functional level. It may even be work for a brand or product that may not exist in your country but you still get it —and it grabs your attention. The work may even be responding to a hyper-local human truth that is not prevalent in your immediate surroundings —but it still grabs you.”

It doesn’t mean the work is intended for everyone, or even that it’s expected to resonate everywhere.

“At its core, it’s intended to achieve the results for the intended market, be valuable and useful to customers and deliver return on investment for the brand.”

Best practice should, he insists, be standard practice for any agency delivering value for consumers and return on investment for brands.

“Embedded within value and return on investment are all the technical, ethical and measurable subcategories that function as the foundation upon which we build brands. What differentiates one brand from the next is the

deployment of its creative capabilities as the ultimate value and return on investment multiplier.”Khuvutlu says true best practice requires the deployment of technical competence to deliver work that inspires people and moves customers to act, while delivering on measurable return on investment for clients.

A post-Covid world, he believes, requires more international best practice to support and grow brands —and by extension, contribute to rebuilding economies.

At the same time, more creativity will be required given that consumer behaviour has changed overnight and societal norms, beliefs and expectations are evolving at a faster pace.

At McCann188, best practice is about focusing brand strategy on finding the meaningful role of the brand in society. “We’ve practically ramped up our access to data, making social listening a daily part of brand building,”says Coles.

He says a post-Covid world will amplify and accelerate many emergent trends as the role of brands in society becomes even more important, and as digital transformation becomes an unstoppable force.

“One particularly positive outcome of a post-Covid world is the emphasis on collaboration to solve problems, and we foresee more partnerships between brands and social organisations emerging.”

SHARED VALUES

Creating true partnership requires culture of collaboration

As the conversation shifts to how agencies can commoditise and cut costs, we mustn’t lose sight of what really matters —creativity

I’ve been involved in many intense discussions about what agencies need to do to become fully fledged business partners to clients across all aspects of the value chain.

And rightly so. This is an incredibly important conversation, and one that we should be focusing on constantly.

I’ve seen the benefits of how brand assets can be extrapolated across the value chain, but only because I’ve been lucky enough to work with clients who approach the agency relationship as a true partnership.

These tend to be the kind of clients who take a long-term view and stick with agencies for a long time, which means their relationship bears fruit through thick and thin and there is real shared value.

Increasingly, much of the conversation is no longer about partnership but more about how agencies can commoditise their services and cut costs. It is not unusual for a piece of business go out to pitch for the sole reason of reducing costs, regardless of how much value the agency partner has added to that relationship up until that point.

That’s not to say we should not be cost-conscious, and we need to be continually focusing our efforts on creating value across the entire value chain. But, as a start, this requires us to recognise where the value lies.

Some tasks should be commoditised, but this cannot be looked at in isolation from the full ecosystem.

When agencies do their jobs properly, they can create incredibly valuable, highly distinctive assets for brands. They have the potential to create equity-building legacy-making ideas that will give brands a vital competitive edge. Then, if they operate in a truly integrated way, brands will be able to extract maximum value from those assets.

This goes beyond just integration and it requires a culture of collaboration. It requires bringing specialists together in a way that is best for the brand, not any individual agency or discipline.

It requires placing value on the very thing

agencies are supposed to offer their clients. Creativity.

And by creativity, I don’t mean just advertising, I mean the kind of critical thinking that can get brands more than their fair share of attention and create meaningful connection with the customer at all touchpoints.

The challenge for agencies is that, in some cases, they have become so marginalised and their products so commoditised that they are unable to invest in their most important asset: talent.

The best conversations I’ve ever had with clients is where they are asking for, or even better demanding, more creativity and innovation and wanting to know how we can get the best talent to work on their business.

And, they understand that the only way to get great talent onto their business is to pay for it and to give them the opportunity to do great work. Which is a win-win because then they are investing their money in the right place and getting an exponential return.

Where a lot of client and agency relationships fail is when agencies are forced to cut costs with no regard for the impact that

will have on their ability to deliver. There comes that point when they can no longer sustain the business and they can’t get the best talent or the people with the right experience on the business, so the work suffers.

And yet there is still an expectation that they can add exponential value without the benefit of a shared-value partnership. And really, value is where we should be focusing the conversation.

If an agency partner is able to add value, they should be fairly compensated. And it’s perfectly acceptable to distinguish between the kind of work that adds exponential value and the kind of work that is commoditised, but only if they are part of the same conversation.

That is a perfect segue into the Covid-19 context. Because, despite the incredibly challenging times and the obvious need to reduce costs and add more value, the very relationships that are flourishing are the ones where clients and agencies have doubled down on their partnership.

The pandemic has forced every business to take a hard look at what the most essential components of their value chain are. Where there is shared value, the partnership can weather the storm, and we are already seeing the benefits of this with some of our clients.

Clients who don’t have a strong agency partnership and who look to cut costs without considering the impact on their agency relationship, are probably finding it difficult to get momentum during this time.

And, there is no better measure of a relationship than how it fares in the most difficult of circumstances. That’s when a partnership is really tested.

So, as to the question of what agencies need to do to stay relevant? It’s simple, but it requires a client partner that believes in the same thing: invest in talent, recognise where the value lies, double down on creativity to create powerful and distinctive brand assets, and integrate those across the value chain.

CREATIVITY RESET

What clients are looking for in a post-Covid world

Ann Nurock presents key insights gleaned from her wide-ranging research into client needs in today’s topsy-turvy world

After eight years of conducting my “relationship radar”tool on 16 corporate clients and at over 60 agencies of all disciplines, I had a pretty good idea what clients wanted from their agencies. Then came Covid and everything changed —but not completely.

Everything I’ve heard from clients during this crisis has been an amplification of what they increasingly wanted before: integration, collaboration, agility and speed at a lower cost, but without compromising the strategic, creative or executional quality of the work. However, what I’m hearing more and more is that clients want innovation and ideas. Not just creative or channel ideas, but business ideas —ideas that will truly add value to their business. The losers will be those agencies that can’t change or can’t change fast enough.

Below are the key insights from my radar experience and research into some of the most successful agencies globally such as Droga5, David Miami and Wieden & Kennedy, including what I learntfrom the Covid crisis:

Relationships

One of Droga5’s key success factors is caring beyond the brief, says founder and chairDavid Droga. It’s the check-ins, the ideas, the additional value the agency can provide that counts. It comes down to trust. The agencies that have the most trusted relationships with their clients produce the best work and can weather any storms. But trust is earned and unless the agency has a full understanding of its client’s business, it won’t have a point of view or the ability to challenge the client on its briefs.

Critical thinking

Too many executions are devoid of critical thinking. In the contagion of digital always on, some agencies are becoming production lines, simply churning out work. And even more so now, as there is no boundary between work and home. Everyone is so busy working they don’t stop to question why, or stop to think.

Account management is often too transactional, with little or no understanding of the client’s business or business per se. This results in an absence of value.

Problem-solving

Before Covid, brands were not growing and clients were increasingly resorting to “short-termism”. There was little brand-building taking place. Short-term activations resulted in disposable creative.

Post-Covid sales have become imperative after months of lockdown, and clients need the advice and counsel of agencies more than ever. Brands are focusing on doing what’s right for people rather than consumers, something highlighted recently by Pedro Earp, global chief marketing officer at AB InBev. Brand-building has become a secondary priority. As people’s priorities have changed, brands need to change with them. There is no going back, he says.

Creativity

According to Forrester Research, 89% of people ignore ads. Creativity, however, is the only solution to helping brands grow. And that’s not just creativity in terms of ads. It’s creativity in terms of the entire brand ecosystem. But creativity needs a reset:

creatives need to become polymaths. Data has to be embraced, new partnership models are required, and more inclusion and diversity are needed.

Every brief needs to be approached in terms of demonstrating how creativity can add real value to the client’s business. Creativity needs to be sensitive and empathetic to the new world. Flashy ideas are irrelevant in the face of growing numbers of people who are struggling. Instead, brands need to come across as human.

