Pernod Ricard
Drink More Water
A responsible-drinking message carried by creators across three seasons: drink water between drinks, and the night lasts longer.
Influencer Marketing · Content · Experiential
Influence
INFLUENCERMARKETINGTHAT LANDS.
Creator campaigns matched by locality and relevance, managed end to end, reported on properly. Not a spreadsheet of follower counts.
- 1500+
- Projects delivered
- R8.5M+
- Media savings reinvested
- 12
- Years in market
How does influencer marketing work in South Africa?
Influencer marketing in South Africa works by matching creators to an audience by relevance and locality rather than by follower count, briefing them in a way that preserves their own voice, and measuring the result against a commercial goal. The market is unusually community-driven and language-diverse, so a creator with a highly engaged regional or suburb-level audience frequently outperforms a national celebrity for the same budget.
The problem
Reach is the wrong thing to buy
The default way to run a creator campaign is to sort a list by follower count, pick the top few the budget allows, send them a brief full of brand mandatories and count impressions afterwards. It produces content that the creator's audience can spot as an advert in under a second, from a person whose audience may not overlap with the customer at all. In a market as regionally and linguistically segmented as South Africa's, a national number hides more than it tells you.
The approach
01
Match on relevance and locality
We select creators against the audience the brand actually needs, down to region and community. That regularly means more creators with smaller, tighter audiences rather than fewer with large ones, because engagement in the right place is worth more than reach in the wrong one.
02
Brief for their voice, not ours
A creator is being paid for the trust they have built, and the fastest way to spend it is to hand them a script. We brief on the idea and the boundaries, then let the execution sound like the person delivering it.
03
Manage it end to end
Contracting, disclosure, scheduling, content approvals, reshoots and payment all sit with us. This is the part that quietly eats a brand team's month, and the part that goes wrong when it is handled informally.
04
Amplify what performs
Because we buy media in-house, creator content that performs organically can be put behind paid distribution immediately, targeted at the same audience profile. Most creator campaigns leave this value on the table entirely.
05
Report against the goal
Data-driven reporting against the commercial objective set at the start, not a screenshot of the best-performing post. Media monitoring runs alongside so earned conversation is visible too.
Capabilities
Deliverables, not adjectives.
Casting and strategy
- Audience-led creator matching
- Locality and language segmentation
- Campaign concept and creator brief
- Contracting and disclosure compliance
Production and management
- Content direction and approvals
- Shoot and delivery scheduling
- Community management
Amplification and measurement
- Paid amplification of creator content
- Whitelisting and paid partnership placement
- Performance reporting
- Media monitoring and earned conversation tracking
Services in this capabilityInfluencer Marketing
Evidence
Where this has been done.
Shell
Shell V-Power: Feel the Fuel
An Ultimate VIP road trip in Ferraris and BMW M cars, creators feeling the fuel, and a live podcast at the F1 Match Party.
Influencer Marketing · Experiential · Content
Excella
Excella Masterbrand Easter
A national Easter media campaign across nine channels, built to keep Excella on the table at the biggest family meal of the year.
Media Buying · Influencer Marketing · Integrated Campaign
Before you ask
Fair questions.
Creator fees vary enormously by audience size, engagement, category and usage rights, so any single figure would be misleading. What matters more for the budget is the split: fees to creators, production, and paid amplification. Campaigns that allocate nothing to amplification usually underperform, because the content stops working the moment the organic reach does.
Frequently, in this market. South African audiences are strongly community and language segmented, so a creator with a tight regional following often delivers more relevant engagement per rand than a national celebrity. It depends on the objective: broad awareness can justify scale, while consideration and trust usually reward relevance.
Against the objective agreed at the start. Reach and engagement are inputs rather than outcomes, so we report them alongside the commercial measure the campaign was built for, and use media monitoring to capture the earned conversation that paid reporting misses.
Yes. Contracting, usage rights, payment and advertising disclosure are managed by us as part of running the campaign. This is where informal creator arrangements most often create risk for a brand.
Related
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We reply within one business day
Big enough to buy the media, small enough that the people who pitched you do the work.