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DIGITAL ADVERTISING: SOUTH AFRICA
The dichotomy of digital in 2021: an industry galvanised by Covid-19
The stakeholders in the digital marketing ecosystem need to pull together to face its challenges and capitalise on opportunities, writes PAULA HULLEY.
With more than 346 million new internet users coming online globally, 2020 opened up the digital gates – including access, interactivity, and engagement. This phenomenal growth resulted in the equivalent of 10 years’ innovation in a mere six months.
Local publishers saw a surge in monthly traffic, with News24, Fin24, the Citizen and Business Insider showing a month-on-month increase of more than 50% in unique browsers over the height of lockdown as we searched for credible updates in real-time online. This was combined with radical bursts of a global, collective energy that saw historical structures and ideologies being re-evaluated and recalibrated, redefining almost everything we know, even if we cannot fully articulate these monumental changes just yet.
Our industry has been faced with equally significant challenges, and as the obstacles (and opportunities) of last year still hang in the air of this one like a thick fog, we find ourselves asking myriad questions about the nature of our businesses and personal lives: Do we move our business completely online or keep our physical space as our primary customer touchpoint? Do we bring all our staff back to HQ or remain a predominantly work-from-home business? Do we stop using third-party data completely and move it all to first-party? Do I keep my career path linear or do I specialise and branch out into an expertise-driven field?
In my experience, and as we build the bridge to better fortunes out of the year that was, the answer is in fact to choose both.
Paula Hulley
As Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Global CEO David Cohen so aptly puts it, “Our ability to meet the very large changes ahead depends on how much we are willing to rise to the occasion. We can’t shrug and go back to business as usual. As an industry, we must reset our mindset. We need to remind the world of all that the ad-supported internet has provided – and continues to provide. The endless drumbeat of negativity about tracking, privacy, fraud and fears of Big Tech will continue in 2021. When naysayers shout, ‘What good is digital?’ the answer is: plenty. The free and open web that helped us all get through 2020 is indispensable.”
NAVIGATING DISRUPTIONS
Some of the most notable disruptions from the IAB Global Brand Disruption Report that we can expect to navigate locally in the year ahead include:
1. The fastest-growing brands of
2021 will be store-less, data-rich, live, participatory, entertaining, localised and streaming.
2. Small brands will continue to
gain market share. All the trends in production, distribution, retailing, and marketing make small brands more competitive against large brands.
That said, big brands’ scale, recognition and trust still give them significant advantages. 3. You cannot delay grati cation.
With Walmart and Amazon competing to make two-hour delivery the norm
in major markets globally, delivery partnerships for rapid fulfilment are now essential for all brands. In what ways will this play out in South Africa in the year ahead? 4. How do I engage thee? Let me count the ways. While the goal of marketing remains ‘create a customer’, the way to do so is through participation via ongoing communities, social selling, live virtual events, classes and other forms of active involvement in the brand – tactics that will experience hyper growth as Covid-19 propels them into the mainstream.
5. Make it streamable, make it shoppable, and make it fast.
Media advertising will increasingly focus on driving participation in live events. Successful publishers, brands and experience providers will partner to create live experiences and enable shopping directly.
The growth of free, ad-supported, streaming TV will boost the usage of shoppable media.
6. Brands must be data companies that make things, not the other
way around. Consumer-facing companies cannot remain competitive without growing their first-party relationships and first-party data.
LET CHANGE BRING US TOGETHER
“Change will happen at a dizzying pace, and it will be happening everywhere at once – from privacy and policy decisions to addressability and attribution across every imaginable device, to the convergence of video and commerce in consumers’ living rooms, to an unstoppable drive for diversity across the industry,” continues Cohen. “This is not the year to go it alone. More so than in any year in recent memory, 2021 is a time when the entire ecosystem – publishers, ad tech, agencies, and brands – must come together to make sense of it all.”