According to global head of Twitter Next Alex Josephson, only 6% of people want ads to continue in thesame tone of voice. It’s not business as usual. Brands must not be tone-deaf to what people are going through and what they want.

Those that do the right thing now will be remembered in terms of brand equity and brand love far into the future.

Through this crisis and beyond, agencies need to be business consultants who solve business problems through creativity. This is the right time for agencies to demonstrate creative leadership, explorenew territories and approaches, and findsolutions within the current environment.

Innovation

The Art of War author Sun Tzurecognised that “chaos presents opportunity for innovation”. Clients want more innovative thinking and thought leadership. The basics are table stakes, but in order to really add value you need to provide innovative solutions. Agencies need to move from being transactional to transformational. They need to provide end-to-end solutions, as consulting firms do.

As David Droga stated on his sale to Accenture Interactive, “I don’t want to be the interior designer when the house is falling down.” However, for agencies to get this right they need to fight for the right to be heard and demonstrate the real value they can provide.

VMLY&R Dubai United Arab Emirates

TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris Johannesburg

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Net#Work BBDO Johannesburg

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Joe Public United Johannesburg

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Grid Worldwide

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CREATIVE CHALLENGE

NURTURING TALENT

Blackboard: the drive to democratise creativity

Blackboard is a nonprofit organisation committed to transforming the creative industry from the ground up.

The initiative was launched in 2017 by Nkanyezi Masango, the executive creative director at King James Cape Town, to expose creativity and advertising as a viable career path to school pupils in underprivileged areas in Cape Town.

“As a creative director, I was always trying to find raw, diverse talent,”says Masango. “But I struggled to find black talent when I approached tertiary advertising institutions. The reason is that as an industry we’re not marketing the advertising or creative industries as viable career options to students from underprivileged backgrounds and schools.”

Achieving meaningful diversity, he says, starts in the classroom rather than the boardroom, which is why Blackboard is intent on breaking down barriers and making creative careers more accessible to all children, even those who’ve never heard of it.

The initiative initially worked with underprivileged schools in and around Cape Town to expose students to creative disciplines and career paths including design, art direction, copywriting, filmmaking, animation, photography, music and digital.

The Blackboard initiative works with grade 10s and continues to work with them throughout their high school careers. Those students interested in creativity as a career are signed up for Blackboard’s year-long programme, which includes a workshop every second Saturday. These workshops are hosted by an acclaimed creative leader in their respective field who does a presentation and then gives the learners an assignment. Creative leaders are encouraged to keep in touch with the students long after the workshop for more guidance and advice.

“By the end of the year we want these students to have a good understanding of the industry and know which particular area appeals to them,”says Masango.

“We want them to establish relationships with creatives during the programme. Blackboard hopes to encourage a sustained

About the ad

The Black Lives Don’t Matter ad was created in response to the FM’s Creative Challenge, which calls for tactical print advertising which responds to current affairs.

“In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic aside, one of the most topical issues under discussion has been around marginalisation, racism and the Black Lives Matter movement. I took that one step further to consider the impact this has on the corporate world, and then narrowed it down to advertising,”says Masango.

mentorship relationship with creatives; relationships which students can rely on to ease them into the industry.”

During the course of the year, students get to work on real projects for real brands under the guidance of practising industry creatives, in the process building up a portfolio of work.

In partnership with the Creative Circle, Blackboard has extended its reach to Joburg, and has already taken on board the first Joburg-based students.

If you want to donate or get involved, visit blackboardcommunity.co.za.

George Floyd’s death, he says, started the discussion that racism exists not only socially but also at a corporate level. “Most boards are not diverse. If neither the board, management team or ad agency are diverse, how can the business talk authentically to its customers?”

The ad’s headline was intentionally written to warrant a second glance, says Masango.

“The bottom line is that if black lives really did matter, we wouldn’t need the hashtag. As an industry, we need to prioritise the democratisation of creativity. Our sustainability depends on it.”

This year’s Creative Challenge finalists proudly feature on the inside front cover and inside back cover of AdFocus.

Corporate Profile

WE GO BY THE NAME OF Ebony+Ivory

OUR CORE SPECIALITY IS Seamlessly connecting insights, strategy, creative and media

OUR BIG PIECE OF WORK IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS

Brand SA Covid-19 lockdown

OUR BIG CLIENTS

Brand SA, John Craig, Wits University, Sasria

OUR OLDEST ACCOUNTS

Kreepy Krauly, Creamer Media, JSE, John Craig, Wits University ACCOUNTS WE’VE WON OVER THE PAST 12 MONTHS

Sasria, Finishing Touches, Special Olympics, Unesco, EU projects ACCOUNTS WE’VE LOST OVER THE PAST 12 MONTHS

None WHO OWNS US

100% independent and South African OUR BEE RATING Level 1

OUR REVENUE BAND R10m—R 15m

THIS IS HOW MANY PERMANENT EMPLOYEES WE HAVE 18

WHO’S THE BOSS

Nombini Mehlomakulu,Paul Middleton

OUR BUSINESS IN 140 CHARACTERS

We are a strategic, creative and media specialist; we craft and enable clients to develop compelling brand stories and sales results.

OUR KEY MOMENT IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS IN 50 WORDS

Growing and delivering during lockdown —2020 is and has been a very strong year for us

So you like us, this is how you get in touch with us

+27 (0) 11-327-6871 info@ebonyivory.co.za ebonyivory.co.za facebook.com/Ebony+Ivory @ebonyads

Ebony+Ivory is renowned for its full-service offering, which includes media research, strategy and buying

Working under lockdown conditions during the current financial year has unlocked new agility and innovation for Ebony+Ivory: not only as a reflection of the heightened sense of interconnectivity and mutual dependence needed to deliver as a team, but as a brand and the way in which brands behave.

This year, says director Nombini Mehlomakulu, has brought to the fore a distinct demonstration of how local and regional economies have grown closer and, as such, how these economies have the opportunity to become more robust.

In the agency environment, for example, having insights, media and creative housed in one team proved effective, with tighter co-ordination and faster turnaround times, despite video conferencing connections and social distancing.

One of the oldest independent agencies in SA, having celebrated its 50th year, Ebony+Ivory has become renowned for its full-service, 360° offering, which includes media research, strategy and buying.

While 20% of the agency’s clients suspended their advertising campaigns duringthe global pandemic, most have since resumed activity.

The lockdown required that communication strategies were reassessed, current campaigns repurposed and others put on hold.

Budget cuts meant the team worked smarter and harder, finding innovative ways to add value through the strategic insights that the agency has developed a reputation for producing.

These insights, coupled with its long-standing, well-established client relationships, paid off, given that the agency was able to successfully assist clients to navigate this uncertain period.

The agency’s sustainability is assured through multiple revenue streams and a core team of highly experienced professionals. It’sa team, says Mehlomakulu, which is passionate about, and invested in, bringing brands to market and which is determined to abide by the agency philosophy of going beyond the brief, to produce work that is effective, on time.

Navigation through the current environment requires extreme focus, says MD Paul Middleton, a keen hockey player who has played at club, provincial and country level. “In the same way that the difference between a club game and an international game represents a 10-fold step-up, so too is business getting significantly tougher each year.”

The rapid rate of change, given the proliferation of new channels and shifts in consumer behaviour, is tantamount to establishing a new business every 18 months, says Middleton. To succeed in this environment requires consistent attention in terms of ensuring that

every aspect of the business is sharper and more agile.

“Like an athlete works on improving their fitness, in the agency world, success is reliant on teams getting better and better at what they do. Success is directly proportional to the amount of effort put in.”

What the lockdown reiterated was the importance of strong client-agency relationships, while highlighting the challenges inherent in a multi-agency model. Pre-Covid it was hard to co-ordinate multiple agencies. It’s now become even more challenging, says Middleton.

The agency’s investment in a concerted marketing campaign is starting to pay dividends. In fact, at a time when many agencies were losing clients, Ebony+Ivory won new ones.

