Google Announces New Products At Google Marketing Live

May 27, 2026

Google Announces New Product At Google Marketing Live — Copyright: Google LLC.

Google announced the latest ads and commerce product innovations coming to Google and YouTube at Google Marketing Live (GML).

Key News From GML 2026:

Creating Ads That Actually Answer

Announcing new formats for Search and AI Mode to transform ads into seamless interactions, bridging the gap between a user’s initial discovery and their final purchase.
Google has also made it easy for partners to access these new formats with new features that best align with their brand goals.

When researching a topic, consumers want to know exactly how a product suits their unique situation. In fact, 75% of people report making faster, more confident decisions using AI Mode in Search. That’s why Google is testing two new types of ads, built with Gemini, that offer relevant product details along with helpful guidance.

To help people evaluate their choices, both of these new formats will feature an independent AI explainer as part of the ad. The Gemini model evaluates and synthesises information about a product or service, and displays that context alongside the advertiser’s creative. This coherent, independent response ensures transparency and builds trust. These formats will also continue to be clearly labeled as ‘Sponsored’.

Transforming Automation Into Intelligence

Google is connecting its agents through a unified experience called Ask Advisor. Rolling out later this year, Ask Advisor works across Google’s products to offer proactive personalised recommendations that save users time and help them reach their business goals. Ask Advisor orchestrates a team of expert agents across Google products, serving as an always-on collaborator and problem solver throughout a campaign journey.

Scaling Human Creativity:

The new Asset Studio features, powered by Gemini, will help marketers remove the guesswork from the creative process by scaling a team’s unique vision globally and ensuring assets connect with the right audience.

Asset Studio is a one-stop-shop for developing creative assets in Google Ads, helping brands multiply the magic of their creativity and scale it across the globe. Google is making it even easier to create the range of assets needed to drive performance across Google and YouTube.

Asset Studio understands a user’s marketing brief, brand guidelines, website, and goals to instantly generate a high-quality range of assets across multiple creative themes and asset types. Users can create and refine them to match their vision using natural language. And users can soon build compelling video assets all in one place with the integration of Gemini Omni, the new multimodal model.

Harnessing The Next Era Of Agentic Commerce:

Google is bringing more Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) capabilities, including the checkout experience on AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app, and further evolving the experience for merchants by integrating Direct Offers.

The new Universal Cart is a truly intelligent shopping cart that works across retailers and across services like Search, Gemini and more. When shoppers are ready to buy, UCP makes checkout from their cart smooth. They can check out with Google Pay in just a few taps with many of their favourite brands, or transfer items to the merchant’s site to complete their purchase. Shoppers can try these select checkout features soon across retailers like Nike, Sephora, Target, Ulta Beauty, Walmart, Wayfair and Shopify merchants such as Fenty and Steve Madden. Regardless of how a shopper chooses to buy, the retailer always remains the merchant of record.

Driving Discovery Across More Surfaces, Verticals, And Markets:

Google is introducing new AI-powered Demand Gen features, like new Google Maps inventory that connects brands with people exploring the local area, and checkout links in nine new markets. Product feeds are expanding to more surfaces and verticals, including auto. Users can get started faster with AI-assisted Demand Gen campaign creation.

With just a few prompts, build more relevant and performant YouTube ads with Multimodal video creation in Asset Studio. Advertisers can also easily boost authentic creator partnership videos directly within the asset picker during Demand Gen campaign setup.

For retailers, serving dynamic product videos at scale will soon be even more seamless. Simply upload videos to Google Merchant Center to dynamically distribute them across Demand Gen campaigns based on real-time user interest.

Leveraging Data By Unified Measurement

Google is bringing Meridian, their open-source Marketing Mix Model, into Google Analytics 360.

Soon, users will be able to:

– Unify insights: Bring together first-party, cross-channel data and metrics signals in one place.
– Pinpoint what is working: Users can measure causal performance to prove exactly what is driving their business and optimise their media mix.
– Forecast outcomes: Use predictive scenarios to guide smarter investments.

GOOGLE MARKETING PLATFORM
https://marketingplatform.google.com

Rogerwilco Wins MMA Smarties South Africa Awards For Innovation In Modern Marketing

Modern Marketing

May 27, 2026

Rogerwilco walked away with five more awards for its generative engine optimisation (GEO) and AI-driven digital work at the Marketing + Media Alliance (MMA) Smarties South Africa Awards. The Smarties wins include four golds for Small Budget, Big Impact; AI Powered Data Insights / Contextual Marketing; Innovative Use of AI in Advertising and Audience Engagement Excellence Using AI, as well as a silver for Advanced Technologies Marketing.

