High Five: South Africa

Covid-19 has challenged us like never before - the fear, grief, uncertainty, mask fatigue, loneliness and sheer exhaustion of it all. Halfway through 2021, as Africa’s Covid-19 vaccine rollout kicked into gear, we could all sense that better days were coming. But we weren’t there yet. So the continent’s biggest telco, MTN, set out to inspire Africans from all walks of life to play their part in taking back control. The campaign has a simple message: if each of us can put up with the hard stuff just a little longer - the masks, the social distancing, the daily struggles - soon we won’t have to. So come on, Africa. Just 'One More Push!'

I love this campaign because it’s truly South African. It uses technology as a way to overcome a cultural issue around the erosion of indigenous languages because AI and voice assistants don’t favour these languages. Shwii is essentially a platform hack where we managed to re-record directional instructions on the navigation app Waze to deliver Zulu commands to our Zulu speaking audience. It’s a celebration of language and really gives previously marginalised South African cultures a voice.

South Africa is one of the most racially diverse countries in the world. When Nissan launched their new Navara, we needed to appeal to every ethnicity, as well as to city slickers, off-roaders and everyone in between. But how do you appeal to everyone and still make it personal? With one of the most personal things of all - music. Which led to our next problem: how do you choose the perfect track for so many diverse music tastes? By partnering with Spotify, we got to choose all of their 70 million songs. We carefully created edits, designed to work with the specific BPM of all different music genres. Using Spotify’s streaming intelligence, users then had their most loved songs matched to our epic driving ad. Meaning that every person got to experience the new Navara paired with their favourite music. Talk about the perfect road trip playlist!

South Africans love rugby, and with the British and Irish Lions coming to our shores, we could finally see the world champs play again. But due to Covid-19, none of the die-hard fans were allowed at the stadiums. So we dug deep into the game-day rituals fans took part in when watching the game at home and explored them with fun, engaging, stylised content pieces. These not only got people amped for the games, but also matched the optimism of our client and Springbok sponsors, MTN.

Is there such a thing as too much football? We don’t think so. And for our client Sportingbet, we set out to prove that football fans watch very little football. Introducing a mobile site that helps you watch more football by proving mathematically that you’re not watching enough...