The agency has made significant investments in the past year into its structures, processes and people —including providing training opportunities.

Having successfully worked through a challenging year, Ebony+Ivory is looking forward to impacting possibilities into 2021 and beyond.

DUKE

WE GO BY THE NAME OF DUKE

OUR CORE SPECIALITY IS

Transforming brands into much-loved and envied players in their categories

OUR BIG PIECE OF WORK IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS

Relaunch of Jive’s sugar-free variant, “Jive X, Nix Sugar All Flava”

OUR BIG CLIENTS

Pioneer Foods, Pepsi, Jive, RCS, Coronation, Protea Hotels, Marriott International, 4G Capital, Vox Telecoms and Food Lovers Market, among others

OUR OLDEST ACCOUNTS

RCS, Woolworths, Heart & Stroke Foundation, Jive, Pepsi, Pioneer Foods and Vox Telecoms, among others ACCOUNTS WE’VE WON OVER THE PAST 12 MONTHS

Coronation, Environ, Monkey Shoulder, Hendricks Gin, 4G Capital, Africrypt, Virgin Money and Defy, among others ACCOUNTS WE’VE LOST OVER THE PAST 12 MONTHS

None WHO OWNS US

100% independent

OUR BEE RATING

Level 1

OUR REVENUE BAND

R40m–R45m

THIS IS HOW MANY PERMANENT EMPLOYEES WE HAVE

80

WHO’S THE BOSS

CEO Wayne Naidoo

OUR BUSINESS IN 140 CHARACTERS

A challenger mentality sees DUKE Group transforming brands from obscurity to fame; from playing on the periphery to playing at the heart of culture and conversation.

OUR KEY MOMENT IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS IN 50 WORDS

The coming together of DUKE, Positive Dialogue Communications and Mark1 to form DUKE Group

So you like us, this is how you get in touch with us

+27 (21) 421-4239 wayne@duke.co.za www.dukegroup.co.za @dukeadvertising https://www.facebook.com/dukeadvertising/

For many agencies, 2020 has been a horrendous year. Others have risen to the challenge and, by virtue of a diversified client base and an entrepreneurial business model, have managed to navigate the lockdown crisis with aplomb.

One of those is DUKE Group, an independent agency which is making a name for itself as a champion of challenger brands. The group comprises three owner-managed entities: creative agency DUKE, digital media specialist Mark1 and public and influencer relations consultancy, Positive Dialogue.

That’s not to say 2020 has all been smooth sailing. In fact, says CEO Wayne Naidoo, it’s been a tumultuous year in a number of respects.

The combined group, consisting of 75 people, had just moved into sparkling new offices at Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront in February. This was the first time all three entities had been under one roof and the group was looking forward to the next phase of its growth trajectory, including establishing a group culture and taking on board a number of new clients.

A month later, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced a nationwide lockdown in a bid to curb the spread of Covid-19.

Around the same time Naidoo’s long-standing creative partner Mike Beukes, the agency’s executive creative director, announced that he was planning to move back to London. Under Beukes’s tenure, DUKE was one of the two most awarded small agencies at the Loerie Awards.

DUKE, however, is no stranger to change. In fact, the agency has very intentionally created a working environment that is fast-paced and dynamic, and nurtured an ethos that allows everyone to thrive, even in tumultuous times. The agency’s physical doors might have closed, but working remotely, the group was as busy as ever.

The agency is fortunate to have

good relationships with its clients at a top leadership level so working remotely was a natural continuation with little negative impact. If anything, says Naidoo, the shared experience of “staring death in the face”has brought the agency closer to its clients.

However, integrating staff from three different businesses during lockdown was a little more challenging. In response, the agency arranged a number of online events for staff, including Friday evening drinks when everybody was required to dress up from the waist up and then divided into random smaller groupsto get to know each other.

“It was a weird time,”says Naidoo, adding that these events initially felt forced, but ultimately worked well and achieved their purpose of breaking down barriers. The agency counts Marriott and Protea Hotels among its clients. In response to the lockdown, Marriott stopped advertising spend and, given the ban on alcohol sales, the agency’s alcohol brands also cut back their advertising spend. As a result the agency was forced to retrench four people and salaries were cut back for a short period.

“Leading a business during this unprecedented period had its own challenges,”says Naidoo. “We all ended up being strangely vulnerable with each other. It was impossible to know with any degree of certainty how things were going to pan out and I refused to sugarcoat the situation with my staff. I openly admitted that I could not predict the future.”

However, many positive things came out of the Covid period, he says. Calling it the “ultimate entrepreneurial test”, he says the businesses had to make do with what they had.

“It was a period when nobody could judge anybody else and when all the superficialities typical of normal life were put aside. There is no question that it catapulted us into new realms in terms of people dynamics and

how we do business.”

Being vulnerable and personal, he believes, helped the agency get through this period.

“As a self-funded agency from the outset, we’ve had our fair share of challenges in the past. We’re used to getting knocked down and then getting up to face another day, so it was rewarding to see some of our clients adopting this philosophy and choosing to have a big presence during the lockdown,”he says.

Though some clients chose to go quiet, behind the scenes the

agency was hard at work strategising and testing ideas.

“This time was about solving real business challenges, and as a result we had even more unfettered access to executive commttees and CEOs,”says Naidoo.

After working remotely for two months, the agency was finally able to reopen its doors to staff in June. Since then, DUKE has been firing on all cylinders.

In September, industry heavyweight Suhana Gordhan joined the agency as executive

creative director. With more than 15 years of experience in the industry, working for a number of top-ranked local agencies, in 2017 she was named one of Destiny Magazine’s Power of 40 Candidates.

Over the years Gordhan has gained unparalleled insights and experiences from her many terms on local and international industry award panels. In 2019, her work for Coca-Cola featured in Contagious Magazine as one of the three campaigns in The World’s Best Strategies.

smartphone.

The award, says Naidoo, speaks directly to DUKE’s ethos of working end-to-end across a campaign to support clients to achieve their actual business objectives, and proves the agency’s resilience and agility in pivoting through the pandemic to add real value to clients.

“My goal has always been for DUKE to play in an integrated space,”he says.

Given that no-one can predict the future with any degree of accuracy, he believes the opportunities for brands to own their space are larger than ever.

“In this new world you can’t apply the rules of the past and there are no new ones. The statistics and data of yesterday are irrelevant. The priority now is to be bold and courageous, genuinely embrace change and recognise that every conversation starts with a clean slate,”he says.

Naidoo intends to maintain the group’s independence at all costs, maintaining that many of the networked agencies have lost their way. “Advertising agencies need entrepreneurs running them, not management people,”he says.

In September, the agency won four new pieces of business and won a Gold New Generation Social and Digital Media award for Best Influencer Marketing Campaign by an Agency for the recently launched One Plus

As for the future, he audaciously suggests that global domination continues to be the group’s goal.“We have great clients and talented people — including a healthy combination of experience and youth —which means we’re perfectly positioned to take the brands we represent all the way to number one.

“The agency is in a remarkably good place right now. Every day feels like the adrenaline rush of jumping off a high cliff into a clear pool below. It’s very exciting — and very addictive,”says Naidoo.