‘We saw early on that generative AI was going to fundamentally change how people find information online,’ said Charlie Stewart, CEO of Rogerwilco. ‘This recognition is about far more than the awards, it validates that GEO is becoming one of the most important shifts in digital marketing and search visibility today.’

GEO, the practice of ensuring a brand’s content is discoverable and cited by AI-powered search platforms such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity, is rapidly reshaping online behaviour. Industry research indicates that more than 30% of adults will use generative AI tools as their primary search mechanism in 2026.

To respond to this shift, Rogerwilco developed GEOFF (Generative Engine Optimisation Forecasting + Fulfilment), a proprietary AI platform with direct API integrations into ChatGPT and Gemini. The tool audits web content against the ranking factors that drive visibility in AI-generated responses, analysing content, structure and technical markup at scale before generating prioritised recommendations for human-led implementation.

Rogerwilco also developed a complementary AI-powered link engine that automatically identifies online mentions of both institutions and prompts webmasters to convert citations into live hyperlinks, accelerating domain authority growth at scale impossible through manual outreach alone.

Building on the increasingly important role of AI in discovery, Rogerwilco has also created Echo, a proprietary closed generative AI search engine. Unlike generic AI search tools that pull information from across the open web, Echo delivers instant, accurate responses sourced exclusively from an organisation’s own verified content. This enables them to own the search experience on their digital platforms, ensuring that target audiences receive trusted, brand-controlled answers at every point of online engagement.

ROGERWILCO
https://www.rogerwilco.co.za/

Growth Is Won By Influencing What Gets Discovered, Recommended And Bought

Modern Marketing

May 27, 2026

Ansa Leighton-Buys, dentsu.

Growth is decided long before a campaign runs or a channel is chosen. It is shaped by the systems that determine what products are surfaced, which options are recommended, and what gets bought.

These systems are increasingly algorithm led, drawing on signals from media exposure, retail behaviour, availability, price, and past performance. Brands that fail to influence them are invisible at the moments that matter most. This is where commerce now plays its role. Not as a channel, but as the way brands and retailers shape buying decisions across the entire ecosystem and prove the growth that follows.

For years, growth strategies have focused on optimising channels. Search, social, programmatic, marketplaces and retail media have each been treated as separate levers. That approach no longer reflects how buying decisions are made. Discovery, consideration, and conversion now collapse into a single moment, guided by recommendation engines and automated systems that reward relevance, availability, and performance rather than intent alone.

As data, media and transactions converge, commerce has moved from an executional function into a strategic growth lever, firmly established in the boardroom. It is no longer about where transactions take place. It is about how influence is created, shaped and converted across systems. Connected commerce is how this influence is designed and delivered. It connects media signals, retail behaviour, content, creativity, data, and identity into a single operating model. One that allows brands and retailers to influence algorithm led buying and measure its commercial impact with clarity.

This shift demands more than better tools or more platforms. It requires a new way of working. One that moves organisations from fragmented execution to coordinated action, and from activity-based reporting to proof of business growth.

As a marketing partner operating across media, data, technology, and commerce, dentsu is uniquely positioned to act as both the connector and coordinator across an increasingly fragmented ecosystem, helping brands and retailers align efforts end-to-end and influence how buying decisions are shaped.

To support this ambition, dentsu is strengthening its commerce leadership with the appointment of Ansa Leighton-Buys as BX Strategic Head of Commerce Marketing.
In this role, Leighton-Buys will lead the strategic development of commerce marketing across the dentsu network, working closely with brands and retailers to design connected commerce strategies that influence buying decisions across systems and accelerate measurable growth.

‘Commerce is no longer about transactions alone,’ said Leighton-Buys. ‘It is about influencing how choices are made. In an algorithm led environment, growth belongs to the organisations that understand how systems work and how to shape them in their favour.’

DENTSU
www.dentsu.com

Protecting Human Thinking Does Not Mean Rejecting AI

Rae

May 21, 2026

Protecting Human Thinking Does Not Mean Rejecting AI — Nicola van Niekerk, Naritive.

Nicola van Niekerk, Managing Director of Naritive, writes why business leaders must protect human thinking in the age of AI. The next leadership advantage is not AI adoption, but knowing where human intelligence must lead.

