Month: July 2021

Dashni Vilakazi, Managing Director at The MediaShop Johannesburg encourages companies to take a hard look at their own accountability and corporate culture.

There are many factors that could be protecting your house from coming down and not achieving real business results. I would venture that accountability and corporate culture would be two of these. Whether you’re leading a small team or a full company, the power to deliver and exceed key results really does matter and accountability is key.

A business’s corporate culture and spirit are major factors leading the accountability movement, it makes results possible and sustainable. Winston Churchill once said, “We shape our buildings and then these structures shape us” – this is indicative of the powerful resonance a good quality performance management process can deliver when seeking good results.

I believe that it should also be every employee’s ethical responsibility to take control of a certain amount of business ownership to really understand the issues at hand and the desired results.

As a media agency, clients hire us as the experts to achieve their objectives and it’s our responsibility to realise these and then weigh up the results accordingly. Once achieved, it’s time to stretch accountability in yourself and your team to adjust the end game and magnify those results even further.

How does this impact the culture when you communicate business objectives to the team? When both parties are in synergy and have a good understanding of the company’s objectives, behaviour and actions combine to steer demonstrable ownership, motivation and engagement.

The practice of partnering with employees to define key results timeously and positively also impacts a company’s ownership culture. When the process and result is congruent, there is a systemic response that compounds trust, aggregation of ownership and a clear sense of accountability. An ownership and response culture then begins.

Engagement with employees is often overlooked but your frontline team should never be excluded as they need to be aware of key objectives so that they can shape the customer brand experience, which will positively reflect on the bottom line.

Sometimes however, this can go awry. A disconnect materialises when the performance management process fails to link up the macro key objectives to an individual’s key performance indicators in an understandable and customised method.

Accountability must be tracked consistently through weekly and monthly tracking metrics that presents a triage in the dashboard of delivery. This enables the employee’s productivity to run in tandem to the macro business objectives. Every piece of work should be connected to the company’s organisational imperatives. Repetition is vital until the message reaches home.

When strength and tenacity is injected into a muscularly strong management process that is being tracked consistently, it allows for adjustments to be tailored more easily to address a changing business environment. This will positively and proficiently impact action.

When the key primacy for results change, so should the company’s tactics. The resultant effect of not modifying these dashboards and project plans immediately, drives experience dissonance from team to customer, allowing the big bad wolf passage into your structure.

Engagement across the whole value chain when leading this adjustment is so critical as it supports the value system of trust and partnering with your team. Ownership, greater engagement and leadership will drive better management control for resolving business achievements.

To maximise business efficacy, defend and protect your company’s vulnerability - create an authentic open-door culture that speeds up the ability to solve problems and deepen real engagements.

Protect your house from the big bad wolf and cement your brick force structure so solidly so that he cannot even get in through the chimney of discord.

By Muhle Hlabano, Business Unit Manager at The MediaShop

We all know that 2020 was a disruptive year due to the Covid 19 pandemic. Varying Lockdown Levels resulted in a contracted SA economy, a significant drop in advertising spend and several sectors completely shut down, not unlike what we’re experiencing now during adjusted Level 4.

Last year, most sectors operated online, and many began the move to work from home. This shifted a lot of consumer behaviour habits and media consumption patterns as people lived, shopped, worked and entertained themselves differently. Behaviours that would have taken years to change literally happened overnight.

Advertisers had to adjust their marketing strategies constantly to adapt to this new norm, and according to AC Nielsen and IAB, the total ad spend for South Africa in 2020 was just over R41 billion, based on rate card values. This represents a 7% decline overall due to the pandemic and lockdowns interruptions.

Table 1. Spend Report 2018 -2020 Growth Rates

Sources AC Nielsen and IAB

The real decline is actually greater as these amounts reported do not account for the discounts on rate card rates negotiated. The fall was noted across all ATL (above the line) media channels with the exception of TV that flat lined and digital which posted a significant growth of 21%.

The growth in digital is an indicative shift in most strategies by advertisers aligning their marketing efforts with the shifts in consumer media habits. Where did most of the ad spend in digital go? From table 4 below you can see that paid search and social made up 75% of the digital spend.

