By Carey Finn. Diversity, independence, and market leadership underpin the award-winning media agency’s decades-long career.
“I call it a boutique hotel, because we are consistently having to overservice,” says Dashni Vilakazi, managing director of media agency The MediaShop. “We get measured according to a client satisfaction score, so we are always having to perform above and beyond.” The agency appears to have no problem doing just that, with a long list of clients that keep coming back — and a string of accolades to boot.
Most recently, The MediaShop received the title of Media Agency of the Year in the 2024 MarkLives #AgencyLeaders Awards. Vilakazi and her team also took home Media Agency of the Year at the FM AdFocus Awards 2024, as they did in 2023. Over the years, there have been a number of other trophies in the cabinet, including MOST Media Agency of the Decade 2008-2018, and Most Awarded Media Agency at the AMASA Awards 2018.
The power of people and intelligence
How do they do it? Through their people and agency intelligence, says Vilakazi. Established in 1988 by the legendary Dick Reed, The MediaShop is an independent agency with three offices across South Africa — all run by women of colour. “There’s lots of girl power,” Vilakazi says.
Part of Park Advertising and the Nahana Group, The MediaShop boasts B-BBEE Level 1 status, with black women ownership at 45% and overall black ownership at 55.53%. The agency operates within a revenue band of R100-150 million, with nearly 150 employees across Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban.
A respected market leader
The MediaShop has demonstrated resilience in the face of global competition, emerging as one of South Africa’s most respected media agencies. The agency services a wide range of clients within and beyond the country’s borders, including Shoprite, Nedbank, L’Oréal, Famous Brands, Telkom, Sasol, MultiChoice, the Showmax Group, and SA Tourism.
Shoprite has partnered with The MediaShop for approximately 30 years, Nedbank for a decade, and L’Oréal for nine years.
“We’ve worked with big local clients for as long as we’ve existed, and that’s teed up our market leadership,” says Vilakazi. “Our market leadership has given us the opportunity to hold this dominant position in the industry, while being supported by winning [all] these accolades.”
Client retention and competitive edge
Without the support of a global network, The MediaShop has had to carve out its own path. “We’ve had to create a lot of our own intelligence, our own tools, our own competitive direction in how we service many of our clients,” says Vilakazi.
At the heart of its success is agility and a relentless focus on client needs. “The other thing is ROI,” she adds. “Those are some of the reasons why clients stay with us.”
Another key factor in client retention is the agency’s flat structure. “When a client has a concern, between the business-unit manager, the staff member, and I, we’ll step in to solve it — whatever it is,” explains Vilakazi.
Long-standing relationships further reinforce trust. Some of The MediaShop’s business-unit managers have been with the agency for many years, providing clients with continuity and expertise.
Helping marketers justify budgets
“Marketers’ budgets are always in question and on the line,” says Vilakazi. “Because I’ve come from a long marketing career, where my budgets have been taken away, or I’ve had to sing for my supper, understanding that dynamic, we try to make it easy for our marketers to prove to their C-suite why they’ve executed a certain campaign, and how this campaign has worked so well for them.”
Vilakazi, who joined The MediaShop in 2021, previously worked at Absa and Old Mutual. “We are also on the line many a time, when clients call us out for more innovation,” she says. “It’s never easy, but to survive as a local independent agency, we have to show cost-effectiveness.”
Maximising ROI in tough economic times
Economic pressures have long challenged advertising and marketing, making ROI a top priority. The MediaShop focuses on extracting value for both clients and the agency at every stage of the journey.
“We can’t continue in this tight economic pressure to charge the kind of media commissions and fees that we could have many years ago,” says Vilakazi. “We’ve kind of created a red card with clients to say we’ll share a discount with you, whatever we negotiate — we’ll help you in terms of maximising your ROI.”
Leveraging data for smarter media strategies
Key to the agency is its marketing intelligence hub, a unit of about 10 employees, including data scientists and a chartered accountant.
“This is where we leverage data and insights, it’s where we create tools that deliver the results, actual ROI to clients,” Vilakazi explains. “We take clients’ business data and overlay it with media activity, then write up actual business cases based on learnings. We tell the client a revenue story, based on the different strategies we put together for them. That’s where our distinction has started coming in.”
Managing media fragmentation with AI
“Media fragmentation is a huge challenge, but we’ve got to find ways in which we can capitalise on it,” Vilakazi continues. “For example, dynamic creative optimisation is something we’ve started trialling with a few of our clients.”
This involves real-time adjustments to ad content in a mass-personalisation ecosystem that leverages AI and machine learning. The agency is seeing marked growth in digital campaigns, which are handled by its performance unit, Lucid, comprising around 60 employees.
Championing representation in the industry
Representation — not only internally but within the broader industry — is a priority for The MediaShop. “The creative agencies showcase themselves brilliantly on the awards catwalk, and media agencies don’t do enough of that,” says Vilakazi.
To address this, the agency plans to increase its presence on jury panels and enter more strategy and creative work into industry awards. Vilakazi herself has served as a judge for the 2024 Effie Awards South Africa and was a Shortlisting Juror for the Media Lions at Cannes Lions last year. She is also a member of the IAB South Africa Influencer Marketing Committee.
These efforts, she says, help build client confidence and open doors to new business opportunities.
Carey Finn is a contributing writer to MarkLives MEDIA and MarkLives.com.