In almost every business conversation today, the same promises appear. Faster workflows. Faster content. Faster analysis. Faster decision-making. Faster everything. For leaders under pressure to grow, deliver, optimise and compete, it is easy to see why AI has become so compelling. It offers scale without the usual friction. It gives teams a way to produce more with less. It creates the impression that productivity can be multiplied almost overnight.

But leadership has never only been about increasing output. It has always been about judgment. It is about knowing what matters, what does not, what should be challenged, what should be protected and what should never be automated simply because it can be. That distinction is becoming more important than ever.

The real risk of AI is not that it will replace every human task. The more immediate risk is that it will quietly change the way people think about their own thinking. When speed becomes the dominant measure of value, slower human capabilities begin to look inefficient, reflection looks like hesitation, and original thought looks expensive. This is where leaders carry a serious responsibility.

We need to protect the space where human thinking happens, because creativity, judgment and discernment do not emerge from constant acceleration. They come from attention. They come from curiosity. They come from lived experience, contradiction, emotional intelligence and the ability to sit with complexity long enough to see what others miss.

AI can process information and generate options. It can summarise, structure and accelerate. But it does not understand culture from the inside. It does not feel the tension in a room, sense when a team is afraid to speak honestly, or know when the fastest answer is not the wisest one. That remains human work.

In creative and marketing environments, this matters deeply. Our industry is already vulnerable to sameness. We have spent years optimising for efficiency, impressions, templates and formats. Now AI can produce more of that sameness at extraordinary speed. The danger is not simply bad work. It is work that feels competent but carries no real conviction. Work that looks polished but has no pulse. Work that reflects patterns instead of perspectives. Leaders must resist the temptation to mistake volume for value.

The strongest businesses of the next decade will not be the ones that use AI the most. They will be the ones who understand where AI belongs and where human intelligence must lead. That requires a different kind of leadership discipline. It means asking better questions before adopting new tools. What kind of thinking are we accelerating? What kind of thinking are we weakening? Are we helping people become sharper, or are we teaching them to outsource the very muscles that make them valuable?

We also need to be more honest about the psychological impact of this shift. Many people are already navigating a quiet anxiety around AI. They are wondering whether their skills are still relevant, whether their judgment is still trusted, and whether the value they bring can be reduced to a prompt, a dashboard or an automated workflow. In cultures that reward output above all else, employees may feel pressured to produce faster, even when the work requires deeper thinking. They may begin to edit themselves before they have properly formed an idea. They may stop testing uncomfortable thoughts because the machine can offer a safer, quicker version. That has consequences.

A workplace that constantly pushes speed can slowly erode confidence, creativity and ownership. People become executors instead of thinkers. They wait for the tool to begin. They choose the acceptable answer instead of the necessary one. They lose the courage to bring instinct, imagination and dissent into the work.

Leaders cannot allow that to happen. Protecting human thinking does not mean rejecting AI. That would be naïve and, frankly, unhelpful. AI is already changing how we work, and in many cases it can remove the repetitive burden that prevents people from doing their best thinking. Used well, it can create more room for strategy, creativity and problem-solving.

But used carelessly, it can flatten the very qualities that make work meaningful and effective. The leadership task is to create cultures where AI supports people without shrinking them. Where teams are encouraged to use tools, but not hide behind them. Where speed is valued, but not worshipped. Where original thinking is still expected, protected and rewarded. Where people are permitted to pause, interrogate, disagree and bring human context into the room.

At Naritive, we believe technology should make work more human, not less. That belief matters far beyond advertising. It speaks to the kind of organisations we are building and the kind of people we are asking our teams to become. Because once a business loses its capacity for independent thought, no tool can give it back.

NARITIVE
https://www.naritiveglobal.com

The Marketer’s Pivotal Role in Building Consumer Consciousness

Rae

May 21, 2026

The Marketer's Pivotal Role in Building Consumer Consciousness — Lloyd Lekgau, Matte BLK.

Lloyd Lekgau, PR Account Manager at Matte BLK, writes how marketers can drive awareness of the economic power of buying local. Marketers have a plumb opportunity to direct a subtle revolution, during a strategic point in the economic trajectory of the country. This opportunity tills the ground for marketing firms to optimise growth in terms of the bottom line, brand influence, creativity and collaborations.

Here it is. There is a much-needed quiet revolution available to every South African, and it requires nothing more than reading a label and buying local, whenever there is an option. However, most must be conscientised of the power behind their buying habits. This is not a political manifesto. Not a protest march. Just the simple act of looking at a product in a shop and asking: was this made here? That one question, asked by enough people, enough times, carries the power to reshape an economy.

