Thousands of people flocked through the doors at the Sandton Convention Centre for the 2019 edition of Leaderex. With 350 sessions, which included debates, discussions and presentations, attendees were spoilt for choice (there were almost too many things happening!)
Combine this with the many exhibitors present (including a stand for The Media Online), and the result was a jam-packed two days.
Here are some quotes from and video interviews with speakers at the gathering, summarising their presentations and topics.
Brett Morris, CEO of FCB Africa: Creativity as the currency of the future
“Creativity is going to become increasingly more important as we get into the future, and it always has been an incredibly powerful asset for brands and for life in general.”
“If you want to thrive as a creative business, you need critical thinking, the leadership, and collaboration that will bring the best disciplines together.”
“As brands evolve over time, less and less differentiation exists. So distinctiveness is actually much more important than differentiation. It’s more important to stand out, to get noticed, and have an emotional connection with people, than it is to have a unique selling proposition.”
Brett St Clair, CEO of Terraflow.AI: Beyond the hype: Putting AI into practice
“A business can really accelerate itself in increasing revenue and reducing costs by using AI in three key areas; finding customers faster and cheaper, improving internal processes and making them more efficient, and improving the customer experience.”
“You want to be in the cloud. Don’t kid yourself. From a regulatory compliance and sovereignty point of view, it’s all fine. Get yourself there.”
Rob Stokes, chairman of the Red & Yellow School of Business: Digital marketing trends that matter (and those that are delusional)
“Think creatively. The only value left in business is creative thinking. Innovation is where we deliver the value. And in digital marketing it’s the same. So many brands are still thinking in silos … At the end of the day, you need to think holistically so that you can think creatively and how different tactics work together.”
“It will frighten you as to how humans are unable to make properly-informed decisions, and most decisions are snap judgements. As marketers we can leverage that, hopefully ethically.”
“Stop wasting traffic. Have a culture of testing and learning within your organisation … Run tests and bank learnings.”
Collin Govender, group executive for shared services at Altron: How to guide your organisation through the complexities of digital transformation
“Create and deliver a new roadmap, so that people in the business can see themselves in it. Everything that you do, keep people at the centre.”
“We underestimated the need for training. Whatever you’ve got planned, multiply it by three because you will see the benefit that goes with it.”
“As you adopt these new digital journeys, you will find that you have capacity available. Resist the temptation to cut people. Retrain them, get them into a brand new way of working, and give them the opportunity to shine.”
Pierre Fouche, chief marketing officer for Southern Africa at IBM: AI and the future of marketing
“Decide on areas where you can apply AI, where you have a big data problem. Don’t overextend yourself, stick to a specific topic or area where AI will solve it.”
“It’s always difficult to know where you start. It’s not a golden bullet that can solve everything. It’s about the integration of data and getting the foundations right … From a South African perspective, it’s just to get the roadmap going, understand where you’re going, know who to partner with, and then choose your specific area that you want to focus on.”
Mike Sharman, co-founder of Retroviral: Six emerging marketing technologies that are changing the game for CMOs
“When you build a company, you basically have the lowest of lows and the highest of highs. I talk about entrepreneurship being one of the toughest drugs that you become addicted to. If you don’t talk to people close to you in your network, you’re going to get caught in that vortex of feeling you’re not doing enough and are sinking.”
“Patience and perseverance is the pathway to prosperity. Spend your time in the trenches.”
Sarina de Beer, MD of Ask Afrika: A blueprint for mapping customer journeys
“We need to understand that we maybe need to stop fussing and focusing too much on trying to find all the solutions in systems, tools, technology, and data, and take responsibility for how we interpret that data and what we do with it. It needs to probably be a bit more encompassing and it requires some kind of translatative context, especially to be more relevant to a rapidly changing consumer that is rapidly become more extremist in their day to day behaviour.”
“Employing the right people with the right skillsets, understanding the cognitive dominance that’s often situated in the person that actually writes the scripting and develops the programmes etc. and investing in good data translators are key.”
Donald Mokgale, MD of Carat Johannesburg: A blueprint for building your marketing technology stack
“As a business you have to have a marketing strategy and upon having one you need to pick from the plethora of marketing technologies which are available, which ones match your marketing strategy.”
“It’s about analysing how you as a business go to market and how you sell your products and services to consumers. Understanding how you sell your products and optimising that using technologies.”
Andre Steenekamp, operations and strategy director at Mark1 Media: Programmatic advertising: Delivering the right message to the right person at the right time
“Now programmatic is on the lips of everyone in advertising and the main reason is because we’ve become very familiar with the platforms.”
“Two of the biggest challenges to programmatic in South Africa are, one, the amount of money people are willing to spend on it … So budget is a problem … and two is the ad creative. We think we can produce one banner ad and we make it in multiple sizes and we put it out into the market, and it will bring back the results … You’ve got to create multiple sets of creative to ensure a relevant message is reaching people at the right time.”
“If you’ve got a really good campaign manager, who’s on-point and optimising, and making sure your lists of safe websites are updated regularly, then brand safety is not a concern.”
Ashleigh Wainstein, co-founder of Social Places: Decentralised marketing: How a localised marketing strategy can deliver authentic brand engagements and real ROI
“Having a localised marketing strategy makes sure that you are reaching a wider audience, and a local audience. So that you are having a unique message in each one of your stores, and it just increases each store’s and a brand’s ROI.”
“Take a phased approach to localising your marketing strategy, you can’t just do it all at once. Start off with the essential part of it, which is having your listing sorted out for each of your stores and then optimising it.”
Pierre Cassuto, CMO of Humanz: The state of influencer marketing
“Influencer marketing can be very successful or it can actually not work, it’s a fine line … Also, fraud is rife. There’s plenty of it in the influencer marketing space and it’s growing.”
“Brands should focus on audience fit with influencers … and making sure they’re a good fit from an authenticity perspective.”
“One of the key metrics people focus on in influencer marketing is engagement. As a CMO, I think it’s a bogus metric, because engagement can mean anything to anybody. But what does happen is that micro- and nano-influencers provide much better engagement rates on average than macro-influencers.”
“There are five different types of influencers, and those different types work at different parts of the marketing funnel. It’s not one size fits all, there’s no absolute answer as to which works best. It’s what works best for you based on what your objective or strategy is. They are celebrities, A-listers, B-listers, micro-influencers, and nano-influencers.”
Elizma Nolte, head of business marketing for Facebook Africa: What is the story with Stories?
“The Stories platform is so popular and growing massively because it’s a format that’s immersive, playful, full-screen and fun to interact with.”
Malcolm Ché, creative technologist at Eden Immersive: Marketing in Virtual Reality is about inviting consumers into your brand story
“Virtual reality, because it extends reality, you are able to take people further than your retail space … It’s going to allow for a far more experiential marketing campaign … It’s 360 marketing, and it doesn’t get more of an experience than being in another reality … Being able to show people your products and key brand stories that would require a whole lot of effort otherwise.”
Yaron Assabi, founder of Digital Solutions Group: 4 best practices for making mobile marketing work for your brand
“Mobile is the most pervasive and accessible medium to consumers. It’s a very personalised device and it’s a really awesome medium for advertising and marketing.”
“I’m seeing more of an understanding of mobile marketing, but there was a lack of understanding of how powerful it is. There’s a misnomer that there’s not enough industry, but that’s not the case … In-app advertising is very powerful as it can be a lot more contextual and relevant.”
Here are some pictures from the Leaderex event:
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