The marketing and communication sector - broadening the definition of transformation

By Astrid Ascar, Chief Growth Officer, Wunderman Thompson

It’s not purely the global Pandemic that has forced all businesses to revisit their strategies and in many cases pivot or fast-track their digital transformation. Changes to the way we do business, and the way in which we service our clients and customers, were already underway. The change has been industry and sector-agnostic, but in South Africa, it has impacted some more than others. For the marketing and communications sector, the pressure to transform can no longer be purely about percentage commitments to Supplier Development, scorecards, ownership, or team diversity; it has to include transforming hitherto traditional skillsets that served a pre-digital era characterised only by marketing across television, radio, print, and out-of-home.

There’s a whole new lexicon that brands, agencies, and tech firms have to navigate - customer experience, user interface design, performance marketing, martech, VR, AR, AI, account-based marketing, social commerce, dynamic creative optimisation – it can be a minefield, but it’s also evidence that marketing will never again look the same in a business landscape that has seen the convergence of the creative, media, communications and tech and data industries. The skills future staff servicing clients will need have shifted dramatically, and they are rare, with multimedia, digital, and related tech and data skills remaining on our country’s critical skills list.

The transformation required in the local marcoms industry still has a way to go in terms of growing a robust independently-owned EME and QSE sector – it’s seen its fair share of fronting, lip service, and scorecard box-ticking – and it’s left us with significant legacy challenges. However, Supplier Development and transformation is about far more than ownership and diversity – it’s about the economy, GDP, unlocking aspirations, and staying true to the spirit of all definitions of transformation. If the larger marketing, tech, and communications players reduce their definition to purely shareholding, or purely diversity, or purely inclusion, they themselves may find their businesses left behind, clinging to very traditional but certainly outdated ways of servicing their clients, with a shortage of talent who’re able to offer integrated marketing, media, technology, and data insight capabilities. Their clients’ future customers have grown up with cellphones in their hands, and for whom media is not something one makes a conscious effort to sit down and consume - it’s part of their lives, woven into the fabric of everyday activities and socialising.

Building future-fit skillset training into supplier development and transformation programmes should therefore be a critical component of any marcoms sector transformation effort. It should be about ensuring sustainability for all marketing and communications players; and ensuring that outdated operating and revenue models also adapt appropriately to reflect the seismic shifts that have occurred.

As an industry, we need to do our part, not only to address the imbalances of the past by transforming the broader industry but also to safeguard the future of all marketing and communications businesses. If the marcoms sector embraces the word ‘transformation’ in its broadest sense, across ownership, diversity, inclusion, and forward-looking skillset and capability-building, it positions for future sustainability and relevance, and that would be a win-win for all.