The Meat and the Potatoes of the Matter is Bread and Butter Decisions

South Africa is at an inflection point. Unemployment sits at 33.5%, and among youth, that figure climbs to a devastating 46.6%. The National Development Plan (NDP), adopted by Cabinet in 2012 as the country’s long-term blueprint, calls for the creation of 11 million new jobs and the reduction of unemployment to 6% by 2030. These are not aspirational numbers. They are a contract. And fulfilling them requires every actor in the economy, government, business, and citizen to play their part. For ordinary South Africans, that part is deceptively simple: buy local, buy consciously and buy often.

Initiatives like the Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan exist as a conduit in this space. The government says, ‘The Nedlac Localisation Working Group agreed to localise up to R200 billion of additional production over a five-year period. They have identified 42 products ranging from edible oils to furniture, fruit concentrates, personal protective equipment, steel products and green economy inputs that can be sourced locally.’

A consistent national shift toward buying local goods could unlock more than 2% in additional GDP growth. The SMME sector supports 13.4 million jobs, with only 37% of the total 3 million SMMEs formally registered, yet unemployment continues to sit at 33.5%. These figures are not just statistics; they represent a problem and consumer choices sit at the centre of the solution.

At the recent 14th Annual Proudly South African Buy Local Summit & Expo in Johannesburg, Minister of Small Business Development Stella Ndabeni reinforced the urgency by linking localisation directly to national employment goals. ‘We are confident this will make a significant contribution towards our NDP target of 9 million of the 11 million jobs by 2030 being created through MSMEs,’ she emphasised, underscoring that supporting local enterprises is essential for job creation and economic rebuilding.

The job creation burden largely falls on small business, and time is not a luxury they have. What’s needed is a smarter conversation between consumers and the businesses that serve them. Buying local has always sounded noble; what it needs now is a direct, honest link to the jobs it protects. That’s a story marketers should be telling louder.

Buying local in South Africa is a strategic economic cycle. When consumers choose local goods, their money stays in the economy, supporting jobs, supply chains, product development and community stability.

Ultimately benefiting the buyers themselves. It also builds national pride, turning everyday purchases into acts of solidarity. Marketers play a key role in driving this shift by educating consumers on local labelling, promoting local procurement and reshaping shopping habits.

Ways marketers can drive this shift include:

– Label education and visibility: Marketers can run targeted campaigns educating shoppers on reading labels, countering price-driven decisions with value-based messaging about long-term economic benefits.

– Storytelling with economic impact: Campaigns that go beyond product features to illustrate real economic outcomes. ‘Your purchase of this locally made garment keeps a factory worker employed, supports a rural supplier and keeps money circulating in our communities’, for example. Emotional narratives linking personal choice to family livelihoods and national strength can build deeper engagement than generic appeals.

– Challenge small businesses to be more creative: A direct call for increased ingenuity for local products to thrive in their localisation marketing narrative when pitted against international competitors.

– Promote a cultural shift: By framing purchases as investments in shared prosperity, marketers can elevate localisation from a slogan to an organic disposition and cultural norm.

– Leveraging digital and social proof: Utilising platforms to share user-generated content, testimonials from local entrepreneurs and data on job creation, from studies and official statements, tied to local spending to humanise the movement and serve as a ‘show and prove’ of some sorts.

– Partnerships and increased collaborations: collaborating with influencers, retailers and corporates to embed ‘buy local’ prompts at point-of-sale, online checkouts and advertising. Such connections can scale impact.

– Advocacy for local competitiveness against international rivals: threats like illicit goods and ultra-cheap online imports remain a challenge, but marketers can counter this by promoting the quality, sustainability and ethical standards of local products, helping them stand out both at home and internationally.

– Promoting inclusivity, strengthening rural and marginalised businesses: marketing can help make the economy more inclusive by shining a spotlight on rural and township businesses, connecting them to larger buyers and supply chains. By telling the stories of local artisans, agro-processors and small manufacturers, marketers can show consumers how their purchasing choices help circulate wealth to underserved communities, create jobs where they’re needed most and reduce the gap between urban and rural areas.

A Call for Marketers to Lead the Charge

Localisation succeeds when government, business and consumers align. Every marketing campaign that educates, inspires and normalises choosing local contributes to the NDP’s employment vision, builds producer competitiveness and fosters an inclusive economy. In doing so, marketers do more than sell products, they help build a stronger, prouder and more self-reliant South Africa.

