These debates happening across boardrooms and agency briefing rooms in South Africa right now are not new and not unique to our market and I understand why the conversation exists.
The pressure is real. Marketers are being asked to prove return on investment (ROI) in ways that were unimaginable a decade ago.
Technology is accelerating faster than most organisations can absorb, while consumers, South African consumers in particular, are navigating economic complexity that would humble any marketer who thought they had the playbook figured out.
But here is what I know after years of working at the intersection of brand strategy, consumer insight, and business performance. The choice is false. It has always been false.
The marketers genuinely driving growth in their organisations are not choosing between the algorithm and the insight. They are using both, deliberately, and they are measuring the result in the currency that matters most: commercial outcomes.
That is the idea at the centre of the Marketing Achievement Awards (MAA) Season. And it has a name: Code, Culture and Commerce.
When we use the word Code in this context, I want to be precise, because precision matters. Code does not mean artificial intelligence exclusively. It certainly does not mean having the largest technology budget in your sector.
Code means digital transformation and technological capability in all its forms. It means using your spreadsheets more intelligently. It means systematic customer value management. It means, yes, sophisticated AI tools where they are appropriate and accessible.
The point is not the tool's sophistication. The point is whether technology is being deployed in the service of a clear strategic intent.
The scale of adoption is no longer a debate. According to the IDCA’s 2025 Global Artificial Intelligence Report, 76% of organisations worldwide now use AI in some form. The question has moved on.
It is no longer a question of whether. It is how.Code, at its best, gives Culture its reach and its rigour. It is the force that scales insight, measures impact, and gets the right message to the right person at the right moment.
Without it, even the sharpest cultural understanding remains anecdotal.
Culture is where I want to spend a moment, because it is the most misunderstood of the three forces and the most important to get right.
Culture is not about cultural trends. It is not a shorthand for ethnicity or language, though both are deeply relevant in South Africa’s extraordinarily complex market.
Culture, in its fullest and most powerful sense, is the deep human understanding that makes marketing resonate with actual human beings.The culture of savings matters.
The culture of a specific business community matters. The culture of how families make purchase decisions, or how procurement managers evaluate suppliers, matters.
These are not peripheral observations. They are the foundation from which genuine insight is drawn. And insight, not data, is what connects a brand to its audience.
Here is the thing about data. The world is data-rich and insight-poor. Data tells you what. Insight tells you why, and why is it the only foundation worth building a strategy on. When you triangulate different data points, qualitative and quantitative, behavioural and attitudinal, that is where the real magic happens.
That is when you find the insight that you could not have reached by looking at any single source alone.
Kantar’s research makes this argument in numbers. Brands with high cultural relevance grow nearly six times faster than those with low relevance. Six times. That is not a marginal advantage. That is the difference between a brand that endures and one that disappears.
Culture gives Code its relevance and its resonance. Without it, technology optimises efficiently for entirely the wrong outcomes.
For too long, marketing has been positioned as a cost centre that occasionally produces something beautiful. That positioning is not just wrong. It is unsupported by evidence.
The third force in our framework is Commerce, and its inclusion is deliberate. Commerce means business outcomes, return on investment, and the measurable strategic value that great marketing creates for an organisation.
It is not an add-on to Code and Culture. It is the proof of concept. The frame that makes both of them matter.
Kantar BrandZ’s Share Price Chart provides historical data showing that brands with high equity deliver superior financial returns over time: +88% return vs. the S&P 500 and +251% on the broader MSCI World Index. This is shareholder value.
This is the language of every finance director and CEO who has ever questioned a marketing budget, and it is the answer they have been waiting for.Marketing does not need permission to be at the strategy table.
It earns its place there through commercial accountability. The best marketers in South Africa already understand this. They are not defensive about measurement. They welcome it, because they know their work delivers. Commerce is the standard, not the aspiration.South Africa is regularly described as one of the world’s most complex marketing environments. Eleven official languages. Vast socioeconomic spread. A consumer base that is simultaneously globally connected and deeply locally rooted.
I have heard our market’s complexity framed as a challenge so often that it has started to sound like an apology
It is not a challenge. It is an advantage.
Africa has been called the world’s most misunderstood advertising market, a reputation built on campaigns that failed because they treated a continent of 54 nations as a single, homogenous audience.
South African marketers navigate this kind of complexity every day. Not as an academic exercise. As a professional requirement.
What this means in practice is that the synthesis of Code, Culture and Commerce is not a new idea for the best practitioners in this country. They have been doing it, out of necessity, for years.
Building technology-informed, culturally grounded, commercially accountable marketing in one of the most demanding environments on earth.
I see this first-hand through the Marketer of the Year evaluation process. The CEO interviews that form part of that process have surfaced something worth saying publicly: South Africa’s leading marketers are making strategic contributions that their CEOs recognise, value, and depend on.
This is not marketing justifying itself. This is marketing leading.
There is substantial global data on AI adoption, marketing effectiveness, and brand performance. What does not yet exist is a clear picture of how South African marketers specifically are navigating Code, Culture and Commerce.
What tools are being used? How insight is being generated? What commercial outcomes are being achieved, and at what scale of investment?
Research from the global north tells part of the story, but South Africa’s market complexity means it cannot tell ours.
Every Season 6 entrant will contribute to changing that. All entries feed into the inaugural State of Code, Culture and Commerce report: a first-of-its-kind benchmarking study of how South Africa’s marketing community is integrating technology, human insight, and commercial thinking.
The report is built entirely from anonymised, aggregated data. No brand names, no agency names, no identifying information of any kind.
For a marketing leader who needs to understand where their organisation sits relative to the broader industry, and who needs to articulate that to a board or a CEO, this report is a tangible asset.
The only way to receive it is to enter.
The MAA exist to celebrate marketing as a strategic business discipline.
Not the loudest work. Not the biggest production budget. The clearest thinking, the sharpest insight, and the most measurable commercial impact. Every great marketing team in South Africa belongs in this conversation, regardless of organisational size.
The standard is the same whether you are working with a substantial budget or making something remarkable out of almost nothing.
What we are looking for is evidence. Evidence that you understood your audience deeply, deployed your resources intelligently, and produced work that your organisation could measure and build on.
Entries for the awards are open at the MAA website. If your work demonstrates the intersection of Code, Culture and Commerce, this is your platform. South Africa’s marketing community does not need to be told it is world-class. It needs a stage that is equal to the work being done.
That is what the MAA has always been here for.
