By Carey Finn. Edison Media has specialised in reaching premium consumers for nearly 40 years.
“At the highest levels of wealth, signals frequently become quieter,” says Duan Coetzee, CEO and founder of Edison Media. “Substantial wealth is frequently understated and outwardly invisible. In our experience, the person with the greatest means in the room may be the least interested in proving it through obvious logos or ‘status’ symbols.”
This can make marketing and premium products and services a challenge: campaigns designed around stereotypes of wealth may impress aspirational consumers who cannot actually afford them, while coming across as “painfully inauthentic” to the intended audience.
Coetzee has the experience to back up his claim: Edison Media — the sister company to AdMakers International — has been working with upmarket brands since its establishment in 1989. Current clients include work for BYD, Riva Yachts and the Ferretti Group, as well as numerous high-end residential projects. They also have previous experience with the likes of Ferrari, Learjet, Maserati, Porsche and Rolls-Royce, as well as General Motors brands and a number of other top-of-class names.
The South African agency, which has a staff count of 19, handles “anything from early strategic involvement to product positioning, defining target markets both in terms of income and geography, developing buying triggers and signals, campaign development, monitoring and reporting, and media planning and buying,” says Coetzee. But the scope of their client sector is deliberately narrow: no FMCG, ever, he says. Instead, the agency focuses on banking and finance, insurance, automotive, private aviation, marine, luxury real estate, and travel/hospitality — and “other categories where trust, discretion and brand stature matter more than indiscriminate reach”, he adds.
The sector that doesn’t do surveys
A stumbling block for many agencies targeting the uppermost parts of the market is that they are not “researchable” via typical means, asserts Coetzee. The wealthy “simply won’t be ‘cornered’ for 30 minutes answering either qualitative or quantitative research questions,” he says. For Edison Media, this has meant meeting — and understanding — potential clients where they are, and then delivering on their briefs.
“Luxury is not simply an income bracket,” says Coetzee. “Nor can the world’s wealthiest consumers be isolated by selecting ‘high household income’ from a media-planning platform. At the higher end of the market, conventional research begins to fail, because the audience becomes too small, too mobile, too international and frequently too private to register meaningfully in mass-market research.”
Coetzee points to recent SARS assessed-taxpayer data, which shows that nearly 2 million people reported annual income before deductions of more than R500,000 in the 2024 tax year, or about R42,000 per month. Though one of the highest income brackets on paper, that does not make all of those people wealthy, quite the opposite, says Coetzee.
“It demonstrates how quickly the addressable market narrows before one has even begun looking for people capable of purchasing something as ‘basic’ as a new vehicle, not even mentioning a Ferrari, a private jet, a superyacht or a private or holiday residence,” explains Coetzee. “The person earning R42,000 per month and the individual controlling a multinational family office may both appear inside a platform’s ‘affluent’ audience. Commercially, however, they occupy entirely different worlds.”
“Volume may be almost meaningless”
By Coetzee’s count, AdMakers International has received over 100 International Property Awards for their high-end development marketing globally. While they historically haven’t talked about them much, “those awards are more than ornaments in a reception area,” he says. “They recognise the ability to position and market developments to affluent purchasers across different countries, cultures and currencies.”
“Mass-market media planning traditionally rewards scale: more impressions, more clicks, more leads and a lower cost per acquisition,” says Coetzee. “But when selling a private aircraft, superyacht, branded residence or sophisticated wealth-management service, volume may be almost meaningless. A thousand unqualified enquiries are not necessarily more valuable than one credible introduction.”
With that in mind, Edison begins with a different question, says Coetzee. “It’s not: how many people can we reach, but where does this brand earn the attention and trust of the people who can genuinely buy it?” The answer, he continues, may involve television, premium print, selected digital environments, private networks, specialist events, carefully chosen outdoor locations, aviation and marine media, or programmatic targeting informed by geography, behaviour and first-party intelligence. “The channels change, but the discipline does not,” he says.
“Edison Media does not understand wealthy consumers because it has commissioned reports about them,” says Coetzee. “We understand them because, for nearly four decades, the group has been entrusted with finding them — and persuading them to buy things most people will never be in a position to consider.”
Carey Finn is a contributing writer to MarkLives MEDIA and MarkLives.com.