MATTEBLK
http://www.matteblk.africa/

Hook, Line And Sinker Appointed By Top Employers Institute Africa As PR Partner

Rae

May 21, 2026

Hook, Line And Sinker Appointed By Top Employers Institute Africa As PR Partner

Established as a global authority on workplace excellence, Top Employers Institute Africa (TEI) works with some of the world’s most recognised blue-chip brands, delivering a rigorous certification programme, workplace research, and data-led insights, to benchmark and elevate business performance. Operating in 131 countries and certifying more than 2500 organisations globally, TEI has appointed Hook, Line & Sinker (HLS) as PR partner to strengthen its presence across the continent.

TEI’s prestigious annual ‘Top Employers Certification Celebration Dinner is widely regarded as one of the most respected platforms that bring together thousands of senior business leaders to celebrate excellence in people management.

The appointment comes at a time when competition for talent intensifies in Africa, with companies placing greater emphasis on measurable, world-class people strategies. HLS will deliver a strategic, insight-led B2B PR programme designed to build authority, increase visibility and drive commercial growth across markets. The approach combines targeted, high-impact media engagement with executive profiling and thought leadership, positioning TEI leadership at the forefront of the ‘future of work’ conversations.

The PR campaign will also be supported by a digital-first strategy, spanning LinkedIn, SEO-driven content, and multimedia storytelling including podcast and video, to ensure sustained visibility and deeper audience engagement.

‘Africa is a high-growth, high-potential market, and organisations across the continent are recognising that people practices are directly linked to business success,’ said Nazia Osman, Head of Marketing for Africa at Top Employers Institute. ‘We required a partner that understands both the media landscape and the strategic importance of our brand. Hook, Line & Sinker brings the successful combination of insight and award-winning execution to help us strengthen our presence and tell more impactful business stories.’

Adam Hunter, Managing Director of Hook, Line & Sinker, added, ‘Top Employers Institute sits at the centre of one of the most important business conversations globally today, how organisations build high-performing, future-ready workforces. We have worked closely with the team over the past two and a half years and are proud to support the business on a retained basis. Our strength lies in combining B2B PR with digital capabilit y, enabling us to deliver measurable ROI in complex and competitive markets across Africa.’

HOOK, LINE & SINKER
www.hooklinesinker.co.za

The Human Investment That Changes Outcomes

Rae

May 21, 2026

The Human Investment That Changes Outcomes — Liezel Jonkheid, Consumer Psychology Lab.

According to Liezel Jonkheid, Founder and Director, Consumer Psychology Lab, technology is advancing, but customer experience is standing still. ‘In the years since I founded the Consumer Psychology Lab, I have sat with hundreds of leadership teams who are genuinely frustrated.’

They have invested significantly in what they believe is ‘customer experience’. They have the platforms, the dashboards, the automation tools, the AI-assisted workflows. They can show you the technology roadmap. What they cannot always show you is a customer who feels genuinely, consistently well-served.

This is the paradox at the heart of modern CX investment, and it is one I encounter in almost every new client engagement. The technology budget has grown. The customer satisfaction scores have not kept pace. Churn rates have climbed. And when we dig into why, the answer is almost always the same: somewhere along the customer journey, the business confused its technology stack with its CX strategy.

They are not the same thing. And until businesses understand that distinction clearly, they will keep investing in the wrong places and wondering why the returns are not materialising.

Technology Is accumulating. Experience Is Not Improving

There is a well-documented perception gap in customer experience that should concern every senior leader. Research by Bain and Company found that 80% of companies believe they deliver a superior customer experience, while only 8% of their customers agree. That is a fundamental disconnect between how organisations perceive their own capability and what customers actually live through.

This gap is widest in organisations with the most sophisticated and diverse technology and communications channel environments. Not because technology makes things worse, it does not when used well and properly orchestrated, but because the accumulation of ‘tools’ creates a false sense of progress. Each new platform feels like forward motion. Each new integration feels like a problem solved. The organisation is busy, the roadmap is full, and the implicit assumption is that all of this activity must be translating into better experiences for customers.

It often is not. Because technology only creates capability. It does not, by itself, create experience. A customer does not experience your CRM. They experience whether the person they spoke to understood their problem, cared about solving it, and followed through. The tool in the background is invisible to them, and it should be.

