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What People First Marketing Means for Algorithms · The Lead Creative

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: based on how the market, the culture, and your customers are shifting, but also how do you stay relevant in future.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: So you have to constantly think about the future as you are actually operating today.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Lead Creative.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: For the second year in a row, we are at the NetBank IMC conference to find out what shifts marketers are experiencing from AI to digital marketing to how the consumer is interacting and engaging with brands in times of really, really great constraints.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: This conversation is brought to you in collaboration with our production partners, Soweto Media, as well as Africa's largest B Cop certified marketing agency, Roger Wilco.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the conversation Joining us on our red hot seat of insights with our first conversation for the day is Gugum Tembo, the CMO of Telcom.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: Gugu, thanks so much for joining us.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: Telcom operates in a very disruptive environment that is getting disrupted all the time.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: How do you as a CMO manage to keep the brand feeling, thinking like a challenger while building market share as a market leader?
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: You know the interesting thing is that a couple of years ago we would never have seen ourselves as a challenger brand, right?
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: Because as you know at some point we were the dominant brand, the only brand uh providing telecommunication.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: So it's taken a mindset shift.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: And one where I constantly have to remind my team that being a challenger brand doesn't necessarily mean that you are coming in to take share away from other people.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: You're actually challenging the status quo, right?
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: You are challenging whether in the category we actually are responding to consumer needs.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I guess for me when we talk then about disruption disruption happens because someone sees that there's a gap in market and they then take charge of that gap, right?
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then it causes disruption for the players that have been in the market and they've kind of become complacent with what they're offering.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: So disruption is necessary because that's the only way that we innovate.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: And innovation requires that we are constantly looking at uh what are how the market is evolving.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely how our consumers are evolving uh because as you know culture evolves um even our consumer needs evolves uh earlier we were talking to Gen Alphas and Gen Z and their perspectives on how brands it should be engaging with them are evolving.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: In our days uh brands engage with us they sent us a a broadcast on TV or radio um it applied to everyone equally and Gen Z and Gen Alpha are telling us we need to make it more relevant.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: So I think the biggest thing is that uh relevance uh is one of the most critical things that any marketer or CMO needs to actually keep on the pulse.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: How do you stay relevant today based on how the market, the culture and your customers are shifting but also how do you stay relevant in future so you have to constantly think about the future as you are actually operating today.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: You mentioned culture quite a few times and I want to kind of tap into that because I've noticed that telecom along the lines of this challenge of brand mindset and thinking telecom has been showing up in very interesting ways in culture.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: I think post pandemic I've been seeing the brand collaborating with podcasters collaborating with the creator economy tapping into culture in those ways when one goes to your company profile for instance on Instagram it looks more like a content creator profile than a brand account right it's it's dotted with content creator content.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: How has showing up in culture in that way served the brand you know uh we spoke about relevance just now cultural relevance is one of those and um I'll I'll give you an example uh when uh the creator economy was starting up um and this as you say just post pandemic that's when things were blowing up and also pandemic actually drove it right because people had time to sit behind their screens and engage and build a community online um and we recognized that uh we could uh literally just go and find creators that we could partner or associate with but what we did because we understood that our starting point was culture we went and partnered with radio DJs uh for all the African language stations and why that was is because we realized how important that communication and community is that's built on traditional media has been for certain generations and audiences.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: So for us uh we wanted to still be relevant uh to the generations that actually listen to radio and the people that they trust more than anyone on radio is not the ads that we put out it's not the brands and what we're saying it's the radio DJs the people that they believe are part of their family because literally when they phone those radio stations and they talk to Ntata Tusso it's as if it's uh one of them right so for us that's where it started that's how you get into culture don't try and insert yourself but try and make sure that you are relevant and actually you are the one that's enabling that evolution and how we enable the evolution was these are radio DJs but how do we go with them onto now the newer media platforms like social media.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: So you started to see people like Mama Dudu actually being active on social media because then she understood the power that she had with the audience that she had on radio and that that audience actually now lives in two different places and then connecting that.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I guess with culture it's about understanding where culture is formed and making sure that uh you are creating value when you come into it and not just getting into it just because I think this leads us nicely to the theme of the CSIMC conference which is about the shift what's the most important shift that you feel you are navigating right now and how will it help brands build themselves over the next five years?
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: Sure um I think the biggest shift is that uh you know brands of course uh exist uh for commercial reasons as well and uh so we have uh older generations that we know have uh the economic power right to buy our products but what you're seeing now is that we all recognize that actually uh part of that buying power sits uh with the youth audience they may not have the money today uh but they are starting to influence what is purchased and so we shouldn't then uh uh engage them uh from a perspective of they are just influencing the decision but we actually need to actually connect with them and listen to them what matters because it also talks to that what I said earlier about you need to be uh literally working on uh building the connection with your audiences today but also thinking about what it means from a future point of view.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: And if we are able then to listen to them today we are already starting to think about how do we shape the product that they'll need in the next five years right but if we are not in five years when they get to a stage where they're economically active we would have lost the mark because we would have built what we think is relevant actually when it's not.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: So I think uh for me literally uh we talk about Africa's uh youth dividend as one of the most uh beneficial things uh for being in this continent it's one of the things that every one of us as brands need to be paying attention to so what I'm getting from that is that you are actually being conscious about building future demand today even with a customer who is not your direct customer today like Salute for instance.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely that's the only way we can sustain our brands.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: We usually ask our guests to pass the mic to our next guest by leaving them a question about their creative process their thoughts on the market their thoughts on the industry and one of our previous guests was Bridget Harper the head of marketing for Volkswagen South Africa and the simple question that she left you was are we creating work for the algorithm or for people?
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: Sure that's that's an interesting one I think we have to uh people have to be the starting point uh because even though we rely on the algorithms uh to take the work in front of the people that we intend to take it to we need to know who they are right uh so that when we tag the algorithm tags uh we are clear this is the type of person that I'm looking for.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: So it can it cannot be generic it can't just be blanket um and it can't be optimizing uh for the algorithm uh when we forget about uh the human at the end of it so it's about the people first and then the algorithm follows yeah now it's your turn to pass the mic to our next question by leaving them a question on their thoughts on marketing their creative process the creative industry or life for that matter sure I probably would ask one because all of us are talking AI these days and we're like oh what do we do with AI so the biggest one for me would be how do we make sure that we do not lose the human insight even uh when we have access to all of these AI tools.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely such a great question cuckoo thank you so much for making time we absolutely love the work that you are doing with telecom and how much you're tapping into this economy and how much you are engaging with this economy to build that future demand that you're referring to.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for your time.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: Awesome thank you for having me.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: This is the Lead Creative like and subscribe