Corporate Profile

Joe Public United 2020

WE GO BY THE NAME OF

Joe Public United

OUR CORE SPECIALITIES ARE Integrated brand and communications solutions

Joe Public (Integrated ATL)

Joe Public Shift (Strategic Brand Design)

Joe Public Connect (Digital)

Joe Public Ignite (Beyond-the-Line)

Joe Public Engage (Public Relations)

Joe Public Maximise (Media)

OUR BIG PIECE OF WORK IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS

Nedbank Secrets

OUR BIG CLIENTS

Cell C, Chicken Licken, Jet, Nedbank and SAB

OUR OLDEST ACCOUNTS

Clover (17 years), Mahindra (17 years), Jet (8,5 years), Nedbank (7,5 years) and Chicken Licken (4 years)

ACCOUNTS WE’VE WON OVER THE PAST 12 MONTHS

Cell C, Bonitas, Mars Inc, Nestlé, Revlon, and Uber Eats ACCOUNTS WE’VE LOST OVER THE PAST 12 MONTHS

Cell C Black

(Business unit was closed down)

WHO OWNS US

60% black-owned, 100% independent and proudly South African

OUR BEE RATING

MAC Charter BBBEE level 2

OUR REVENUE BAND

R200m-R250m

THIS IS HOW MANY PERMANENT EMPLOYEES WE HAVE

300

WHO’S THE BOSS

Gareth Leck, Khuthala Gala Holten,Laurent Marty, Mpume Ngobese, Pepe Marais and Xolisa Dyeshana

OUR BUSINESS IN 140 CHARACTERS

An integrated brand and communications group that exists to be the fertile soil that grows our people, our clients and our country.

OUR KEY MOMENT IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS IN 50 WORDS

Becoming the largest black-owned independent agency in SAwith a 60% black-owned shareholding. Winning Agency of the Year at the Loeries, Pendorings and Ciclope Africa for two consecutive years. Connect Joe Public winning Med-Large Agency of the Year at the New Gen Awards for four consecutive years. IAB Bookmarks 2020 for Best Contribution to Transformation in the Digital Industry. So you like us, engage with us

+27 (0)10-591-7770

info@joepublic.co.za

Corporate Profile

King James Group

WE GO BY THE NAME OF

King James Group SA (Joburg and Cape Town)

OUR CORE SPECIALITY IS A fully integrated communications and technology offering, including brand strategy, through-the-line communications, digital services and platforms, PR, digital media and data analytics, live events and activations, and decoupled retail production

OUR BIGGEST BRAG IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS

Sanlam’s“Now is the Time to Plan” brand campaign

OUR BIG CLIENTS

Pick n Pay, Sanlam Group, AB InBev, TymeBank, Allan Gray, Liquid Telecom, Visa, Reckitt Benckiser

OUR OLDEST ACCOUNTS

Pick n Pay, Sanlam Group, AB InBev, TymeBank, Allan Gray

OUR WINS OVER THE PAST 12 MONTHS

Anglo American, Inecto, Darling, Allan Gray Australia, Microsoft, Wesgro, SARES

WHO OWNS US

We are independently owned OUR BEE RATING

We are a level 1 BBEEE contributor

OUR REVENUE BAND

More than R200m annual turnover

THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE WE HAVE More than 300 staff members

WHO’S THE BOSS

Alistair King, chief creative officer

James Barty, chief executive officer

OUR BUSINESS IN A TWEET

We are in the business of investment-worthy ideas that pull our clients’brands and businesses closer to their customers

OUR KEY MOMENT IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS IN 50 WORDS

Being appointed as the main agency for Liquid Telecom across Pan Africa

So you like us, engage with us

+27 (0) 11-215-0000

+27 (0) 21-469-1500

info@king james.co.za www.king james.co.za king jamesgroup king jamesgroup king jamesgroup

When a global pandemic turns the world upside down, when every well-laid plan comes undone and every industry, economy and individual is shaken to the core —well, that’s when you discover how important roots really are.

So says creative agency King James Group Africa, which has managed not only to survive the challenges of this year, but come out even stronger, by anchoring itself in the fundamentals that have always been the driving force behind the agency’s formidable power and success.

“How do you keep your clients’ brands connected to their customers when you have no idea what tomorrow is going to bring? How do you respond to challenges with solutions that may only be relevant for the next week? How do you keep a brand front and centre at a time when so much else is competing for attention — when there seems to be so many more important things to focus on? How do you future-proof a brand when the future has never been so unclear? You stay true to your roots,”says Lesego Kotane, MD of King James Joburg.

In this case, King James’s success has long been built on its ability to remain connected and relevant to its clients and to help

these clients stay relevant to their respective audiences.

Here’s how it navigated the challenges of “business unusual” in the middle of a global pandemic to stay true to its reputation and continue to deliver to its clients.

First, connect with clients. When the crisis first hit, King James moved towards its clients first. “We got stuck in right away,” says Taryn Walker, MD of King James Cape Town.

“While each client focused inwards on stabilising their business, we focused on how to best partner with them, providing them with an external perspective that could help navigate a fog of uncertainty, while keeping them connected to their customers. To do this effectively, we set up war rooms, with the best brains in the business. We triaged, amputated and regrafted…quickly.”

Indeed, navigating the right way forward for each client required a nimble, bespoke approach. And hours and hours of Zoom meetings. While some clients needed to immediately pause their communications, some needed to ramp up their efforts, while others used the time to refocus entirely.

“Our partnerships with clients have always gone beyond the

creative work we do for them,” says Kotane.

“We seek to burrow deep into clients’organisations to solve really meaty business challenges. This approach proved invaluable in a time like this —when the challenges were big, the unknowns even bigger and the pace unrelenting.”

Now, create meaningful connections for others.

Only after meaningfully connecting with clients can meaningful connections with their desired audience be made. In each case, King James sought to create work that was constructive and relevant.

In a bid to staunch the wave of panic-buying across the country just before lockdown, King James helped Pick n Pay do something truly extraordinary.

It invited a diverse range of the country’s top artists to create a catchy, light-hearted song about the perils of panic-buying. Broadcast far and wide, and warmly received by both the public and the retailer’s biggest competitors, the entire project was turned around (remotely) in just five days.

For Sanlam, the live-streaming of SA’s first Olympic-qualifying female artistic gymnast in 15 years

performing her routine on the exact day she had planned to perform it in Tokyo, served to bring some much-needed good news to the nation.

It provided the country with an inspirational message of hope and positivity and emphasised the idea that our dreams haven’t changed —the timeline has just shifted.

With the hospitality and tourism industry hit hardest by the lockdown, King James’s client Stella Artois sought to create a movement that at once celebrated the good times ahead, while helping restaurants and bars survive the worst times right in front of them through the #SaveYourSpot initiative.

Then, when bars and restaurants re-opened their doors, the agency continued to drive relevance for Stella by localising and rolling out a global campaign for the brand: Together Apart.

The campaign enabled people to once again create special moments together through art, food and music, but to do so safely with the help of a 21m x 38m mural laid over much of the floor space in the open-air piazza at Nelson Mandela Square in Sandton.

The illustration included circles of various sizes that were all appropriately socially distanced from one another,. showing that social distance doesn’t have to be anti-social.

Where

there’s our will, there’s a way.

“As an independent agency, King James has always tried to make the impossible possible,”reflects Walker. “Whether that’s bringing big, hairy ideas to life that could turn you grey overnight, or battling an impossible deadline on a shoestring budget: where there’sour will, we’ve always found a way.”

During this year, the agency has had to reorganise teams to

bring their collective strength to each task like never before, yet through it all, they have not only strengthened existing client relationships (not losing a single one), but forged new ones (winning no less than six new clients).

To keep this impressive track record and culture alive requires a workforce that’s fully alive too. Enter: the final fundamental conviction behind King James’s success despite the storms:

Valuing internal connections.

In the face of the challenges that this year has delivered, many of us have had to work harder than ever before, often in directions and contexts that are completely new.

Thankfully, hard work is nothing new to King James.

“Beyond any well thought-through process, or rigorous tech stack, it was our

people that became more important than ever during this time. Our people who always want to go above and beyond, who really believe that in times of crisis and uncertainty, there has never been a better time for creativity to save us all,”says Walker.

Even so, all people have limits. So, to counter-balance the inherent strain and stresses of the year, King James introduced wellness apps, hosted virtual town halls and fun community-building moments and, when it became safe to do so, restructured its business to ensure everyone had the opportunity to reconnect in the real world once again too.

The unknown route ahead. “We have always been built on certain principles, and as it turns out, those principles make us not only good, but formidable in a crisis,”concludes Kotane. Indeed, there is nothing like a good crisis to shake off the extraneous and reveal what’s really underneath.

