After 100 years, FCB Africa and Meta Media come together to create HUMANTRUTH

After 100 years of building South Africa’s most iconic brands, FCB Africa officially bows out and makes room for a new chapter with the launch of HUMANTRUTH agency. An independent African marketing agency, HUMANTRUTH consolidates Nahana Communications Group’s FCB Africa and boutique media agency, Meta Media. The new outfit is a full-service, performance-driven marketing business that integrates strategy, creative and production with media strategy, planning and buying, servicing brands and businesses in South Africa.

‘This is a momentous occasion for Nahana Communications Group, bidding farewell to a 100-year legacy in FCB Africa, and welcoming HUMANTRUTH. By combining that deep experience with the incredible, bespoke work of Meta Media, we’ve created something Africa’s marketing and communications landscape has rarely seen at this scale. From here on, the possibilities before us can only be limited by our imagination – the next 100 years promise to be exciting for South Africa’s agency landscape,’ said Thabang Skwambane, CEO of Nahana Communications Group.

HUMANTRUTH leverages the creative and brand-building capabilities of FCB Africa and Meta Media’s expertise in media, audiences, data and behavioural intelligence. But the ambition goes beyond bringing capabilities under one roof. It is a different outfit, where humans are truly the operating system, both inside and outside the agency. Strategy, creative, campaigns, media planning and buying, experiences and technology are not the end product, but the ways brands build stronger relationships with human beings. The agency’s role is to understand those relationships more deeply and use that understanding to help brands grow. 

Thumiso Masoha leads the business as Managing Director. Speaking at the launch of HUMANTRUTH, Masoha said, ‘This is Day One of HUMANTRUTH – an agency built for the future of the African marketing industry. We are bringing together integrated strategy, creative and media because people do not experience brands in separate disciplines. They experience one brand, across ideas, platforms, culture and conversations.’

Masoha continued, sharing the agency’s philosophy, ‘We are bringing something different to the industry, using the very building blocks that have made our country’s marketing landscape one of the best in the world. The unit of work may be the deliverable, measurement metrics may be the outcome, but the true unit of value of our work is the shift in the relationship between the brand and the human. We want to change what growth for clients looks like by asking better questions and using human understanding to create work that moves people and grows brands.’

HUMANTRUTH’s long-term ambition is to build a marketing company for the next 100 years, putting forward ideas, intelligence, intellectual property and mar-tech platforms built in Africa, and effective beyond the continent. For clients, this means bringing strategy, creativity, media, experience, intelligence and technology closer together around the business and the people it needs to reach. 

With FCB Africa and Meta Media’s chapters now closed, HUMANTRUTH begins its own – Day One starts now.