What a CX Strategy Actually Is

Strategy is about the human triangle, not the tech stack. We define a CX strategy as the deliberate design of the emotional, psychological, and relational experience a customer has across every touchpoint with your brand. It encompasses how your customers feel when they interact with your people. Whether they feel heard, valued, and respected. Whether the experience reflects a brand that genuinely understands them, or one that is merely ‘processing’ them.

A genuine CX strategy asks different questions from a technology strategy. Not ‘what tools do we have?’ but ‘what do our customers actually need to feel in order to stay, to grow, and to advocate for us?’ Not ‘how do we automate this journey?’ but ‘which moments in this journey are so emotionally significant that they require a human being, and are we investing in that person’s capability to show up well?’

Our research shows that loyalty most often crystallises not in routine interactions, but in moments of service recovery, when something has gone wrong and a customer needs to know that the brand will stand behind its promise. These are precisely the moments that automation cannot handle, and that undertrained, disempowered employees handle badly. The technology investment that matters most in these moments is the investment in the people using it.

How Technology Becomes A Proxy For Strategy

The conflation of technology with strategy happens because technology is tangible, measurable, and easy to present to a board. You can show a platform roadmap. You can demonstrate an integration. You can pull a dashboard. Strategy, particularly the human, relational kind, is much harder to quantify and slower to prove.

And so, over time, the technology investment crowds out the strategic conversation. The organisation optimises for what it can measure through its systems: ticket resolution times, first contact rates, CSAT scores, NPS. These are not unimportant, but they are only proxy metrics. They measure outputs from the system, not the depth of the relationship between the customer and the brand. An organisation can achieve strong proxy metrics while customer trust quietly erodes, and the technology will not tell you that is happening until the churn data does.

We see this this pattern clearly in our market research. Organisations with the most robust CX measurement infrastructure are not consistently outperforming those with simpler setups. What distinguishes the highest performers is not the sophistication of their tools, it is the quality of the conversation happening between their frontline employees and their customers, and the degree to which leadership was investing in that conversation.

The companies that are winning on CX are the ones whose people understand the brand’s promise deeply enough to deliver it, in any channel, in any situation, under any pressure.

The Real Investment Imperative

This is not an argument against technology. It is an argument for using it with strategic intent rather than as a substitute for strategy. When technology is deployed to free frontline employees from administrative burden so they can give full attention to the customer in front of them, it is immensely valuable. When it is deployed to automate the moments that most require human judgement, empathy, and personal connection, it damages the relationship in ways that are difficult and expensive to repair. Ask a customer who has tried to resolve a problem with their bank or cellular provider and had to endure a never-ending loop of automated bots, chats and disempowered contact centre agents reading from a script how they felt about the brand afterwards.

The right question to ask of every technology and channel investment is not ‘can this be automated?’ but ‘what does the customer need in this moment, and does automation serve that need, or does it serve our operational convenience at the customer’s expense?’ These are different questions with very different answers.

Technology and automation should handle the routine so that people can handle the important. That distinction, between the routine and the important, requires a level of customer understanding that only a genuine CX strategy can provide. Without it, businesses automate the wrong things, frustrate customers at the moments that matter most, and then invest in more technology to try to fix the problem they created.

The Human Investment That Changes Outcomes

Your frontline employees are your CX strategy made visible. The return on investment in customer experience is disproportionately driven by the quality of frontline employees: their skills, their confidence, their genuine connection to the brand’s purpose, and the degree to which the organisation has empowered them to make decisions in the customer’s interest.

Frontline employees are the strategy made visible and felt. When we encounter organisations with genuinely excellent customer experience, we almost always find the same thing: leaders who understand that investing in their people’s capability, their emotional intelligence, their product knowledge, their ability to navigate complex and difficult conversations, is the highest-return CX investment available to them.

This investment is consistently underweighted relative to technology spend. I am not advocating for divestment from technology, I am advocating for rebalancing. For recognising that the platform your business runs on is only as good as the people operating it, and that those people need as much deliberate investment as the systems they use.

Given the massive generational diversity now present in both employee and customer populations, the capability to adapt communication style, demonstrate genuine empathy, and navigate differing expectations is among the most commercially valuable skills a frontline team can possess. This is not soft skills development, it is strategic capability building with a direct and measurable impact on retention and revenue.

Start with the end in mind: what does excellent actually feel like for your customer?

A customer experience strategy begins not with a technology selection but with a deep, honest, research-informed understanding of your customer. What matters to them. What frustrates them. What makes them feel valued versus processed. What they need at each stage of their journey, and which of those needs are emotional, not just functional.