In King James’s case, what’s underneath appears to be a fierce determination to always find new ways to better connect with each other, its clients and the world at large.

It’s not over yet, but with the fundamentals of what makes this agency what they are now tested and proven, it would seem it’s ready for whatever comes next.

Corporate Profile

M&C Saatchi Abel

WE GO BY THE NAME OF M&C Saatchi Abel: Joburg, Cape Town

OUR CORE SPECIALITY IS

Creating beautifully simple solutions for an increasingly complex world OUR BIG PIECE OF WORK IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS

Standard Bank’snew brand positioning OUR BIG CLIENTS

Standard Bank, Takealot.com, Heineken International, Lexus, Nando’s, MWeb

OUR OLDEST ACCOUNTS AVI MWeb, Takealot.com, Nando’s, Lexus, Heineken International

ACCOUNTS WE’VE WON OVER THE PAST 12 MONTHS

Standard Bank, TikTok ACCOUNTS WE’VE LOST OVER THE PAST 12 MONTHS

Heineken SA

WHO OWNS US

50.9% locally owned. Black partner and staff ownership is 26%, white management ownership is 24.9%, and M&C Saatchi has a 49.1% shareholding OUR BEE RATING

Level 1

OUR REVENUE BAND R175m—R200m

THIS IS HOW MANY PERMANENT EMPLOYEES WE HAVE

M&C Saatchi Abel employs over 220; the M&C Saatchi Abel group over 350 WHO’S THE BOSS

The partners —a federation of entrepreneurs OUR BUSINESS IN 140 CHARACTERS

In the business of creating beautifully simple solutions for an increasingly complex world. We call this “brutal simplicity of thought”.

OUR KEY MOMENT IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS IN 50 WORDS

Retaining 100% of our people at 100% salary in lockdown;landing a large petrochemical account; TikTok’s first campaign in SA; relaunching Africa’s biggest bank; and retaining level 1 BEE

So you like us, this is how you get in touch with us

(Cape Town): +27 (0) 21-421-1024 (Johannesburg): +27 (0) 11-268-6388

Email: info@mcsaatchiabel.co.za

www.mcsaatchiabel.co.za

www.mcsaatchigroup.co.za

@mcsaatchiabel /MCSaatchAbel

@mcsaatchiabel

M&C Saatchi Abel/M&C Saatchi Group SA

If the Covid crisis has taught M&C Saatchi Abel anything it is that its philosophy — “Brutal Simplicity of Thought”—is more relevant than ever given that this is the year when everything superfluous has been discarded.

In fact, at a time of immense trepidation for both agency and clients, this philosophy has served as a vaccine for the mind, allowing creativity to flourish.

Working with a number of blue-chip clients meant the agency has had to prepare for any eventuality, including having a remote working strategy in place, when lockdown was announced.

“From the outset, we made a decision not to implement knee-jerk reactions and to instead take a long-term view,”says group MD Jason Harrison.

As marketing budgets tightened, and the realities of a depressed economy set in, the agency made a commitment not to implement any retrenchments or pay cuts.

There were a number of highlights during the lockdown, including the agency’s first virtual pitch for a major (petrochemical) account —which it won. In the middle of a global pandemic, it also completed a new brand positioning and payoff line for Standard Bank, an account which it acquired in 2019.

The agency also made changes it had been considering foryears. Remote working, including the ability to brainstorm remotely, opened up a whole new world. The agency produced a “re-plan on a page”strategy for every one of its clients to successfully navigate their way through this uncertain period.

But more than that, even closer client relationships were forged. Discussions with clients transcended advertising and communications and became strategic business conversations, giving the agency the opportunity to solve business problems creatively, something M&C

Saatchi Abel does particularly

well. “We deal extensively with the C-suite, providing what are essentially business consulting services,”says Harrison.

The agency is fortunate to have clients in diversified sectors —a fact that has stood it in good stead during this tumultuous year — including a number of new economy brands such as Netflix, TikTok, Mr D, Superbalist, MWeb and Takealot. It took the agency just six weeks to pivot the MWeb brand to own the home and completely rebrand.

However, it was not all smooth

sailing: challenges included staff burnout and concerns about mental health. Agency people are motivated by making things happen, and during the lockdown many clients were not able to commit to anything. This meant that at times it was a challenge to keep the momentum going. In response, the agency rolled out a mental health programme to provide psychological support.

It also established an emergency fund to help family members of staff who were retrenched and gave electronic

shopping vouchers to those who needed them.

At the time of lockdown, M&C Saatchi Abel’s message was simple: “Our doors are closed, but our minds remain open.”

After the easing of lockdown restrictions, the agency has opened its doors and plans to introduce a hybrid model which combines remote working with office work, to liberate staff to produce better thinking and solutions depending on the need.

Harrison says agencies will be the economy’s frontline workers

in the months ahead by creating demand for products and services in a way that is not self-serving.

“This new world — ‘the better normal’we call it —will be about getting back to the basics of marketing. If we can help clients grow their top line, market share and brand equity, then we’ve done our jobs properly.”

Case Study

Agency: M&C Saatchi Abel and VMLY&R

Brand: Nando’s SA

Format: Integrated PR, digital and social media

Our project partners: Sunshine Gun, MSL Group, The MediaShop

The premise

In the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, Nando’s wanted to find ways to stay close to our family and friends even when they couldn’t enjoy our products. We knew we needed to communicate authentically, staying true to our voice at a time when many other brands were silent.

We wanted to be a voice of hope in a sea of worry by bringing a smile to the faces of South Africans. We also wanted to provide tangible support, not only to our staff and franchise partners, but to vulnerable communities in SA as well.

As lockdown eased, we sought ways to innovate by bringing the country’s favourite chicken to people in new and safer channels. We also had a responsibility to inform our customers about the precautions we were taking to make them feel safe and to help them understand how they could get their peri peri-fix in ways that they might not have tried before.

The thinking

Lockdown restrictions meant we couldn’t trade, and even as channels began to open up across the restaurant industry, our trading capacity was limited.

Nando’s serves food as fresh as possible so we had a sizeable amount of food that we couldn’t sell. To allow this food to expire and have to destroy it seemed like a criminal act. We could not let that happen when so many vulnerable South Africans were not receiving enough to eat on a daily basis.

Our challenges were therefore how to reach people with messages of hope and keep the brand relevant in their lives, and how to support vulnerable South Africans as a home-grown brand

lodged in the hearts of the nation.

The application

To tackle the first challenge, we turned to our engaged and sizeable online community. With astrong reputation in tactical communication and social media community engagement, we selected digital media as the right place to communicate with our most loyal customers.

We fired up communication in two ways. First, we started at home. We aligned our narrative to support good behaviour and encouraged people to adapt to embrace safe protocols as we turned off our grills for the first time since 1987. We did this through a video we wrote, produced and edited within 48 hours where Nando’s founder Robbie Brozin shared a message of hope and encouraged our

Nandocas (who then shared this with hundreds of thousands of South Africans) to stay safe and stay home. This video was shared by our Nando’s community on their own personal socials and via our agency partners, friends and areas of influence in an entirely organic way.

Second, we shared a spicy tactical social media post which advocated good hygiene by using a well-known competitor slogan that had just been globally suspended. The post read, “Turns out, finger licking isn’t good”, which the brand subsequently removed from all their advertising material.

We acknowledged that the sudden and extensive changes to people’s circumstances meant that we were developing a new language thanks to the new behaviours we had to introduce

into our lives as South Africans. So we developed a COVIDictionary of words inspired by conversations related to lockdown behaviour in SA. We released words like Ramapunctual (when making important decisions takes time) and Skhokhorona (revered title of those who stay home during lockdown).

We also had a look at our technology development plans and prioritised a method to serve South Africans through the launch of a brand-new means of ordering and collecting Nando’s. Lockdown provided an opportunity to drive some technological innovation and adaptation, becoming the first restaurant in SA to launch Kerbside Collection as well as enhancing the way the brand interacted with customers through technology. Through Kerbside Collection (affectionately nicknamed Zwakala Sokulethela — “you come to us and

we bring it to you”), customers are given the option to order and pay through the Nando’s mobile app or website, drive to their local Nando’s, and have their food brought to their car on a tray as they wait in a specially demarcated parking area at no extra cost, thereby avoiding delivery fees. We think of it as drive-to rather than drive-thru.

