Glenn Jeffery Reflects on South African Creativity

Economically it’s been one of the toughest years we’ve had as an industry with almost all clients cutting back on their spend, not just here in South Africa, but all over the world. The number of resources required for an integrated campaign today compared to a few years ago has increased thanks to the explosion of mediums available, however budgets have shrunk. Despite that (or perhaps because of it) we are seeing very innovative creative work coming out of the industry globally.

The solvertising trend where agencies are creating work that is more useful to consumers was big in 2015 with work like Volvo’s Life Paint by Grey London (which has just launched in South Africa) and RGA’s Hammerhead navigation not only helping consumers get around more safely but also winning big at awards festivals.

The Grey network is extremely hot right now having won 113 Cannes Lions. What made it more special was that it came from 18 different countries across 20 diverse categories. While Ogilvy won the most Lions for the festival (10 more than Grey) it was the quality of Grey’s awards that set it apart - four Grands Prix from three offices.

Off the back of that stellar performance it’s been a year of major change locally from independent South African agency to global networked agency as we joined that high-flying Grey family.

The benefit of which has been immeasurable thanks to exposure to some of the best work in the industry through the Grey offices. Also, being majority owned by WPP comes with all sorts of new metrics from creative performance to business performance so it was a year of getting to grips with how that works. By focussing on the creative, the business will come, but with profit targets set so stringently you need to be vigilant against it becoming the sole focus for the agency which is something we’ve been working hard on. We’ve learnt a lot in the past year and now it’s about putting those learnings into practice.

While we’ve had numerous account wins and some great campaigns, the past 12 months have been about restructuring the agency - which has taken a lot of planning and hard work to make sure we are prepared to make 2016 our breakout year.

I see advertising finding new ways to be more relevant in 2016. To be in the centre of pop culture alongside tech companies and musicians while at the same time doing things that are more useful to people. Cannes is a great predictor of the direction our industry is taking and by changing the Branded Content category to Entertainment and Music it’s clear that as an industry the lines are blurring. As more agency’s get it right you see a shift with musicians approaching ad agencies to be part of ad campaigns where once you’d battle to get them on board for a million bucks.

In the way of great advertising I loved Geico’s answer to the very awful YouTube pre-roll ad with its Unskippable campaign, just for its entertaining simplicity. As a medium YouTube is hugely powerful with content being watched by a massive global audience 24/7 but the pre-roll ad is the ugly sister with almost everyone skipping them. In an age where advertisers have an amazing array of mediums available to them, YouTube remains one of the most influential in terms of sheer reach so to see a brand find a way to make the medium entertaining is something I’d love to see more of.

As the industry redefines itself to keep up with the digital age there has been countless articles, debates and arguments on how to be truly “integrated”. I look forward to when we no longer speak of specialist digital roles and get the focus back to the business of storytelling and entertaining audiences. The main difference is we now have so many more interesting ways of delivering these stories to people. I think more and more agencies are not just talking about this but actually restructuring their companies to do it well.

I think SA underperformed a little this year. It prides itself in being robust and consistently punching above it’s weight creatively, however, looking at what stood out globally and what was big here you can see we have to catch up a little. In South Africa ads still look like ads, which isn’t a good thing. There were a few exceptions with campaigns like Sanlam’s One Rand Man taking a different approach and not feeling like a traditional campaign. But judging from comments coming from the industry everyone is aware of it and working to be more competitive so watch this space…