The story of digital advertising in South Africa

What year did you start your career in digital advertising? 

In 1995. Although, it wasn’t called “digital advertising” back then. In fact, my first business was called Jouissance and my second was called Cyberforce. So, yeah, we were on our own mission at the time. 

Why digital, considering it wasn’t a “thing” yet? 

I wish I could say I had the gift of foresight, but honestly, it just seemed cool to me, and having graduated with a philosophy degree, the job offers weren’t pouring in. The web seemed like a geeky, sci-fi thing to get into, and one thing led to the other. 

In those early days, what did digital advertising look like? 

It looked like building websites. This was before display advertising, before Google, long before social media. So, the only way for brands to have a presence online was to build a website, and that’s what we were convincing them to do. And online games. Boy, did we build a lot of shitty online games! 

What were the challenges you faced back then? 

For starters, no-one believed the internet was going to be as big and revolutionary as it has been. A lot of people just thought it was something for computer people – they didn’t see the massive consumer potential. The whole idea of e-commerce struck a lot of people as ridiculous. I can recall vividly being assured by various clients that “no-one will ever buy clothes on the internet” or “no-one will ever give up reading the Sunday Times”. 

In South Africa, we also took a really long time to make internet access affordable to the average person. I was still connecting on a dial-up modem at the turn of the century and it cost a fortune. A lot of ISPs got extremely rich. 

How do those early challenges compare to the ones we face today? 

I think the advent of AI has a lot of parallels with the advent of digital. Same hype. Same insane stock prices. Same proliferation of “experts” all claiming to know how it’s going to work out. And same sense that everyone is talking about it, but few are really doing it.

I think digital marketing has, as predicted by many of us, become the dominant force, so the challenge is no longer persuading clients to spend money on it but rather to bring the same levels of creative integrity to the work. 

What are the biggest mistakes brands have made in the digital space?

First, they have adopted digital way too slowly. There are still lots of companies out there with massive “digital transformation” projects steadily failing. The analogue world put up a hell of a fight. 

Second, I’d say wasting a lot of money on fraudulent ad views. No-one has taken the criminal nature of the digital advertising ecosystem seriously enough and they are now so far through the looking glass, they can’t backtrack. 

The web seemed like a geeky, sci-fi thing to get into, and one thing led to the other

—  Jarred Cinman

What trends did everyone think were going to be huge but never went anywhere?

Oh, too many to list! The obvious ones like NFTs and the metaverse spring to mind. But in the early days of the web, there was a tendency for everyone to try to build the “ultimate portal” in every category. The ultimate pet portal. The ultimate sushi portal. The ultimate glue portal. In the end, Google came along and made the internet so modular that you didn’t need the ultimate landing page for every topic under the sun, and AI is about to permanently defeat this trend. 

What are your most memorable examples of digital advertising and marketing in South Africa? 

The first website we built for Nando’s in the 1990s is still a high-water mark in my career because it was the first real example of translating an offline brand into an online world — and doing it with immense digital literacy. We really were using the absolute cutting-edge technology of the time but with deep creative nuance. 

The second thing I remember is building a site when Cape Town was running out of water where people could close a tap by sending a tweet. We got this crazy science guy to build us a Twitter-linked tap on a webcam that closed a tiny bit every time someone used our hashtag. We did eventually close it. (By the way, it was running on a closed water system, so we weren't actually pouring scarce water reserves down the drain.) 

Would you say that digital has been exclusive or inclusive for South Africa? 

I think mobile has brought an enormous number of people into the digital ecosystem and huge credit should go to Vodacom and MTN, in particular, which have connected the majority of South Africans to the internet.

That said, there is a vast difference between using WhatsApp and fully participating in the digital world, and so there are still deep divides in our economy, going far beyond whether they have internet access, obviously. 

I would say a lot of the early ideals of the internet have proved to be utopian and it’s done as much harm as good. From fake news to depressed and bullied teenagers to a concentration of digital wealth in a tiny number of white, Western men’s hands, this is not the cyberspace William Gibson or Nicholas Negroponte imagined. 

If you knew in 1995 what you know now, what would you do differently? 

I would have paid way more attention to social media when it came around. I was so tied up building websites that I kind of missed the profound impact of the internet becoming a two-way medium. And I should have bought Yahoo shares and 10 bitcoin when they first went on sale. 

What excites you about the world of digital? 

All my excitement at the moment has shifted to AI. I feel like I’m living in a science-fiction movie, and I experience my mind being blown on a daily basis. I am also deeply worried about how AI will impact society, business, politics and human existence, which is different to how I felt about the internet. To me that was all just positive, so in that way, I was as idealistic (and young) as everyone else. 

The big take-out: The biggest mistakes brands have made in the digital space is adopting digital way too slowly and wasting a lot of money on fraudulent ad views