By Charles Lee Mathews. Brands are increasingly paying to reach the same people across multiple platforms. The challenge now is working out which media spend delivers new audiences, and which simply adds more frequency.
For a decade, the story sold to local marketers was that digital had won and that traditional was in retreat. People buying media tell a different story. Mass audiences didn’t leave but fragmented across screens. Consequently, brands are increasingly paying to reach the same person more than once.
“Retail media is not being funded from one place. It is pulling money from both trade and shopper marketing budgets and from the main media budget,” says René Fowler, head of integrated media operations at Juno. “As retail media networks (RMNs) build stronger brand-building and off-site options, they also start taking a bigger share of the main media budget,” she says.
“Initially, much of the spend going into RMNs came from trade and shopper marketing budgets,” says Shikaar Juglall, managing director of Performics South Africa, part of Publicis Groupe Africa. “But that is now changing. As retailers build stronger media propositions, use first-party data more effectively and extend their offering beyond owned environments, retail media is starting to compete for mainstream media budgets as well,” Juglall says
Retail media’s power play
The proof points are already trading. “Checkers Sixty60, Takealot and Pick n Pay show how retail and commerce environments are becoming important media platforms in their own right. The opportunity is significant, but the discipline has to be equally strong,” he says.
Not everyone agrees the change has reached South Africa. “Retail media in SA is still mostly a trade and shopper-marketing story, where core brand budgets have not seen a radical shift in spend to retail as yet,” says Tanya Schreuder, CEO of the media division at Joe Public.
The condition for change, Schreuder says, is access. The move “may scale if these channels open up their ecosystems, and allow brands to access consumers programmatically across all retailer ecosystems,” she says.
The pull towards retail media sits alongside a second pressure with performance digital hitting a ceiling. “You cannot optimise your way out of weak demand. You have to create demand in the first place,” Juglall says, and adds: “When brands continue to retarget the same audience pools, in the same environments, with similar messaging, the efficiency eventually starts to decline.”
👉 Read more: Retail media networks: A double-edged sword for brands and retailers (May 2025)
Performance media falls flat
The symptoms are becoming more apparent. “The pressure on ad fatigue is real, where you could refresh creative every four to six weeks; in some verticals this is now at two to three weeks,” Schreuder says.
Fowler calls the pattern a trap. “Platforms such as Meta and Google keep producing fast, easy-to-report results, so budgets stay concentrated there,” Fowler says. “The risk is that brands keep harvesting existing demand without doing enough to create future demand,” she says.
None of the four describes a wholesale return to traditional media. “We are seeing a tactical rebalancing towards brand building channels, but not a full swing back to traditional media,” Fowler says, citing BRC research that roughly “75% of South Africans aged 15 and over listen to radio weekly.”
Juglall frames radio’s position as subtle strength rather than revival. “Radio is largely maintaining its share rather than suddenly gaining disproportionate new investment. But that in itself is important,” he says.
Ad wastage and double trouble
That points to where the real waste lies, and it is not the channel everyone expects. The mass audience has not collapsed; it has multiplied across screens. “Even as linear TV households declined from 15.9 million to 13.9 million between 2018 and 2023, total households watching TV, including streaming, actually rose to 16.5 million, around 91% of all SA households, once VOD and SVOD are counted in,” Schreuder says.
The consequence shows up on the affluent end of the buy. “Increasingly, brands are overpaying for duplicated reach across YouTube, social video, streaming platforms and premium digital video environments,” Juglall says. “Without proper cross-platform planning, it is very easy to buy the same affluent consumer multiple times while assuming you are extending reach,” he says.
Fowler draws the same line on measurement. “Platform-attributed conversions are not always the same as genuinely incremental conversions,” she says. The reframing all of them are reaching for is identical. “The focus should not be traditional versus digital. The real question is: where are we creating incremental reach, and where are we simply adding frequency against people we have already reached?” Juglall asks.
That question is about to get an answer the market has never had. South Africa is replacing its television currency: the Broadcast Research Council of South Africa (BRC) has mandated GfK to build a Total Video Measurement service, expected from 2027, that, for the first time, shows reach and frequency across linear and streaming.
👉 Read more: Connect CEO Martin Macgregor on redefining reach (Sept 2025)
Next generation measurement
“We wait with bated breath for the BRC’s new Total Video Measurement currency, with a vision of one data set instead of two competing ones,” Schreuder says. Fowler’s warning is the part operators can act on now. “Brands that are not already testing CTV and streaming may enter that environment without a useful historical baseline,” she says.
Economic pressure is reshaping how those buys are committed, and what agency scale is worth. “Economic uncertainty has definitely shortened planning horizons,” says Kevin Ndinguri, chief investment officer at Publicis Media.
“When clients require more flexibility and fewer fixed commitments, it inevitably puts pressure on some of those negotiated rate models.” Leverage has not vanished, Ndinguri says, but its source has moved. “It is no longer only about a single annual commitment with one media owner. It is increasingly about total market influence, trading intelligence, platform partnerships, data capability and the ability to optimise across channels,” he says.
Best of both worlds
Fowler’s prescription is a hybrid: “commit enough predictable spend to protect pricing and premium access, while keeping a meaningful flexible portion for optimisation,” she says.
Underneath retail media, the performance ceiling and the upcoming currency change run on a single idea. “Media spend is moving towards data, flexibility, attention and measurable outcomes,” Fowler says. Ndinguri puts the direction more plainly: “Low-cost reach is not always effective reach.”
The next three years of media buying will reward those who can prove a rand reached someone new. Everything else will be frequency dressed as reach.
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.