Nando’s built the kerbside functionality into their app and website in just a few weeks, but we have since added features to the app that enhance the experience such as voice ordering through the search function and the ability to watch some of those famous Nando’s ads while you wait for your food.

We got special permission to open a limited number of our restaurants for the sole purpose of cooking meals to give away to vulnerable communities. We involved other restaurant industry partners whom we nicknamed the Frenemies, in the form of McDonald’s and KFC, to work together with us to feed these communities.

We partnered with Joint Aid Management (JAM), an NGO licensed to distribute our warm meals, and invited the Frenemies to join us in this feeding scheme to make a positive impact. We shared this news through our social media and PR channels using the hashtag #StreetwisePERi-PERiMcBurger.

Taking this act of charity to the next level, we customised our mobile app to give people the chance to purchase Nando’s vouchers that they could redeem as soon as restaurants were once again open.

Nando’s then used its vouchering capability to raise money for the Solidarity Fund, a public benefit organisation with a mandate to support the national health response and contribute to humanitarian relief efforts as South Africans fight against Covid-19.

The vouchering initiative

allowed Nando’s customers to contribute to the fund because for every voucher purchased, Nando’s contributed 10 times the value of any voucher bought and donated this to the Solidarity Fund.

The impact

During the Covid-19 lockdown period, Nando’s generated a total advertising value equivalent of R22,657,272 through more than 200 pieces of organic coverage.

We cooked over R1m worth of

Nando’s food, saving it from going to waste and partnering with 156 organisations around the country, including orphanages, homeless shelters, old age homes and places of safety for women and children with a total of 52,840 meals. In addition, we provided food parcels and education kits for kids in our own backyard in Lorentzville to the value of R3m.

Through the vouchering initiative Nando’s raised more than R1m for the Solidarity Fund.

The effect

It was not any SA brand’s intention to divert entirely from their plan for the year, but every smart brand did just that. It takes courage to let go of your intentions at a time when they are no longer relevant. We headed down an entirely different road from the one we planned to go down this year, and we are proud to have achieved several firsts through this agility.

We partnered with our competitors for the first time in history, pulling together as key members of the restaurant industry to support South Africans during very tough times. We built and launched a brand-new channel in the form of Kerbside Collection within a few weeks, and were first to offer this as a means for customers to collect their Nando’s orders without leaving the safety and comfort of their vehicles. We found ways of being relevant and present in the lives of our customers even when we couldn’t serve them.

We were reminded that investing in brand-building and community engagement gives you ready eyes and ears when you have something important and serious to say, and to elicit an engaging and heartfelt response across a nation.

Corporate Profile

OMD

WE GO BY THE NAME OF OMD

OUR CORE SPECIALITY IS Media strategy, planning and buying, marketing intelligence, branded content and full-service digital (media, creative and community management)

OUR BIG PIECE OF WORK IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS

Onboarding three of SA’s greatest brands: SA Tourism, Diageo and Discovery

OUR BIG CLIENTS

MTN, Diageo, SA Tourism, Massmart, Discovery, Spar, PepsiCo, McDonald’s OUR OLDEST ACCOUNTS

Nissan, Spar, PepsiCo, McDonald’s ACCOUNTS WE’VE WON OVER THE PAST 12 MONTHS

Diageo, SA Tourism, Discovery ACCOUNTS WE’VE LOST OVER THE PAST 12 MONTHS

Standard Bank, Disney WHO OWNS US

Omnicom Media Group/Phembani/ Josh Dovey/Gary Westwater/Staff trust OUR BEE RATING

Level 2

OUR REVENUE BAND

Confidential

THIS IS HOW MANY PERMANENT EMPLOYEES WE HAVE

179

WHO’S THE BOSS

Marco Santos and Julio Rodrigues OUR BUSINESS IN 140 CHARACTERS

At OMD, we have the talent to deliver on our brand promise of “better decisions, faster”, which has never meant more than it does in today’s challenging environment.

OUR KEY MOMENT IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS IN 50 WORDS

Becoming the largest billings media network in SA

So you like us, this is how you get in touch with us

+27 (0) 11-303-2000

Julio.rodrigues@omd.co.za www.omd.co.za

OMD SA, part of the worldwide Omnicom Media Group, has retained its positionas the largest media agency in SA for the 14th consecutive year. With billings of more than R8bn, its scale provides it with unrivalled buying power and access to great talent.

Its success can be attributed to a number of factors, including the stability of senior leadership, continuous development, and the group’s proprietary platform Omni, which links audience, media and creative insights into its planning system.

In fact, says OMD SA MD Julio Rodrigues, Omni is one of the reasons the agency won the Diageo, Discovery and SA Tourism accounts. Omni enables OMD to deliver on its promise to provide “better decisions, faster”by giving teams access to data and one another.

More than ever before, media agencies are being forced to interrogate data to move beyond the traditionally more narrow approach.

“To bring a new way of thinking, we need to get people from diverse backgrounds and training into our environment; people who are not necessarily cut from the traditional media agency cloth and who can bring a new perspective to our thinking,” says Rodrigues.

Empathy and understanding the consumer journey and its nuances has become a key focus in recent years, and needs media agencies to work more closely with creative partners.

The Covid crisis has forced media agencies to work much faster, which has required driving even more efficiencies. “The days of trying to get creative on board after the media strategy are long gone, given the much quicker turnaround times now required.”

As an integrated media agency, OMD includes a full-service digital offering. The pandemic has propelled the agency into areas not typically associated with a traditional media agency,

including e-commerce, branded content, influencer marketing and events.

OMD Massiv is a full-service, strategic digital agency, which specialises in creating experiences that transform brands and grow businesses. It was established in response to a market need for fast turnarounds, synergistic concept creation and strong technological understanding and development to improve data flows between clients and agency partners.

At inception, OMD Massiv only accepted ad hoc projects, but in the past year it has a handful of key clients on retainer.

Omnicom Out of Home is one of the largest out-of-home specialists in SA, offering strategic planning, buying and production expertise. OMD Digital is the specialist digital advertising division of Omnicom.

The services of OMD Digital, together with OMD Massiv, offer clients a one-stop e-commerce shop, from e-commerce platform development to lead gen media buys and API call centre plug-ins.

In Africa, Omnicom remains one of the largest and strongest media networks. OMG Africa is a specialised, centralised, co-ordination unit for Omnicom Media Group SA, leveraging well-established relationships with OMD and its partners across 14 African countries.

In collaboration with specialist digital, creative and content divisions of OMG, the Africa unit offers turnkey media solutions to a portfolio of more than 30 local and international organisations operating in the region.

Its services range from media, strategy, planning, buying, reporting and governance to creative development and integrated campaign management.

“While many agencies have tried to break down silos, we see value in having specialists,”says Rodrigues.

“One of OMD’s biggest advantages is a team of very astute people who are able to pivot and stretch themselves to do new things. In the past year we’ve moved completely out of our comfort zone, offering everything from building e-commerce capabilities and call centre integration systems, to hosting events and managing influencers”.

“We look forward to what the future holds and thank the Omnicom team for their support and commitment, especially during Covid.”

