By Carey Finn. The managing director of OMD South Africa talks career and agency progression, plus “human Intelligence”.
“I remember when I took over as head of strategy, I had a lot of industry colleagues phoning and going: what the hell are you doing,” laughs Julio Rodrigues, managing director of OMD South Africa. “Because the agency wasn’t known for its strategy back then. And then we started competing. We started winning a few awards, we started picking up strategy across the clients that we already did planning and buying for, and we started growing.”
Rodrigues became the strategy director of OMD South Africa in 2014, a role he held for nearly three years, but his history with the agency goes back further. “I think the reason I was fortunate enough to grow strategy within OMD is that I had buy-in from key people that I had worked with over the years,” he says. “So I started bringing in strong strategic talent. And all of a sudden we went from not really being known for our strategy, to winning a number of pitches based on strategy.”
OMD South Africa retains its position as one of the largest media agencies in the country, with billings at ratecard of $520 million according to 2024 Recma data (R9.2 billion). The B-BBEE Level 1 agency employs approximately 100 media specialists, with long-term clients including McDonalds, Massmart Group, PepsiCo, and Nissan. Other big names include Diageo, a significant brand for the group across the continent, and Spar, which is part of a partnership with TBWA, where OMD manages the buying.
“Rapid career progression”
“Within OMD, I’ve had the opportunity to grow my career quite rapidly — from strategy into business management, to managing director — who knows what’s next,” says Rodrigues. He first joined the agency in 2012, moving across from Notabene, known back then as “the strategic hotshop”, where he had been part of the team that did the historical rebrand on Vodacom. Prior to Notabene, he had been at Mindshare — more on that below.
“I worked closely with some senior people at Vodacom, and we worked through what I still believe is one of the biggest and best rebrand strategies South Africa has seen,” says Rodrigues. “We had everything turn from blue to red overnight.” That got his name on the industry radar, and he was asked to move to the Omnicom Group.
“My move to OMD was to come and be the hybrid strategist across traditional and digital media, working on Vodacom,” Rodrigues explains. “From there, I went to head of strategy, then strategy director.” Aside from a short chapter at Mediamark in 2013-2014, he has been at OMD ever since.
“OMD is the kind of place where if you get your head down, and you’re willing to do the work, opportunities will open up,” says Rodrigues. “When I looked at opportunities within an agency versus a client, I think I spotted that quite early on. It’s more entrepreneurial, it’s more dynamic. It’s smaller, it’s more agile.”
Knocking until the door opens
When Rodrigues first encountered a media agency, he didn’t actually know what it was. “But I thought it looked interesting,” he says. “What got my attention was the fact that you wouldn’t be working on one specific brand; you’d be working across multiple brands, with multiple different audiences and challenges.”
Rodrigues recalls the time that Mindshare came to speak to his Honours class to recruit interns; the then Marketing Management student was intrigued. He applied, but wasn’t selected. However, the media seed had been planted, and he decided to “start his own thing”, spending the next few months building a fast-food mobile app and website. It was 2009, and Mr Delivery was “still using books” — the reasons for which he couldn’t fathom. Let’s get all the brands’ menus in one place, as a digital service, he reasoned.
Hoping to sell the concept, Rodrigues started visiting agencies and trying to get brands on board. “Door after door slammed,” he says. He even went back to Mindshare, but that door was closed too. Until, that is, their innovation department got in touch. His tenacity had paid off, and he was hired — cutting his teeth in the industry over the next two years. Ultimately MyFoods never came to be, but his time at the agency was impactful. “Mindshare taught me a lot of the fundamentals that I apply today,” he says.
Big shoes to fill
Despite an aptitude for it, management was not something Rodrigues sought out; it was something he needed to do. Following the tragic death of Gordon Patterson in 2016, Rodrigues stepped into the role of business director, taking on the agency’s Standard Bank account for South Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, including Nigeria and Ghana. It was OMD’s largest client at the time, “a very big piece of business” that no one wanted to touch because of the scale.
“I didn’t want it, but it was what the team needed at that point,” says Rodrigues. “I was fortunate in that my upbringing helped me handle that kind of pressure. Being Portuguese, being based in retail in South Africa — I’ve always worked in supermarkets, I’ve worked in takeaways, restaurants. I’ve worked across so many different areas of business with my parents and family — you kind of have to take leadership. When things are going wrong, you have to step up and own it.”
Rodrigues credits Patterson’s mentorship in his success in the role. “Luckily I had enough time with Gordon, who was very patient, very diligent in how he approached work,” he says. “His principle that you’re never too senior to roll up your sleeves and get involved was probably the key take-home I have from him.” Rodrigues remembers working with Patterson on annual strategies, on the floor, “sitting there with Post-it notes and big white sheets of paper, building the strategy with him, all of us, on our hands and knees.”
From there, the next step was Rodrigues’ current role — managing director, which he took on in 2020. “As part of the [business director role] I also got involved in pitches, and new business, and after a while, my MD moved into a sub-Saharan Africa CEO role, and they needed an MD for South Africa.”
Looking ahead, with “human intelligence” at OMD South Africa
“Over the years, we’ve had to grow,” says Rodrigues. “We couldn’t just stand still, and just be a media-buying house. We went from media buying, to media planning, then got involved in strategy, and started doing more account management, as well as specialist services such as consulting — so all of that grew over time.”
Evolution is the way forward, with the agency undergoing a rebrand earlier this year. “We’ve moved away from “Better decisions, faster”, to a new promise to our clients, which is “We create what’s next”, and I think that new positioning has helped us streamline what we need to do for them,” Rodrigues explains.
“In a world where AI is the buzzword, and automation — our systems can improve how we work and drive efficiencies — the most important thing we need to remember is there’s still the human aspect of media,” says Rodrigues. “It’s all good and well that you can plug things into tools and systems and spit out media plans, and automate reports, but without the people behind the reports, and without the people building relationships with clients, and understanding the local nuances in a market, or a client’s business objectives, you’re going to lose a lot of that knowledge that sits within someone who’s got, say, a 15-year relationship with a brand.”
Dialling up data analytics, and securing specialist areas
Rodrigues is focused on “continuing to drive growth in the right areas of the business”. He says that the agency has “substantially dialled up” their specialist area of data analytics, leveraging econometric metric modelling studies and other approaches. Specialist areas are the name of the game at present, and Rodrigues draws attention to OMD’s OOH division.
“We’re probably one of the few agencies that still has an OOH specialist department,” says Rodrigues. “There’s been lots of talk about us merging that department into media services under a media planner — which we are not interested in. We still believe that OOH requires a specialist department.” He estimates that the team manages 40-50% of the top 25 OOH advertiser investment in South Africa. “That department is really important to us.”
Developments to watch, says Rodrigues, include a new influencer specialist business, as well as the agency’s e-commerce business. OMD Transact will be merged under the group’s recently acquired Flywheel, with the rollout underway. “We just continue to evolve,” he says. “Wherever the media industry starts moving and swaying, we ensure that we are at the forefront, and if not acquiring business globally to roll out locally, then we are looking at the options locally — and continue to build specialist areas, to service our clients, to ensure they don’t need to go anywhere else.”
Carey Finn is a contributing writer to MarkLives MEDIA and MarkLives.com.
