A quiet paradox plays out across boardrooms in South Africa. Paid media, one of the single-largest line items in most marketing budgets, receives the smallest slice of executive attention.
Creative concepts attract the spotlight and, if we are honest, the oohs and aahs and extended debates. Media? “Can we cover that in the last 15 minutes please? We are running over.”
This isn’t about territory or ego. It’s about simple economic logic. You would never spend the most amount of money on something you give the least amount of attention and scrutiny, unless, of course, that something has quietly become so familiar that we’ve stopped seeing its strategic depth.
Walk with me for a moment.
Surely no CFO would dream of signing off a R50-million capex project after a cursory glance at the final slide. Yet this is what businesses routinely do with money that touches consumers where they live: in their homes on their TVs, in the palms of their hands, in their cars through the radio, on billboards at airports and along the highways that people commute on every day.
Not a rant or tirade
Sometimes these so-called touch points become actual landmarks such as: “Let’s meet at the big billboard on So-and-So Drive”.
Because paid media infuses itself so deeply into the lives of consumers, we track real behaviour at scale, not just surveys with a representative panel. We see first-hand the patterns before focus groups even book the boardroom. Yet despite this, we are often asked to summarise what we do in the time it takes to finish a decaf latte.
This isn’t a big rant or tirade. Rather, it is an observation that represents an incredible opportunity for brands. Because, you see, when media strategy is finally invited into the conversation earlier, not as an executor but as a genuine strategic partner, something fundamental shifts.
The discussion moves on from “where should we place the ads” to “how does media move in the world the customer inhabits, to elicit a gainful response for the business?”
Texture and reality
When this happens the CMO is no longer just optimising vanity metrics, they’re understanding the texture and reality that fuels the value-exchange between customers and the brand in daily life, in the micro-moments where their brand interacts with customers, in the exact points where preference can tip into purchase or where loyalty can progressively grow.
What we’ve observed from brands that treat media as a strategic business partner is that what might have started as a media review shifts into a business conversation, one that has impact on fiscal planning, product range prioritisation and even menu design.
The marketing director doesn’t walk away with an “optimised plan”, they walk away with the kind of data-backed strategy that will empower them to motivate the board to defend, or even grow, their budget; even in the difficult times we’re experiencing currently.
This is not because the media is cheaper or flashier, but because it proves that it understands the customer in ways no one else in the room does.
‘Sticky’ creative
To shed light on a missed opportunity that businesses can profit from, at Connect through our 2025 Attention Study with Amplified and Dr. Karen Nelson-Field, we found that in today’s world where people are switching between platforms in a matter of minutes, it’s the platform architecture that dictates how long users stick around to view content within them, despite how ‘sticky’ the creative may be.
We tested brand, retail, social media and digital creative, and people exhibited platform-specific patterns of Active Attention, Passive Attention and Drop-Off, even when creative told great stories.
This is not a departure from what the industry knows, but it deepens our knowledge with observations of South Africans engaging with ads from some of South Africa’s favourite brands.
The simple truth we arrived at after this study was: Media sets the rules. Creative wins within them. So, when we focus on storytelling and creative executions before we understand where we should tell the story, in which contexts and to drive which response, we set creative up for failure and the business loses out too.
Media sets the rules. Creative wins within them.
In a market as complex and cost-conscious as South Africa, data is not gold. It is oxygen. And media strategy, done with depth of insight and tactical prowess, is one of the few disciplines that breathe it in real time.
Missing growth levers
We are not guessing behaviours, we are measuring and optimising in real-time, at scale, across every platform and through every execution.
Now, when you think about this: when this rich data stays locked into the tail end of an agency’s final presentation deck instead of being stress-tested with the CMO from the outset, everyone loses. The brand misses growth levers. The board misses the full picture. The agency loses its place at the main table and becomes a supplier instead of a revenue-generating partner.
Forward-thinking marketers are flipping the script, and it’s very encouraging to be part of the journey. They bring media strategy into the room while the business challenge is still being defined, not after creative has presented.
Better business
They don’t do this simply for better media plans, they do it because it is better business. The question shifts from “how do we reach more people” to “how do we grow in this competitive category, in a flat economy?”
They see media not as a cost, but as a diagnostic tool and performance accelerator.
The question every South African CMO should ask themselves right now is this: “If one of my largest investments is the one I spend time on the least, what else might I be missing?”
‘If one of my largest investments is the one I spend time on the least, what else might I be missing?’
The data, the insights, the strategic advantage are already in the room. But they don’t need to show up for a few minutes at the end of the agenda. What I’m inviting you to do, is to bring them upfront and see your biggest marketing investment work even harder for your bottom line.
Bongi Mvuyana was recently promoted to strategy partner at Connect, part of The Up&Up Group.
