The SCOPEN Africa Decade Awards held in Johannesburg on 24 February 2026 were meant to be a celebration – and they were. But by mid-morning, the conversation had turned uncomfortable in the best possible way.
César Vacchiano, President and CEO of SCOPEN, set the tone. Drawing on insights from SCOPEN global studies, he argued that the agency–client model is at a turning point.
“The traditional full time equivalent (FTE*) model is no longer fit for purpose,” he said. “It may help procurement compare costs, but it does not reflect the true value agencies create.”
Change, he stressed, will require trust, cultural alignment and collaboration between brands and agencies. It will not happen overnight.
That challenge was taken up by a roundtable featuring Bridget Harpur, head of marketing at Volkswagen Group South Africa; Andisa Ntsubane, managing executive of brand marketing and communications for Vodacom Group Africa; Chris Botha, group managing director of Park Advertising; Kabelo Moshapalo, chief creative officer of Ogilvy; and Carl Willoughby, chief creative officer of TBWA.
Johanna McDowell, SCOPEN’s partner in South Africa and CEO of the Independent Agency Search & Selection Company, noted that the timing felt significant. “We’ve spent a decade gathering data on how this industry works,” she said. “What we’re seeing now is that the commercial models underpinning those relationships are no longer keeping pace.”
Show me the outcome
“The world around us is changing at a rapid pace, and the way we think about remuneration needs to fundamentally change too,” said Andisa Ntsubane. “We’re constantly asked, ‘What’s the outcome?’ If we don’t have meaningful conversations about balancing resources with outcomes, we have a problem.”
Chris Botha highlighted the structural flaws in current models. “With FTE-based remuneration, you’re incentivised to employ more people — the bigger your team, the bigger your fee. Commission models create the opposite problem. So both extremes are flawed.”
Yet outcome-based remuneration is not simple. Attribution is rarely clean, and external factors matter. “Defining the ‘how’ and ‘what’ will be fascinating,” he noted.
Botha also pointed to productisation as part of the future. Agencies are building proprietary AI tools and platforms, with clients increasingly open to licence fees. “There isn’t one single answer. The future will likely be a mix.”
Accountability, but …
From the marketer side, Bridget Harpur welcomed stronger accountability but warned of risk. “If you were an agency in the motor industry right now and paid purely on outcomes, you might be in serious trouble,” she said. “But what I do like is the accountability.”
Marketing leaders are under intense pressure to justify spend. “It’s often difficult to demonstrate marketing’s contribution in financial terms. An outcomes-based model would force clearer metrics — and that’s what finance teams want.”
Khensani Nobanda, chief marketing officer of Nedbank Group and winner of the Most Admired Marketer of the Decade,made a similar point when collecting her award.
“I didn’t show a single ad,” she noted when describing her board presentation. “I showed how marketing will create value for the business going forward.”
The implication for agencies is clear: if marketers are being asked to speak the language of finance, their agency partners need to meet them there.
Who carries the risk?
For creative leaders, remuneration models shape daily realities.
“Operationally, how we’re paid affects everything,” said Carl Willoughby. “We’re under pressure to deliver more, faster, with fewer resources. Something has to shift.”
Kabelo Moshapalo framed it as a question of shared risk. “CFOs ultimately make the decisions. It’s about shared expectations. Creativity has long-term value, but we’re still incentivising it through archaic models.”
No one claimed to have the perfect solution. Hybrid structures — blending base fees, outcome incentives, project pricing and licensing — are likely to dominate, with some experimentation unavoidable. Convincing procurement, which often has little understanding of marketing goals, may be the toughest hurdle of all.
“Consistency doesn’t mean standing still,” says McDowell. “If we want sustainable partnerships, we have to be brave enough to test new commercial models — together.”
The FTE era may not disappear overnight. But in a room full of people who’d spent a decade measuring this industry, the mood was clear: the next ten years will require a different kind of conversation — and it has already started.
* Full-Time Equivalent (FTE): A unit of measurement used to calculate total labour hours across a workforce, where part-time employees are counted as a proportional fraction of a full-time role. FTE standardises workforce data, enabling more accurate assessment of staffing levels, budgets and project costs.
