Insights on digital,
strategy, and South Africa.
Strategy, platform behaviour, South African consumer culture, and AI. Written from the front line, not the sidelines.
Your phone is vertical. Your content is not.
Most brands are still producing landscape content for a portrait world. The brief has changed. The production hasn't.
23 May 2026Meta just passed Google in ad revenue. Here's what that means.
For the first time, Meta's advertising revenue has overtaken Google's. The implications for how South African brands allocate media budgets are significant.
16 May 2026SA brands are drowning in data and starving for humanity.
More dashboards. More metrics. More reporting. And somehow, less connection. The data obsession has produced a generation of brands that know everything about their audience and feel nothing like them.
15 May 2026TikTok is not an entertainment app. It's a shop.
TikTok Shop is live and growing. South African brands are still treating TikTok as a place to post dance videos. That gap is the opportunity.
14 May 2026Amapiano went global. No brand strategy built that.
Amapiano is now a global genre. No marketing budget did that. Understanding why should change how South African brands think about culture.
14 May 2026Everyone has an AI tool. Almost nobody has an AI strategy.
ChatGPT subscriptions are up. AI-generated content is everywhere. Actual AI strategy — the kind that compounds and creates competitive advantage — is rare.
13 May 2026Why South African brands produce content nobody asked for.
The problem isn't budget. It's not even talent. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of what content is for.
June 2025Influencer strategy in South Africa is done backwards.
Most SA brands start with the influencer and work backwards to the brief. That's why most SA influencer campaigns feel like paid posts — because they are.
May 2025AI does not replace strategic thinking. It exposes the lack of it.
If you can't brief a human strategist, you can't brief an AI. The tool doesn't fix the thinking problem.
April 2025What brands get wrong about South African audiences.
South African consumers are not a monolith. They're not "the township market" or "the middle class" or "the youth". They're specific people with specific contexts.
March 2025Turns out, it was never fong-kong.
Chinese products in South Africa were never just cheap copies. That framing missed the point entirely — and cost brands a decade of insight.
April 2025From fong-kong to global giants: what Chinese innovation actually looks like.
The brands that dismissed Chinese manufacturing as low-quality are now watching BYD, DJI, and Huawei reshape entire industries.
March 2025