Our global knowledge partner – Incubeta Group – shares the factors and trends informing performance media space in South Africa. Most of SA’s paid media skills are still a few years behind the more mature markets. They were excited to team up with us to create our new Digital Paid Media online short course, which is a solid step in the right direction for anyone wanting to surpass their peers in this fast-evolving marketing discipline.

Here’s what Jonathan Gluckman, NMPi’s CEO, has to say:

Most agencies and companies are still running campaigns for brand awareness and traffic; and measuring performance on metrics such as impressions and clicks, rather than optimising for conversions and true ROI.

Performance marketing is the only way to reach the new digital-savvy customer, and it is critical that both agency and clients recognise that managing campaigns for brand awareness versus that of true performance is a vastly different skillset.

Online advertising spend globally is about to overtake traditional advertising.

Researchers estimate that marketers worldwide will spend $237 billion on online advertising in 2018. That’s about 44% of all global advertising dollars, meaning it is only a matter of time before online advertising overtakes traditional advertising (like print, radio, and television) once and for all.

In SA, it is still less than 10% of spend, but we are seeing digital media spends growing rapidly in this market as it plays catch up, meaning plenty of career opportunities for those with strong performance credentials. But the economic climate is forcing everyone to cut costs with potentially detrimental effects – as training budgets get cut, agency fees get squashed, and very often juniors are put in charge of a brand’s digital presence. The agencies that are confident in their ability to deliver can disrupt the industry by thinking of new fee structures, for example introducing that a part of their fee is based on performance.

The digital landscape is becoming more complex,

With multiple channels, multiple devices, use of first and third party data, attribution and measurement all being underpinned by technology. Business needs to become more customer-centric and use data to properly understand their customers, which is the only way to achieve the desirable state of personalisation, making messaging as targeted and relevant as possible.

And it is not stopping, as programmatic TV, digital radio, dynamic creative are added to the mix. We are already utilising and testing digital outdoor advertising for clients in Europe, all out of the Cape Town-based production hub.

In an ever complex digital landscape, specialists and specialism are required.

The digital agency of the future will utilise advanced technology which will underpin media, creative and measurement. One only has to look at Sir Martin Sorrell and S4 capital with their acquisitions of Mediamonk (dynamic creative) and then Mightyhive (tech and measurement) or ourselves, the Incubeta Group with NMPi, DQ&A and Joystick offering performance media, tech and measurement and dynamic creative.

As mentioned previously, NMPi will be providing its extensive training material for managing performance campaigns across paid search, programmatic display and paid social, via Red & Yellow.

The course material is the same material we use to train all our commercial client-facing people and campaign managers. It’s a core part of our success as the largest performance agency in the southern hemisphere. Traders who have done this course have ended up managing large-scale international ecommerce campaigns for Walmart.com, Expedia, Standard Chartered Bank, Zappos and Overstock, to name but a few of our many hundreds of clients. Imagine managing a campaign that has millions of keywords, products changing frequently, and pricing based on product marginal information. And as an agency, getting paid on achieving a Cost per Lead or Cost of Sale metric that is delivering true ROI.

Even though Cape Town is our global ops and head office, as a group we’ve been lucky in that the majority of our clients are offshore. This means our training and people need to be relevant in a global performance world. And now, the smart people who take this course, get to gain these highly-relevant and much-needed skills.

To sign up for our Digital Paid Media course, click right here!