Corporate Profile

Promise

WE GO BY THE NAME OF Promise

OUR CORE SPECIALITY IS Full-service, including consulting, data and digital media expertise

OUR BIG CLIENTS

RMB, SAB (AB InBev), AfriSam, Redefine Properties, PPS, CSA, BestMed

OUR OLDEST ACCOUNTS

SAB (AB InBev) and AfriSam ACCOUNTS WE’VE WON OVER THE PAST 12 MONTHS

CSA, Redefine Properties ACCOUNTS WE’VE LOST OVER THE PAST 12 MONTHS

None WHO OWNS US

100% independent and owner-managed

OUR BEE RATING

Level 2

THIS IS HOW MANY PERMANENT EMPLOYEES WE HAVE

70 WHO’S THE BOSS

James Moffatt, Marc Watson, Craig du Preez and Verushen Reddy

So you like us, this is how you get in touch with us

+27 (0) 11-463-2413

craig@promisegroup.co.za promisegroup.co.za @promiseagencysa

A previous winner of the FM AdFocus Medium Sized Agency of the Year Award, Promise focused on bedding down extensive digital and data skills in 2018, while in 2019 it invested in globally awarded creative talent.

The result, says MD Craig du Preez, is a multifocused business which is able to tick all the necessary boxes in an agile manner.

In late 2019, the agency was awarded the Cricket SA account after a face-to-face pitch process, which was the last pitch done in person. Since then all pitches have been conducted virtually.

In 2020 Promise was awarded the account for JSE-listed Redefine Properties, after a hotly contested multi-agency virtual pitch.

The agency put a numberof creative campaigns on hold during the lockdown period, instead advising clients on appropriate communications.

In addition, it focused on researching the impact of the lockdown onits clients in the business sector, including RMB, AfriSam and alcoholic beverages giant SAB (AB InBev), to advise them on the most appropriate

strategies.

“There is no darker moment than realising that a campaign you have worked on for three months would be tone-deaf in light of the pandemic and the lockdown,”says Ayanda Seboni, PPS executive responsible for brand, marketing and communications.

Promise, however, delivered on its promise of agility and being solutions-orientated. “What started as a crisis gave us the most authentic and heart-warming campaign we have ever done,”says Seboni.

Promise’s consulting arm was kept particularly busy helping clients maintain their business services. A bigger focus on consulting and strategy has meant the agency has had to embrace other skills.

“We’re fortunate to count both highly strategic creative and very creative strategic people among our team members,”says Du Preez.

Great strategy and creativity, however, have become table stakes at Promise. What makes this agency unique is the fact that it is an agile business partner with a deep understanding of the sectors in which its clients operate.

Corporate Profile

TBWA

WE GO BY THE NAME OF TBWA\The Disruption Company

OUR CORE SPECIALITY IS

Using our collective specialist capabilities to locate our clients’brands in culture

OUR BIG PIECE OF WORK IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS

MTN’s“Wear It For Me”, Solidarity Fund behavioural change campaign, Spar Thank You and TBWA\ Covid-19 tracker

OUR BIG CLIENTS

MTN, Spar, Nissan and Liberty

OUR OLDEST ACCOUNTS

Spar and City Lodge Group ACCOUNTS WE’VE WON OVER THE PAST 12 MONTHS

HP, Cobra Taps, Spotify and Stanlib ACCOUNTS WE’VE LOST OVER THE PAST 12 MONTHS

None WHO OWNS US Omnicom, Phembani and a local staff trust

OUR BEE RATING

Level 1: 51% black-owned, 30% black female-owned

OUR REVENUE BAND

Large THIS IS HOW MANY PERMANENT EMPLOYEES WE HAVE

433

WHO’S THE BOSS

Luca Gallarelli and 17 talented leaders across the collective

OUR BUSINESS IN 140 CHARACTERS

We are a radically open creative collective powered by our operating system, Disruption®, creating work that seeks to make an impact in culture

OUR KEY MOMENT IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS IN 50 WORDS

● 2019 Loeries Awards Regional Agency Group of the Year (TBWA\)

● 2019 Creative Circle Agency of the Year (TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris)

● 2019 Creative Circle Group of the Year (TBWA\SA)

● 2020 Bookmarks Agency of the Year

● 2020 Cannes Lion Regional Agency of the Decade runner-up

● 2020 Fast Company World’s Most Innovative Companies

So you like us, this is how you get in touch with us

+27 (0) 11-322-3100

luca.gallarelli@tbwa.co.za

hello@tbwa.co.za

www.tbwa.co.za

@tbwaafrica @tbwaafrica and @backslashafrica @TBWAinAfrica

TBWA\SA

Corporate Profile

The Odd Number

WE GO BY THE NAME OF

The Odd Number

OUR CORE SPECIALITY IS Through-the-line advertising

OUR BIG PIECE OF WORK IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS

Brand SA, Assupol, Nedbank, Game, CricketSA

OUR BIG CLIENTS

Brand SA, Assupol, Nedbank, Game, CricketSA, BBC Worldwide

OUR OLDEST ACCOUNTS

BBC Worldwide, Brand SA, Nedbank, Assupol

ACCOUNTS WE’VE WON OVER THE PAST 12 MONTHS

Game, Newzroom Afrika, M-Net, Mara Phones, Sunday Times, Financial Mail ACCOUNTS WE’VE LOST OVER THE PAST 12 MONTHS

Adcock Ingram —Panado

WHO OWNS US

We’re an independent, 100% black-owned and controlled agency.

OUR BEE RATING

Level 1

OUR REVENUE BAND R50m–R60m

THIS IS HOW MANY PERMANENT EMPLOYEES WE HAVE

More than 50 FTEs

WHO’S THE BOSS

CEO Xola Nouse and chief creative officer Sbu Sitole

OUR BUSINESS IN 140 CHARACTERS

We’re the leading independent 100% black-owned, through-the-line agency in the market. We use powerful, nuanced insights to connect brands to people.

OUR KEY MOMENT IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS IN 50 WORDS

● FM Small Agency of the Year 2019

● Multiple Gold Pendorings

● MarkLives —second-most admired agency for diversity

● Multiple Loeries

● Five One Show finalist positions and four merit awards

● One D&AD finalist position

So you like us, this is how you get in touch with us

+27 (0) 10-312-6190

info@theoddnumber.co.za www.theoddnumber.co.za

@OddNumber /TheOddNumber

Last year’s AdFocus Small Advertising Agency of the Year continues to flex its muscle, navigating a challenging year with resilience and agility.

SA’s leading independent, 100% black-owned agency has grown its business and continues to exceed its revenue targets as a result of a number of account gains, including Game, Newzroom Afrika, Mara Phones and M-Net.

Recognised as the second-most admired agency for diversity by MarkLives, it has been awarded multiple Pendoring and Loerie awards in the past 12 months.

The agency received five One Show finalist positions, which resulted in four merit awards, at the world’s most prestigious awards show, The One Show. It also received one D&AD finalist position.

The net result of these accolades is that the agency has been recognised by The Creative Circle as the second-highest rated agency in the country.

The Odd Number easily adapted to the lockdown, given its robust systems which allowed it to continue with business as usual. A Covid-19 business continuity plan was developed,

regularly updated and shared with staff, detailing the agency’s work-from-home policy, working methods, flexible hours, meeting commitments and technology.

“Our primary message to our staff was that we would need to continue to produce the work efficiently and effectively, and continue to meet deadlines and provide exceptional service to our clients and internal teams,”says CEO Xola Nouse.

A shift in consumer behaviour in 2020 has meant an adjustment to advertising spend. At the same time, businesses are wanting to commercialise increased media consumption.

A priority for brands in the current environment, says Nouse, is to remain relevant and empathetic to the changing circumstances of their consumers.

Mobile, digital and social platforms will remain key to getting messages across in a timeous and cost-effective manner, which means that the messaging being created in advertising and communication content is more important than ever before.

To succeed in this environment requires agencies tobe responsive

to the needs and demands of their clients, who are, in turn, having to respond to the market and their evolving business imperative.

A priority for The Odd Number is to embed itself in its clients’ businesses and become as invested in its clients’success as it is in its own. Creative executions need to factor in business objectives. True client and agency partnerships, says Nouse, are built on sustained mutual success.

The Odd Number’s philosophy is simple: to connect brands to people through powerful, nuanced creative executions. It’sa philosophy which has stood the agency in good stead given that the agency is increasingly attracting leading clients in their respective categories.