Because a CX strategy built on genuine customer insight will make better technology decisions, better process decisions, and better people decisions.

The businesses that will outperform over the next decade on customer experience are not those with the most sophisticated technology environments. They are those that understand the emotional and psychological drivers of their customers’ loyalty, and that have built every element of their operation, human and digital, in service of those drivers.

Technology is just one component of the customer journey. It is not the journey. And until businesses hold that distinction clearly, they will keep investing heavily into technology capability they cannot fully convert into experience.

The stack does not make the strategy. The strategy tells you how to use the stack. Getting that sequence right is, in our experience, among the most consequential decisions a customer-facing business can make.

CONSUMER PSYCHOLOGY LAB
https://consumerlab.co.za

Celerity Exhibiting Messaging Solutions In London

Rae

May 21, 2026

Celerity Exhibiting Messaging Solutions In London

With a 26-year track record and a long-standing global presence, BulkSMS has established itself as a trusted partner for enterprise organisations where message deliverability and reliability are mission-critical. Through robust APIs, BulkSMS enables seamless integration with CRM, ERP and custom-built platforms, handling high volumes of time-sensitive communications with consistent performance.

Celerity, a global messaging group behind BulkSMS and Kero, will exhibit at London Tech Week 2026, bringing a comprehensive deep-dive into the Rich Business Messaging landscape for enterprise brands navigating the rapid convergence of SMS, WhatsApp for Business and RCS for Business (Rich Communication Services).

As AI, emerging technologies and evolving regulatory frameworks reshape how businesses communicate with customers, Celerity will offer visitors a practical, ROI-focused guide to understanding which messaging channels deliver the greatest impact, and how to build future-ready communications platforms that are both secure and scalable.

A standout example of BulkSMS in action is its work with the Castle Triathlon Series in the UK, where real-time SMS communication has played a pivotal role in enhancing participant experience and operational efficiency, from race updates to time-sensitive alerts, demonstrating the enduring power of SMS when it matters most.

Introducing Kero: One Platform, Every Channel

Building on the BulkSMS foundation, Celerity has launched Kero, a unified messaging platform that brings SMS, WhatsApp for Business and RCS for Business together in a single, intelligent ecosystem. Kero is designed to eliminate the complexity of managing multiple messaging channels, empowering businesses to automate customer journeys, personalise engagement and optimise delivery based on real-time behaviour and preferences.

‘Businesses don’t have to choose between reach, richness or reliability. Kero enables them to leverage the strengths of each channel in a hybrid, intelligent way,’ said Richard Simpson, Managing Director of Celerity.

The Messaging Trifecta Explained

At London Tech Week, BulkSMS and Kero will demonstrate how three complementary channels combine into one powerful communications strategy:

SMS: universal, immediate and trusted. Requiring no app and no internet access, SMS remains unmatched in global reach and reliability. It is the backbone of business communications for OTPs, appointment reminders and critical alerts.

WhatsApp for Business: secure, scalable and conversational. Operating in a familiar, trusted environment with end-to-end encryption, WhatsApp for Business is ideal for sensitive customer interactions and service conversations, with full CRM integration capability.

RCS for Business: rich, interactive and branded. The next evolution of mobile messaging, RCS enables brands to deliver visually engaging, interactive content including images, videos, carousels and quick-reply buttons, directly within the native messaging app, transforming the channel into an immersive brand experience.

Richard Simpson, Managing Director of Celerity, explained the group’s philosophy, ‘SMS, RCS and WhatsApp are all channels that deliver messages to mobile devices, but they differ significantly in terms of features, reach and functionality. SMS retains its role as the trusted channel for mission-critical use cases, while RCS for Business and WhatsApp for Business provide the engagement and interactivity that modern customers expect. It’s about understanding the use case of each and selecting the right channel for your audience and objectives.’

Simpson added, ‘We are excited to participate in London Tech Week 2026, where we will demonstrate how businesses can move beyond fragmented communication strategies towards a more unified, customer-centric approach.’

Visit BulkSMS and Kero at London Tech Week 2026 (8-12 June) to discover how the future of business messaging can work for an organisation.

TERESA SERRAS COMMUNICATION

https://tscommunications.co.za

Having The Courage To Let Culture Lead The Way

Rae

May 21, 2026

Having The Courage To Let Culture Lead The Way

Thando Gambushe, Head of Marketing at Humanz ZA, writes that in a creator economy obsessed with polish, performance, and paid placement, one traditional Zulu coming-of-age ceremony offered a different blueprint for influence. When brands entered my friend Sni’s ‘memulo’ not as sponsors, but as natural participants in a lived cultural moment, the result was more than reach, it was resonance. This is what happens when culture leads, and brands are invited to follow.