Nielsen and IAB

Table 2. Digital View in South AfricaSources AC

Table 5. ATL Spend Report 2020 vs 2019 spend Variance

Sources AC Nielsen

Doing a deep dive going into 2020, ATL compared with 2019 month by month, we can see that in the first two months most media was on track to be better than 2019 but 2020 had other plans.

The first hard Lockdown had a significant impact across all media types, all reporting a negative growth in this period. Electronic media started recovering with TV becoming positive in the fourth quarter only when the country entered Level 1.

The top three categories in 2020 were FMCG with 26% share of spend, Retail (22%) and Financial Services with 18% share of spend.

And how did the top advertisers adjust?

Table 6. Top 15 ADVERTISERS

Sources AC Nielsen

The top advertiser changed with Unilever taking over from Shoprite who had been dominant in previous years although Unilever has been steadily increasing their spend over the past three years. This shows the resilience of the FMCG category during the lockdowns especially since we were all at home more and sanitizing everything in sight. This result is also not surprising considering the toilet paper shortages in the initial lockdowns…

The question becomes whether we will see this carry over to 2022 and onwards or if we’ll experience more dramatic shifts in advertising media spend patterns across media platforms?

We at The MediaShop are definitely keeping our eyes on all development.

By Lukanyo Bushwana, Strategist at The MediaShop

Covid-19 has undeniably acted as a catalyst to speed up digital adoption and introduce new trends at a rate that few could have predicted. As a result, the vast majority of marketers have refocused their digital efforts and rightfully so; you fish where the fish are.

Every impression is an opportunity. As consumers begin what is now called “revenge spending”, brands need to be more discoverable than ever before. Increased ease of movement and what people can do provide opportunities to influence consumers, where every impression is an opportunity to connect. To make use of this, marketers should use dynamic creative information, choose inventory near points of interest and understand the mobility patterns of their granular audiences.

In the past few years there has been a lot of talk about Programmatic Digital out of Home (pDOOH) and how it will revolutionize the OOH industry and change the way marketers and brands buy media space and how media owners sell OOH. Obviously, pDOOH has already been in existence in some of the biggest markets or the so called ‘first world countries’ but what’s exciting is that a few South African OOH suppliers are investing in this type of media.

So what is Programmatic Digital out of Home?

Programmatic digital out of home, refers to the automated buying, selling, and delivery of out of home advertising or ads on digital billboards and signage. With programmatic DOOH, computers automate the sale and delivery of ad content in a similar way to what you see with most online advertising. Buyers will set conditions under which they want to buy media, and when those conditions are met, ads are then purchased automatically.

Brands can achieve some real benefits when programmatic DOOH is planned and activated within an omni-channel programmatic campaign. Programmatic methods have expanded the traditional perception of OOH purely as a brand-building medium, to incorporate performance driven objectives and, in these unpredictable times, programmatic OOH could be the best advertising weapon for brands.

One of the biggest advantages of this medium is its ability to run hugely impactful ads on premium digital sites with relevance and flexibility. Creative can be adjusted at the click of a button in response to time sensitive information like sports results, breaking news or even the change in weather.

A good example of pDOOH is from an international food delivery brand called foodora. This brand used weather, time of day, and location data to drive a creative campaign effectively within a very relevant programmatic DOOH campaign. Audiences were delivered different messages at lunch and around dinnertime. They were prompted to go for a nice walk to pick up their food if it was sunny, and to treat themselves to delivery when it was raining. The restaurants suggested to them were different depending on where they were located when seeing the ad. All of this was accomplished without any additional input from foodora once the campaign had been set up. See link below to view the foodora case study.

Add to that, digital OOH is 100% fraud-free, safe and transparent due to its broadcast nature, so there’s no risk of ad-blockers, viewers skipping the ad or campaigns appearing in undesirable or unsuitable locations.

As a media strategist myself, I am very excited about this platform and can’t wait to execute brilliant creative ideas that will probably bring me my first media accolade!