By Charles Lee Mathews. South African media and marketing leaders look at how audiences are forcing the industry to engineer understanding, not just buy reach.
South African media had a restless 2025. Audiences grew harder to reach, trust in traditional platforms kept falling, and AI began changing how people search and discover content. We asked a handful of the industry’s sharpest thinkers what innovation changed how they work. Their answers point in the same direction.
From broadcast to belonging
“Audiences became more selective, more vocal, and far less interested in being spoken at,” says says Thembeka Mabaso, CMO at mutuality-driven financial services provider glu. The brands that stood out in 2025, she argues, were those that stopped broadcasting and started building.
Mabaso points to the rise of digital-first, community-driven engagement models as the year’s defining shift. These models prioritise two-way engagement, she says. They invite audiences to shape conversations rather than passively consume. This turns platforms from distribution channels into spaces where trust is built through inclusion.
She says that in a crowded, sceptical market, community-led models offer marketers “a more human and resilient way forward”. “For those willing to build with their audiences rather than talk at them, this shift stands out as one of the most impactful media innovations of 2025,” Mabaso notes.
Content that flows
“The next innovation has to be the evolution of multimodality (already very present) into genuine liquid content,” says Charlie Stewart, CEO at Rogerwilco.
Multimodality is when a brand makes it easy for users to switch between content types — text-to-video, articles-to-audio. Liquid content goes further. Stewart notes that liquid content adapts the substance of content itself based on individual user context and behaviour, rather than switching formats.
Spotify Wrapped is a good example, Stewart argues, because it turns a user’s listening data into a personalised story. Locally, he nods to the Jamie Oliver campaign for Checkers. “The message was dynamically assembled for each customer based on their actual shopping behaviour. Each customer saw Jamie saying different things for different reasons. From a media perspective, this goes way beyond personalised ads, targeted creative or dynamic insertion,” Stewart notes.
The distinction between liquid content and personalised creative lies in semantic depth. Where dynamic ads might swap out a product image or headline, liquid content reconstructs meaning itself based on individual user journeys. In a world of AI slop, campaigns like this stand out. “While they may be expensive to produce, their return on ad spend is likely to be significant,” he says.
Attention at scale
“If I had to pick one media innovation that is truly changing how we work, it is AI-powered creative automation. Not because it makes ads faster or cheaper, but because it fundamentally changes how digital media operates and influences outcomes in the market,” says Scott Reinders, the chief operating officer at Connect, part of the Up&Up Group.
Automated, template-driven creative means production bottlenecks no longer cap scale. “We can plan for real scale from the start, knowing we can support hundreds of variations across platforms, audiences and formats without slowing execution,” Reinders says. The implications run through the entire media operation: media performance signals feed back into creative rules. Optimisation moves beyond bids and audiences into structure, hierarchy and attention mechanics. High-frequency creative refresh cycles become realistic and sustainable.
“Where this really becomes powerful for us as a group is when creative automation is combined with our proprietary access to attention data,” says Reinders. “Instead of flooding platforms with more assets and contributing to the digital landfill, we can encode proven attention principles directly into creative templates. Media planning then creates the conditions for attention at scale, and automation ensures every asset follows those rules consistently.”
This results in fewer wasted impressions, lower cognitive load for audiences, clearer brand and action signals, and better conversion efficiency over time. “When budgets are under pressure and audiences are fragmented, this matters. Media can actively shape effectiveness, not just distribute messages,” Reinders says.
“Bottom line: AI-powered creative automation, when guided by attention data and effective media planning, produces better ads, at scale, with media firmly in control of performance conditions.” While Reinders focuses on precision in paid environments, another shift is underway in how brands participate in the creator economy.
The creator model gets inverted
“Influencer marketing is not new. It has been around for a while, but for me, the best innovation I experienced in 2025 was an influencer business with a twist. The new business is called EDC Squared,” says Chris Botha, group chief executive at Park Advertising. Rather than brands issuing a single creative directive, they brief creators at scale. Brand managers receive hundreds of pieces of content to rotate and choose from, each with its own creator fingerprint. The better a piece performs, the more support it gets — and the more the creator earns.
“It’s a very smart model that gives money to the creator, and is adaptable and flexible for a modern media world,” Botha says. It speaks to a broader industry shift: moving away from rigid, pre-approved content towards dynamic, performance-driven creative that rewards what actually works in the market. It also addresses the growing gap between how brands want to show up and how audiences want to discover them. This gap is sharpest in search, where the fundamental mechanics of discovery are being rewritten by generative AI.
Engineering understanding
For Leanne Levine, local digital lead at Sauce Advertising, the most important media shift of 2025 is one most brands haven’t fully grasped yet: “where brand and location data itself becomes the media that generative engines consume, trust and redistribute.”
As search moves away from clicks towards AI-generated answers, brands can no longer just buy reach. They need to be understood and surfaced by machines. Levine calls this Generative Engine Optimisation — turning thousands of local brand touchpoints (locations, services, menus, FAQs, attributes, reviews and policies) into structured entities that AI systems can reliably ingest and redistribute across maps, voice assistants and search results, where they influence answers rather than impressions.
“What makes this a media innovation is not the technology alone, but the shift in logic. Media is no longer a placement, but a trusted data layer. Distribution happens through AI synthesis, not ad inventory. And reach is replaced by local relevance at the moment of intent,” says Levine.
This model enables what Levine calls micro and community media at scale, where individual stores or service locations become locally authoritative sources without fragmenting brand consistency. “Each location effectively functions as a small publisher within its own community, feeding verified information into the AI ecosystem.”
“It represents a fundamental shift in how media works in an AI-driven internet: from broadcasting messages to engineering understanding,” Levine says. While Levine’s work focuses on being surfaced by AI, another trend this year centres on bypassing discovery platforms entirely.
Why millions are ditching platforms for paychecks
“From my perspective, it is the rise of Substack and email-first platforms: building owned email lists, controlling audience data and monetising through paywalls, all of this against the backdrop of a growing decline in trust in traditional media,” says Siki Msuseni, founder and director at Amplified PR.
From a PR agency perspective, this shift speaks directly to changing media consumption patterns. “We are operating in an increasingly cluttered, hyper-stimulated digital world, where attention is fragmented, and audiences are overwhelmed. In that context, email marketing has quietly become one of the few spaces where brands and individuals can still capture and hold attention,” Msuseni says.
What makes platforms like Substack powerful is their ability to leverage personal delivery and trust. “Email feels personal. It cuts through noise. It allows creators and brands to speak directly to their audience, without algorithms dictating reach.”
For Msuseni, email marketing has become more than a tactic. “Email marketing has become my latest obsession, not just for its effectiveness, but for how personal and human it feels, even when reaching the masses.”
These six innovations share common DNA. Each represents a move away from rented reach towards owned relevance. The future of media, it seems, is not about finding new platforms to rent attention from. It is about engineering the conditions in which attention, understanding, and trust can be earned and sustained at scale.
Charles Lee Mathews is a senior editor to MarkLives MEDIA and a senior writer to MarkLives.com, as well as co-founder of The Writers, a writing consultancy.
