By Ontiretse Moeng

Let’s talk about where our money is going.

The reality of South Africa’s advertising market is defined by an act of economic extraction. Our total digital ad-spend is now over R17.7 billion, yet an estimated R10 billion or more of that budget is finding its way outside our borders, flowing directly to the USA & China.

This isn’t simple commerce, it’s the inevitable result of market monopolisation. Competition Commission confirms that media giants like Meta and Google have secured such a dominant share that they have established a globally standardised approach for media strategy that is, for South Africa, fundamentally extractive. The global digital infrastructure allows them to take significantly more value than they ever put back into our local economy.

The Failure of Standardised Strategy

The most critical argument against this imposed global “new-norm” is simple. The universally standardised approach to strategy, which relies on global norms of media buying and AI-driven efficiency, is strategically inefficient for our local markets.

The failure lies in a crucial distinction we must all embrace. Cultural Translation versus Cultural Reflection.

Algorithms can deliver impressions, but they cannot deliver reflection. The risk is stark, as ads intended for a local audience, having been filtered through this standardised global system, simply fail to resonate locally, while that R99 out R100 of the spend leaves the country forever.

The Dual Imperative

The combination of capital flight and generic global strategies creates a dual imperative for everyone involved in media buying and policy making in South Africa.

First, strategy must pivot. Brands must demand and reward creativity that achieves true Cultural Reflection. Second, there is a crucial need for more robust local digital and integrated media infrastructure. We must create competitive local platforms to ensure a greater percentage of the R17.7 billion ad-spend stays right here in South Africa.

The Case for Local Reflection in a Global AI Era

The entry of global giants like Amazon, now competing fiercely with local heroes like Checkers Sixty60 and Takealot, highlights the challenge of purely globalised strategy. Amazon leverages global pricing and efficiency, but it has yet to replicate the cultural reflection engineered by its local competitors.

Look at Checkers Sixty60. Its success wasn’t built purely on the convenience of a 60-minute delivery promise. It was built on a marketing strategy that reflected local desires and a deep reliance on the established, hyper-local footprint of a national retailer.

When South African media buyers connect using vernacular language, relatable humour, or emotional storytelling rooted in shared community experiences, effectiveness is enhanced and trust is built. This local fluency is precisely where AI fails. AI is fantastic at translation but still falls short at reflection.

The Pendulum Swings: Finding Strategic Equilibrium

This brings us to the next inevitable question: what happens when the movement toward hyper-localism and market protectionism becomes the new extreme?

It’s an established philosophical pattern, linked to the dialectic principle. When one system (the globalised digital monoculture) becomes so vast, it naturally inspires the birth of its opposite (the hyper-local resistance).

The danger is not in the swing itself, but in overshooting the middle. Will we swing too far and start to miss the efficiency and variety that the global standard provided?

The true wisdom lies not in switching completely to the local extreme, but in finding the Strategic Equilibrium. This is the point of balance that allows us to strategically identify when a standardized global approach is needed for efficiency, and when a culturally in-tune approach is mandatory for genuine resonance. Our strategic evolution must not result in a simple over-correction.

Conclusion: Global Standards, Local Soul, and Strategic Balance

The path forward for South African strategy must be one of intentional balance. We must invest in local media to stop the economic bleeding and demand Cultural Reflection to correct strategic failures. But above all, we must be careful not to allow the anti-globalisation pendulum to swing too far, ensuring our future model is one of sophisticated Strategic Equilibrium. A system that maximises efficiency through global tools while prioritising resonance through local soul.

By Oratile Modiragale  

We find ourselves in the midst of the rapid technological advancements of Fourth Industrial Revolution where the biological, digital and physical worlds have blended. With this, the use of AI becomes weaved into our daily lives in more ways than we had anticipated.

Many individuals and businesses had come to a split point of either embracing this new technology, fearing and almost ‘abstaining’ from its use completely or being completely excited about the powerful tool they now had access to.

The media space was faced with the challenge of either fully taking on this new tool in full strides or fearing the threat it poses to creativity, credible information and cognitive bias. The brands and companies have progressed, increasingly adopting the software into its content. While this is an efficient and innovative way to generate content pieces to the exact specifications desired, we have to ask how this affects the people we speak to? Our audiences, the consumer of this media.

As we come to close the 2025 year, we have observed a growing audience segment that reports a sense of ‘technological betrayal’ from brands and companies that have utilized AI in media. There has been a reported 13% of consumers who have felt that they could trust advertisements that were completely created by AI which, surged to 48% when they had the sense that there is a human element in the mix. This has brought me to think about how much of the  benefit of artificial intelligence is our audience seeing in its use in media and do brands actually receive the best value in the long run in a space that seeks out authenticity from brands.

Consumers seek out authenticity as a measure of investment in them from a brand. The idea that a copywriter sweat over every word or the handcrafted visual from an art director that took weeks to get right, communicates to the audience was that they’re ‘worth the effort.’ When this is swapped out for generative AI content, the messaging often backfires with the content being viewed as lazy. The audience asks themselves: ‘If they didn’t care enough to make this themselves, why should I?” This if often where I have seen brands lose their audience.

The betrayal often stems from a lack of transparency where some of the audiences don’t necessarily hate the technology but hate being duped into thinking that they are interacting with something real. This ‘betrayal’ compounds faster than the trust being built and when brands insist on synthetic mimicry, there is a risk posed to lose an audience that was willing to engage.

Artificial intelligence aims to make us feel seen through its hyper-personalization but has instead left a gap where this could be possible by using predictive algorithms to target audiences that has unfortunately missed the mark leaving them feeling like brands still don’t get them. When this happens there’s often a sense of invasion from AI that is felt by the consumer rather than the intended helpfulness.

I do believe that due to this rising trend in the usage of artificial intelligence in media, we will be seeing more of the absence of AI in media as a distinguisher amongst brands where a human only approach will be seen and felt as a status symbol. It is interesting to see how this will play out in the media landscape.