At the IAB we call this the ‘big tent’, with our membership crossing
all marketing, media, platforms, ad technology and marketing technology segments to identify relevant growth opportunities and deliver cross-purpose solutions. Whether solving for brand safety, viewability or benchmarking online ad spend in South Africa, it is the uniting of all the various industry stakeholders that enables the IAB to empower the media and marketing industries to thrive in a digital economy.
“We must reset our commitment to working together as an ecosystem,” says Cohen. “We must park our egos and our pride of ownership at the door and pull together. The most challenging industry problems we face – crossscreen measurement; identity resolution; balancing privacy, personalisation and safety; and more – won’t improve unless we all work together. Ready or not, 2021 is here. When the industry looks back at this moment in 10 or 20 years, we won’t remember what ended; instead, we’ll remember what started. This is our moment. What we make of it is up to us.”
Sources: DataReportal, July 2020; ITU, 2019 IAB 2020 Global Brand Disruption Report
Paula Hulley joined the IAB SA as CEO on 1 July 2018, with more than 15 years of experience in building brands and consumer-engaging experiences. She joined digital agency Gloo in its first year of inception, going on to become MD of the Cape Town office and then MD of the integrated business, Gloo@Ogilvy, post the merger with Ogilvy in 2015. Hulley then became head of innovation and digital for Ogilvy Cape Town.
Embracing the coddiwomple
With the future an uncertain destination, Relativ Media finds purpose in the journey.
C oddiwomple: “To travel in a purposeful manner towards a vague destination.” The past 12 months have brought with them a sequence of unexpected challenges to both business and families alike, teaching us several crucial life lessons.
Change is inevitable and comes with myriad scary unknowns, but it also delivers opportunity for those who embrace the challenge of their immediate surroundings and circumstances in order to focus on the road ahead, adjusting course as needed along the way.
The media industry has always craved collaboration, innovation, knowledge sharing and partnerships that are trusted, even more so through
Covid-19. In the past we were all so busy responding to either client or agency – to achieve more reach with less budget, more innovation with no time, more digital with no creative – that we didn’t often give ourselves the space as an industry to find ways to do the undoable.
Relativ Media identified with these needs and created a space for real engagement among industry experts, opening their virtual doors to the industry through The ‘Relativ Room’, a bimonthly platform for all agencies and client partners to debate hot topics, stress points and potential obstacles faced by the industry. Through collaboration and an opening up of communication for all to have a voice, not only are we learning from each other, but we are also sparking those passion points again. Is programmatic DOOH going to be a hit or miss? What process do clients follow when deciding to select one vendor over another? Are shoppers still identifying with brands through ecommerce vs bricks and mortar engagement? Are media agencies collaborating within their teams and driving the best results for clients through truly integrated strategies across all channels?
With the recent mobility reports showing an over-performance of 8% on the norm of baseline residential traffic and only a -4% on workplace traffic, we can identify that the way traffic is moving has changed somewhat; however, the levels are very similar to those shortly before our first lockdown. Relativ Media has used this past year to not only rebase and rethink but also expand. With bigger and bolder iconics on highways, the rights to Uber South Africa, and a growing network of super regional and regional malls across the country, Relativ Media can now assist brands with shopper engagement en route and through to point of purchase.
We feel that investing in data through ROAD and Broadsign, while expanding our DOOH offering in key locations, has been pivotal in the immediate industry need, and the results from OMC speak for themselves. We have geared ourselves for the most personal and targeted consumer journey placement we have ever had. Growth is possible when you have the right people and are willing to learn from each other, supporting each other from start to finish.
And who’s to say things should go back to the way things were? Dropping the barriers in the boardrooms, asking all the ‘silly’ questions, learning from each other – it’s all completely possible now that we have merged the human experience with our newfound digital availability. So, while the initial destination of choice might not have been reached and the coddiwomple continues, we can only speak to where we are and learn from where we’ve been.
