Naritive is a brand sponsor of this year’s WesBank New Generation Awards. Media partner, Modern Marketing, interviewed Naritive’s Global Founder and CEO, Nicolas van Zyl-Smith. He discusses the future of advertising, the importance of using AI while strengthening the human skills that still matter most, and why being clicked is not always the same as being remembered.
Why did Naritive come on board as a brand sponsor for this year’s New Gen Awards?
The New Gen Awards celebrate the exact kind of work this industry desperately needs more of: work that is brave, measurable, culturally relevant, and built for how people actually behave online.
For us, this is about backing the agencies, brands and creators pushing the industry forward. Naritive was born here, built here and scaled from here. Supporting a platform that recognises the next generation of digital excellence feels deeply aligned with who we are.
But there is a more immediate reason for us, too. As relative newcomers to the industry, we are actively looking to build deep connections with value-aligned partners. Shifting an entire advertising ecosystem away from empty vanity metrics and toward real human engagement is a massive undertaking and we know we cannot do it alone. We want to pull up a seat at the table and connect with the forward-thinking brands and agencies who want to build that high-fidelity digital future alongside us.
The industry is entering a new era. Awards should celebrate real human attention, deep engagement and true business impact. That is the exact conversation we are here to help move forward.
What value will Naritive add to the awards?
Naritive brings a different lens to the awards. We sit at the intersection of creativity, technology, media and measurement, which means we are interested in what happens after an ad is delivered. Was it noticed? Was it experienced? Did someone engage with it? Did it create any meaningful impact?
The industry has spent years optimising for visibility, but visibility is not attention. A campaign can be served millions of times and still be ignored at scale. Through our platform, formats and attention-led approach, we want to help shift the conversation from media delivery to human engagement.
What are some of the biggest challenges the marketing and advertising industry is facing, and how can brands and marketers adapt?
The biggest challenge is attention. The industry has become dangerously good at putting more into the market while getting less meaningful engagement in return. Consumers are moving faster, filtering harder and ignoring more than ever before.
That means the old comfort metrics are no longer enough. Being served is not the same as being seen. Being viewable is not the same as being noticed. Being clicked is not always the same as being remembered.
Brands and marketers need to adapt by building for human attention from the start. That means stronger creative, better context, more interactive experiences and media choices that respect how people actually behave online. It also means measuring what matters, not just what is easy to report.
What does the future of advertising look like, and how can brands ensure they do not get left behind?
The real advantage will sit with brands that can create distinctive ideas, turn them into engaging experiences, and prove that people actually noticed, remembered and acted.
Cannes made it clear that creative, media, data, creators, commerce and measurement are no longer separate conversations. They are becoming one connected ecosystem. Brands that stay stuck in silos, build assets for single channels, or measure success through impressions alone will fall behind.
To stay relevant, brands need to design for attention from the start. That means making creative more interactive, more portable across channels and more accountable to real effectiveness.
For Naritive, this is the opportunity. We help agencies and brands take existing creative and turn it into attention-led experiences that work harder across the media plan they already have.
What does AI really mean for creativity, productivity, people and the future of work in digital advertising?
AI is going to make the industry faster and it is here to stay. That part is obvious. The more important question is whether it will make the work better.
Used well, AI can take a lot of the repetitive drag out of the system. It can help teams move quicker, test more ideas, personalise better and spend more time on judgment, strategy and craft. Used lazily, it can flood the market with average work at industrial speed. That is the real risk. AI can make average faster, but average is still average.
The Cannes conversation also seems to be moving beyond AI hype. Business Insider reported that senior marketers at Cannes were talking less about blind acceleration and more about human discernment, originality and creative taste as competitive advantages in an AI-shaped industry.
For people in digital advertising, the future will not be about competing with AI on output. It will be about using AI while strengthening the human skills that still matter most, like taste, cultural understanding, strategic judgment, originality and empathy. The people who thrive will be the ones who know how to use the tools without outsourcing their thinking to them.
You recently partnered with a local team in Kenya that will represent Naritive. Can you comment on the importance of having teams who understand the culture and nuances of the country they are in, and do you think some brands still fall into the trap of treating Africa as one homogeneous market?
Yes, and it is one of the reasons we are very intentional about how we expand. This is not a unique insight to Africa, but any business that has accumulated some transnational success will know it is not one market. It is a continent of different cultures, languages, behaviours, media habits and commercial realities. This is not to say that there are not some striking similarities, but arrogantly ignoring this fact is a short road to a messy end.