But if growing its clients’ businesses and maintaining a winning culture is not enough, the agency has also sets its sights on more international awards. Watch this space!

Corporate Profile

Levergy

WE GO BY THE NAME OF Levergy

WE ARE A Mid-size agency

OUR CORE SPECIALITY IS Sport and entertainment

THIS IS HOW OLD WE ARE Eight years

OUR BIG PIECE OF WORK IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS

Awarded Agency of the Year at the 2019 Hollard Sport Industry Awards

OUR BIG CLIENTS

Nedbank, SuperSport, Heineken, Energade, New Balance, WWE, Mamelodi Sundowns, Sasol

OUR OLDEST ACCOUNT

MultiChoice —eight years

ACCOUNTS WE’VE WON OVER THE PAST 12 MONTHS

Heineken, Bridgestone, Mamelodi Sundowns

ACCOUNTS WE’VE LOST OVER THE PAST 12 MONTHS

None WHO OWNS US

M&C Saatchi Plc

OUR BEE RATING

Level 1

THIS IS HOW MANY PERMANENT EMPLOYEES WE HAVE

40 OUR BUSINESS IN 140 CHARACTERS

We create meaningful change for brands through the things people love.

THIS IS WHAT INSPIRES US “Brutal simplicity of thought”and “diversity of thought”

So you like us, engage with us

27 (0) 10-10-7026 or info@levergy.co.za

The opening of Levergy in 2012 was met with scepticism by our industry peers, who believed our founding partners naive to be starting an agency in a recessionary period for the sponsorship industry. It was on the back of this decreasing confidence in sponsorship as a marketing platform, though, that we believed there was value to be unlocked. Eight years later, Levergy has become the most awarded specialist sport and entertainment agency in the country.

We drive a unique internal culture pinned on five non-negotiable values and an anti-hierarchical structure that allows the best versions of every employee to come to the fore. It is this environment and culture of inclusivity that delivers the diversity of thought required to produce the best work in the industry. We are a proud level 1 BBBEE accredited business, but our transformation and talent strategy is not one that is guided by a rating. It is a strategy held together by the belief that a transformed workplace delivers the best and most effective work. In 2019 wecreated and delivered campaigns for five brands across five World Cups and Afcon,

including the global New Balance cricket campaign and leveraging Heineken’s Rugby World Cup partnership. Most significantly though, the #TeamHeineken campaign gave us the opportunity to bring the Rugby World Cup final to all South Africans on SABC through a ground breaking broadcast sponsorship. Thanks to Heineken, the Rugby World Cup final was taken to all corners of SA.

Strong financial growth has been further validated by a bumper awards period, with 15 awards across categories and disciplines collected. Most notably, we regained the Agency of the Year accolade at the Hollard Sport Industry Awards. The past year has placed the spotlight firmly on women’s sport and Levergy has been at the epicentre of it, delivering award winning solutions through the Fifa Women’s World Cup, Netball

World Cup and Sasol Women’s League.

Before the nationwide lockdown, we executed more than 60 live experiences across the continent. When the pandemic kicked in, we harnessed the power of passions as consumers sought hope and distraction. The result was a wonderful array of creative work delivered through digital content and PR.

Levergy’s purpose is to create meaningful change for brands through the things people love. Through our philosophy of Brutal Simplicity of Thought, we continue to execute effective and award winning solutions that deliver value to our clients’brands and businesses. The industry has come to realise that marketing to consumers through their passions has never been more powerful in a time when people’s appetite for community, escapism, wellness and entertainment has never been more evident.

I’M IN HELL, AND CAN I CALL MY DEALER?

Life as a brilliant, yet misunderstood mid-weight copywriter

Cosmo Glasscock is a copywriter at the boutique advertising agency Sodom and Gomorrah. It counts among its clients Easi-Glyde condoms, the energy drink Mega-Mayhem, and the SA chapter of the special US interest group Trump Loves Africa (TLA). Glasscock, like many in the industry, was forced to work from home during the Covid-19 lockdown. He still is in fact. This is an early extract from his weekly diary which is soon to be made into a movie by the new streaming service Nutflux

Sunday 11pm: Amped and ready for day one working at home. No more impossible deadline demands from client-service idiots. Will not have that knob-nut of a foul-breathed creative director constantly asking me to help with pro-bono work for his charity for maimed tomcats. Alarm set for 7am. Will have good breakfast ahead of 9am Zoom creative meeting.

Monday 11am: Should not have taken 100gof Diphenhydramine to help me sleep last night. Can’t find my cellphone charger. Had a weird dream about two blind Siamese cats hissing at Donald Trump. Just remembered copy with noon deadline due for TLA client for Ventersdorp spit-braai event.

Monday 11.40am: Creative director has just finished screaming at me for missing the meeting, saying one bronze Loerie does not make me indispensable. Noon deadline given for TLA copy. Going to call my dealer for a baggie of Godfather OG. Told it has a THC content of over 34%. Still can’t find charger. Monday 9pm: Where did the day go? Phew, that stuff is strong. Nailed 20 Woolies bran muffins, a giant packet of samosas and 2l of tea. Never had such bad munchies. Found charger nestling in an old G-string. Mine?

Monday 11.59pm: Finally, nailed TLA copy. A sampler which will go into my portfolio. “Don’t dump on Trump, pump for Trump, jump for Trump. Come and braai a rump for Trump.”I write better when I’m completely narcotised. This has Cannes Lions all over it. Alarm set for 6am.

Tuesday 2am: Sleep eludes me. I’m too full of

energy. Trembling slightly. Wondering if I should have sampled the entire 2l Mega-Mayhem lockdown special. The hissing Siamese cats are back.

Tuesday 3am: Have a brilliant idea for new TV ad for Easi-Glyde. We eavesdrop at a meeting of a support group called Mighty Members, where brave and liberated middle-aged men discuss the daily complexities of their often-hard relationship with their appendages. Is there enough understanding of each other’s needs, is the tenor of the conversation. They all sit in a circle and talk openly. Tears are shed. Then a box of the product is produced, with the payoff line “Something All Members Can Agree On.”I cannot understand why I am still a mid-weight copywriter when I can produce stuff like this. Sleep beckons.

Tuesday 9.20am: Late for creative brainstorm but can’t find the code for the Zoom meeting. Await call from creative director. More screaming. I threaten to leave. He says I must Foxtrot Oscar. I think I know what that means. It’s rude and unnecessary. Am going to order Uber Eats for breakfast to settle myself.

Tuesday 10am: Mexican. Italian. Chinese or that new Armenian restaurant. The pondering continues.

Tuesday 11am: Decision made. Am going Armenian. Has anyone ever tasted a cheese Borek or a Sine Kofte? I’m going for both. Tuesday noon: Motorcycle deliveryman arrives. There is a strange quasi-religious atmosphere as he takes out the packet from his pannier, bows his head reverently in greeting, gently places it on the doormat and

retreats slowly and silently. Nodding. He will be tipped.

Tuesday 12.04pm: Damn that was good. Didn’t know how starving I was.

Tuesday 1pm: Decision made. Am leaving Sodom and Gomorrah. They don’t appreciate my strategic creativity. Am going to call Horst Wolfe¬schlegel¬stein¬hausen¬berger¬dorff, the executive creative director at the Mein Kampf agency. They’re doing some excellent work in the marching uniform category and his campaign for the Furz sauerkraut brand was nothing short of astonishing.

Tuesday 2pm: Odd. His agency number is disconnected. His voicemail says he’s returned to Hellschen-Heringsand-Unterschaar in Schleswig-Holstein. Must be the lockdown. Or his odd political beliefs.

Tuesday 4pm: Creative director has just called to apologise. The day before he’d been tested for Covid. The nurse was new to the process and the swab is still stuck in his left nostril. He has to have emergency surgery. The good news is the agency has just won the public protector ad account with a R100m budget. And I’m the lead copywriter. He also tells me his government sources are adamant the lockdown won’t last longer than three weeks and bottle stores are guaranteed to stay open.

Jeremy Maggs