Relevance is crucial to success in advertising

With the upsurge of global brands entering the South African market, and vying for prime marketing space with local competitors, the advertising industry looks to grow upwards of R 48 billion by the end of 2023.

Showing a fixed growth rate since 2017, OOH (Out of Home) advertising continues to attract a higher percentage share of advertising spend in the country, compared to other segments such as print. Mass media, and specifically radio as a medium, also continues to remain strong in terms of reach with almost half of the population – 22.4 million listeners – tuning in on an average day across the country.

So, how do brands elevate themselves to reach their target audience? According to Irina Vlad, Managing Director at Ivie Media, ‘In a highly congested and competitive advertising market, targeted awareness through dynamic creative is key.’

She adds, ‘Dynamic creative as a principle is all about relevance, and relevance is all about personalisation. We achieve personalisation through data-driven strategy.’ Using dynamic creative in advertising – whether radio, OOH or TV – allows a brand to speak to its audience in the way that they want, providing consumers with more reactive and relevant content. Traditionally, platforms like OOH have been known to enable a brand to tell a story, however, with dynamic creative, the story or message can be tailored to the moment, to the location and the context. In radio, this is achieved by making sure advertising creative matches the hour and audience it is flighted to on air.

‘Accumulating, interpreting and utilising data is the golden thread of any successful advertising campaign. If a brand is adapting or building their strategy based on their customer insights, wants and needs, they’ll be creating awareness in the right place, at the right time and with the right people; essentially ensuring their invaluable marketing spend is used wisely,’ adds Bianca Uys, Commercial Director at Ivie Media.

With this data-driven, dynamic content approach, the Ivie Media team was tasked to support South African FinTech, Lulalend in achieving their marketing goals on radio: ‘We enlisted Ivie Media to support us in building brand awareness and education of our offering in Gauteng and the Western Cape. Those provinces where campaigns were run saw an increase of 12% application volume compared to provinces where campaigns were not run,’ says Tom Stuart, CMO of Lulalend.

A relatively new agency having launched in 2020 during the global pandemic, Ivie Media is a 100% women-owned boutique media agency. ‘At Ivie Media, we want to ensure that we’re accessible to all businesses – not only financially, but in terms of the needed guidance and expertise they may not afford elsewhere. We consider ourselves an extension of our clients’ businesses and apply our strategies – such as dynamic creative – across the board,’ concludes Vlad.