Having a local team in Kenya matters because representation is not just about sales presence. It is about understanding the market properly. It is about knowing the nuance, the humour, the consumer behaviour, the platforms people actually use and the way brands earn trust in that environment.
For Naritive, expansion is not about parachuting in with a one-size-fits-all adtech solution. It is about building with people who understand the country they are in, while giving them access to technology that can scale across markets.
What exciting developments does Naritive have in the pipeline?
Embedding basic AI features into a workflow is rapidly becoming a baseline commodity. In today’s adtech environment, if a company’s core strategy relies entirely on AI services or products, it will not last long. While our upcoming platform release will make smart, guardrailed AI creation native to the Naritive ecosystem, our truly disruptive developments lie elsewhere.
The real excitement in our pipeline surrounds our strategic infrastructure partnerships with Google and Lumen Research.
By completing our migration onto Google Cloud Platform, we have centralised a Unified Data Layer in BigQuery containing over 750,000,000 proprietary campaign data points. Leveraging this massive engineering foundation alongside Lumen’s eye-tracking methodologies allows us to train deep, predictive attention models rather than optimisation based on empty, accidental clicks. We use this data to deliver verified commercial outcomes tied directly to our proprietary Attention Per Mille (APM) score.
Furthermore, we are actively looking beyond ordinary display banners. While our interactive Connected TV (CTV) product line is already live and operational, we are currently establishing new partnerships to onboard entirely new activation channels, specifically Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) and Retail media inventory.
Our ultimate ambition is to build the definitive, cross-channel Attention Intelligence Platform right here in Africa, prove its undeniable ROI locally and scale it as a world-class infrastructure export globally.
How is Naritive reinvesting directly into the community that backed you when you were just starting out?
Naritive’s growth is deeply tied to the South African ecosystem. We were fiercely backed by local clients, agencies, and talent who believed African adtech could compete globally. For us, reinvesting means moving past corporate platitudes to focus on three distinct pillars:
1. Keeping innovation local and continental
Too often, multinational companies treat African markets merely as sales destinations rather than places where technology is actually built. We are completely flipping that script. We keep our core engineering and product innovation firmly rooted in our local hub to scale capabilities within the continent. Furthermore, as we expand our footprint across Africa, we are turning our home market into a proud net-exporter of world-class adtech infrastructure.
2. Building industry connections
We are not just attending existing forums; we are actively designing and launching our own proprietary industry events. Our goal is to bring the local media, agency and tech communities together in dedicated physical spaces, creating a highly collaborative environment where industry peers can connect, share deep structural insights, and engage with each other directly.
3. Direct grassroots social impact
True community support requires real action on the ground. As our business scales, we have a responsibility to support the vulnerable communities surrounding us. We are currently investigating partnerships with vital local NGOs to channel resources, awareness, and direct support to the organisations doing the heaviest lifting.
Ultimately, giving back has to connect to what we do best: driving meaningful human connection toward the things that actually matter.
Naritive Aside
Van Zyl-Smith is also a partner of Lucky Hustle, which recently launched Lucky Chery, a purpose-built agency team.
Question for Darren Morris, CEO of Lucky Hustle: Do you think these purpose-built teams are the future, and can you speak about the changes happening in traditional agency structures in order to adapt to market needs?
Yes, because clients are no longer buying agency structures. They are buying outcomes, speed, ownership and specialist thinking.
Lucky Chery is a good example of that shift. It was built around a specific client, a specific category and a specific commercial ambition. That means the team is not trying to force the client into a traditional agency model. It is designed around what the brand actually needs, with the right mix of strategy, creative, content, digital and cultural fluency working as one unit.
I do not think the agency model is dead, but the old template is under pressure. Agencies have to become more flexible, more integrated and more accountable. Purpose-built teams allow you to keep the best parts of agency thinking, which are creativity, craft and strategic depth, while removing some of the bureaucracy that often slows the work down. For us, Lucky Chery is not just a resourcing model. It is a statement about how we think modern agency partnerships should work. Build around the client and the opportunity and not around an organogram.
WesBank New Generation Awards
The WesBank New Generation Social & Digital Media Awards are South Africa’s premier independent and performance-based digital accolades, and have become the definitive benchmark for digital excellence in the South African corporate and agency sectors. Mark your calendars for September 23rd, the night Johannesburg witnesses the pinnacle of South African digital achievement.
WESBANK NEW GENERATION AWARDS
https://www.newgenawards.co.za/
