TBWA\South Africa wins AdFocus Group of the Year and African Impact awards

After winning the Overall Agency of the Year title in 2022, TBWA\South Africa’s star continued to shine brightly at the 2023 FM AdFocus Awards, winning both the Group of the Year Award and the African Impact Award.

TBWA\South Africa is unique in Africa, consisting of a collective of leading agencies that specialise in everything from brand strategy and design to production. Structured to house expert-led specialist agencies that epitomise the top tier in their respective categories, the group aims to focus on firepower and eliminate duplication.

The group consists of Yellowwood Future Architects (business, marketing and brand strategy), Grid Worldwide (brand experience and design, including through-the-line execution), TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris (a full-service marketing communication agency), Magna Carta (corporate reputation management and PR), Sting Content Production (audio and visual content production) and the Omnicom Precision Marketing Group (data services, media, social and a combination of first- and third-party data). The last-mentioned two were developed from within the collective to give high-potential individuals leadership opportunities.

The collective is based on a foundation of shared values and identity, respecting that each business in the group is unique and has its own reason for being, culture and role. Holding it together is a unified vision, shared perspective, standardised operating systems, cohesive training platforms and common language.

Countering criticism that the collective is complicated, the group says the model provides leadership depth and greater efficiencies. The ace up its sleeve, it says, is a senior leadership team empowered with both autonomy and accountability. It’s an approach that has helped it attract, retain and promote some of the best talent in the industry.

The agency is particularly proud of its ability to grow industry giants, with a number of TBWA ‘alumni’ now global industry players. Pete Khoury, previously CCO of TBWA\South Africa, is the most recent example of this, having taken on the role of global CCO at Adidas. Khoury has been replaced by Carl Willoughby. If its strong performance at the Creative Circle Ad of the Month Awards since Willoughby took over is anything to go by, the agency remains in good hands from a creative perspective.

The group once again collectively grew top-line revenue by adding a number of new clients to its roster, and increased efficiencies even further. It has long-standing and healthy relationships with clients including Spar, Nissan, MTN, City Lodge, Absa and South African Tourism. In 2022, the TBWA\South Africa and MTN partnership won AdFocus Partnership of the Year, with the TBWA\Coastal and Spar partnership coming in as a finalist. TBWA\Coastal is again a finalist in the partnership category this year.

The ethos of the group is inherently “open source”, which means it looks for nontraditional partnerships. It recently formed partnerships with specialist agencies outside the group, including PlusNarrative, Helm and EXP, affiliates that offer even more diverse and specialist skills to benefit its clients and teams.

The agency concedes that it is not always the easiest to work with and  doesn’t always do what it’s told. “We take a point of view and will debate it fiercely. We don’t believe in dogmatism. We believe that our clients come to us for a reason: they are hunting for a strong point of view that leverages the intellectual horsepower and creative talent that we offer,” says the agency.

TBWA has been operating across the continent since 2001, when it established its first affiliations with agencies in Nigeria, Botswana and Mauritius. That network has since expanded to 34 affiliates, spanning 24 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The agency manages the MTN and Nissan accounts across Africa and, in April 2023, added Absa’s Africa business to its client roster, making it responsible for the brand across nine countries beyond SA’s borders. This acquisition arguably entrenches TBWA as Africa’s most connected agency network, partnering with some of the continent’s largest and most prestigious brands.

The big take-out: The agency concedes that it’s not always the easiest to work with and doesn’t always do what it’s told.