By Carey Finn. Lerina Bierman and Graham Deneys on tech, talent, and understanding audiences.
“My goal never changes — it’s for Carat to be perceived as hands down the best strategy agency in South Africa; in fact, on the continent,” says Graham Deneys, chief strategy officer, dentsu media brands. The reason for that is simple, he explains, referencing The Art of War: strategy without good tactics won’t get a team very far, while tactics without strategy will get them nowhere at all. “We’re obsessed with making sure that no matter what we have in our system, or what we do, strategy comes first. And I would like clients to know that about us.”
Carat was recognised as the number-one strategic planning agency in South Africa in the Agency Scope South Africa 2023/2024 rankings, a title Deneys plans to hold onto. It was named the leading media agency in overall market perception in the same study.
Succeeding in a “people industry”
Lerina Bierman, group managing director of Carat South Africa, hopes to add another title, albeit it unofficial, to the agency’s list this year — top agency for talent to work at in South Africa. “I always talk about how an agency is about people, product, and profit — and for us it is always in that order,” she says. “We really put our people first. And a big focus is around building that culture internally.”
It may be a difficult achievement to measure, Bierman admits, but it’s about attracting, and retaining, the “very best talent” in the industry. “We are a people industry,” she says simply. “So without the best people, and the best minds, and the best attitudes, you’re kind of dead in the water.”
Talent retention is something Carat South Africa already seems to do well. Deneys has been part of the agency for almost 12 years, and the broader network, through Isobar, for 14. He joined as “their Africa guy”, and played a key role in setting up hubs across the continent. Eight of Carat’s other senior team members have been with the agency since they were interns. In fact, 53 people in total who started out as interns still work at Carat today. “We’ve got this amazing group of people who we grew from the bottom up, and who just love the energy and what Carat is as a place to work, and to grow, and to learn in,” says Bierman.
Talent tends to stay
Carat formalised its internship programme in 2015, and it has “been about grassroots bringing people into the industry and training and upskilling them,” says Bierman. “And it’s not just making the agency a place where they can start their career, but giving them a place where they can continuously grow and get different category experience. You really don’t have to leave this agency or network to [develop] your career.” The industry may be characterised by churn, but Carat is not, she says.
Bierman herself is in her 18th year at the agency, having been with Carat right from the start — first in strategy, before “more of a media director role”, and then running the agency. Carat launched in South Africa in 2007, building on its heritage as the world’s first media agency, founded in France in 1966. It forms part of the dentsu group today.
The facts and figures
Carat currently employs a core team of approximately 120, with the Joburg office slightly bigger than the Cape Town location. While they bring in new people when they win new clients to service, the core base team remains constant, says Bierman. Deneys says that staff will often move between the two offices, supported by the agency as they serve clients across different regions.
Standard Bank had just been onboarded when we spoke to Carat, but other big names on the client roster include: Heineken Beverages, serviced by a bespoke unit called Red Star; Vodacom; Beiersdorf; Pep; Mastercard; the Gates Foundation (another recent win); Godrej; and TikTok. The agency reported billings of just over R2 billion out of South Africa last year. It is Level 1 BBBEE, and 51% black owned, with 35% black female ownership.
Tech to take consumer understanding forward
Carat has what Deneys describes as “a significant footprint” in Africa, with representation in 28 markets, 11 of which are Carat-owned agencies. A number of Sub-Saharan hubs are run from South Africa for their key regional clients. “The biggest project for Africa right now is the expansion of our tech stack into those markets,” says Bierman. This includes the rollout of their Merkury Media tool.
When dentsu came into the picture (through a merger with Aegis Media in 2013), they brought with them high-level tech enablement, says Bierman. Part of this was evolving the agency’s long-running Consumer Connection Study (CCS) — panel data made up of just over 5,000 people, and representative of 29 million South Africans — that underpins everything the agency does. The study has been taking place since 2011 in South Africa, but has a longer history globally.
“Within that data are things like attitudinal statements, demographic, and psychographic [elements],” says Deneys. “There’s a lot that we can dive into. One of the key things about Carat is that we have always been an agency that is deeply rooted in understanding audiences, and understanding people.”
Bierman describes Merkury Media as a comprehensive, data-driven media solution. “It is part of the broader dentsu Merkury platform, which focuses on leveraging first-party data, though a partnership with Telkom, giving us access to 20 million unique IDs, enriched with our proprietary CCS data, to give our teams a deeper understanding of people, thereby enhancing media planning, targeting, and optimisation,” she explains. “There is a lot of amazing tech that has come into what we do, but it’s always still on this chassis of understanding people better, and activating against people better, in a really solid, strategic way.”
Core principles remain the same
“My role is just that, to make sure that no matter what technology comes down the line, no matter what elements are changing in our industry, we make sure that we have a super powerful understanding of two things,” says Deneys. “That is: what are consumers thinking and doing — how do they experience what we are looking at? And, what is the client trying to achieve?”
This year will see Carat broadening their solutions framework to clients. “We are moving more from a product to a solutions point of view, looking at the full scope of what dentsu has to offer,” says Bierman. “[It’s about] looking at the business problems that clients have, and coming to them with fully-fledged solutions.”
Machine learning: early days, but exciting stuff
When it comes to AI, Carat South Africa employs a combination of external and in-house tools. Bierman says they make sure their teams are “the most qualified and most enabled” on applied AI, and notes that they are the only media agency that is a full Google Marketing Platform partner. To this skillset they add their own tech — what Deneys describes as “essentially an LLM that can sit on top of any data source”, to extract insights from data sets.
The agency has also been using its own competitive analysis tool, embedded with machine learning, to track and analyse points like share of spend and reach, as well as share of salience and sentiment in the market. Deneys says this has been a game-changer. “It’s been able to start making correlations between what moves a market share needle more than another element,” he says.
The tool has become predictive, too, forecasting whether a competitor’s reach, or client’s reach, will go up or down, and looking at market share as well, up to three months ahead. “It’s still early days, but we already use it on one or two clients, and it’s yielded great results so far,” says Deneys. “So it’s an exciting space.”
Carey Finn is a contributing writer to MarkLives MEDIA and MarkLives.com.