‘If I get arrested, you’re my lawyer. If I get sick, you’re my doctor.’ It’s the standard university-era pact of lifelong friendship. But no one ever adds, ‘If I have a memulo, you’re my marketer’. Yet, that is exactly where I found myself when my friend Sni asked me to help integrate brand partners into her memulo: the traditional Zulu coming-of-age ceremony marking a young woman’s transition into womanhood.

A memulo is spiritual, ancestral, and deeply personal. It is not an event you would typically associate with a ‘brand deck’. Which is precisely why it worked so well.

Participation, Not Placement

We brought in brands Sni already lived with: Maybelline, Vaseline, and Brutal Fruit. Crucially, these were not cold activations; they were non-monetary partnerships, built on existing trust. These brands were not ‘sponsoring’ a campaign; they were participating in a lived experience.

In an era where audiences are weary of ‘curated’ storytelling, the results were staggering. The memulo’s content generated over 15.9 million organic views. But the real story lay in the sentiment:

Maybelline: A ‘full-face’ moment on the day of the ceremony hit 2.1 million views. With 11000 saves and 1100 shares, the comments called it ‘a national ad’ and ‘too authentic to be free’.

Vaseline: As the impelesi applied makeup by the river, branded umbrellas shielded us from the sun. The content secured 2.6 million views, functioning as a visual and functional necessity rather than a commercial imposition.

Brutal Fruit: Content centred on the communal act of sharing food and drinks the day after, sparked 1.2 million views. Audiences did not discuss advertising; they discussed flavour, friendship, and the ‘realness’ of the moment.

The Shift: Culture Making Space

This was not a case of brands shaping culture. It was culture making space for brands, on its own terms.

The success of these moments reveals a shift in the ‘Signals of Interest’. When people stop talking about placement and start talking about participation, a brand has moved from being a vendor to being a guest. This was only possible because Sni’s circle, her friends and impelesi, didn’t just appear in the content; they became a co-creator ecosystem, amplifying the experience across multiple perspectives.

A Challenge To The Industry

This milestone serves as a blueprint for the next phase of creator-brand relationships.

To brands: If you want real resonance, you must loosen the grip. Authenticity cannot be engineered through a 10-page creative brief, or any form of over-direction. It requires a willingness to exist inside a creator’s real life, not just their deliverables. You must be willing to show up where you’re invited, not just where you can buy a banner.

To creators: We must rethink our value. Instead of viewing partnerships as transactional ‘campaigns’, we should be inviting brands into the milestones and cultural rituals that define us. When we align brands with our heritage and our communities, we are not ‘selling out’: we are providing a bridge.

The future of this industry will not be built on better ads, but instead on the courage to let culture lead the way.

TextB0X Conceptual
www.textboxconceptual.co.za

The Multi-Skilled Workforce Advantage and Rethinking Talent in the Specialist Age

Modern Marketing

May 21, 2026

The Multi-Skilled Workforce Advantage and Rethinking Talent in the Specialist Age — Dhatchani Naidoo, Delta Victor Bravo.

According to Dhatchani Naidoo, Managing Director of Delta Victor Bravo (representing eatbigfish in Africa),a few years ago, while working abroad, she was chatting to a South African friend who had recently emigrated. ‘The locals are miffed with us,’ she said. ‘Apparently we’re making everyone else look bad.’ The faux pas? South Africans in her office were going above and beyond, picking up tasks outside their job descriptions, solving problems that were not technically theirs to solve. It was ruffling feathers because it disrupted the unspoken agreement that you do your bit, and no more.

Naidoo had encountered a similar dynamic, not unkind, not lazy, but distinctly boundaried. ‘That’s not my job’ was a phrase heard often, and it was puzzling. Not because there’s anything wrong with clear role definition, but because it was so foreign to how she had always worked. On home shores, if something needs doing, you do it. That instinct is not learned on a management course. It is forged in an environment where resourcefulness is not optional and it is a competitive advantage the global economy is only now beginning to recognise.

The Wrong Lens

The ‘skills gap’ remains an enduring talking point in Africa. Not enough coders, not enough data scientists, not enough digital marketers. But as we argued in the Africa’s Beautiful Constraints white paper, the problem is not a shortage of skills, it is a shortage of recognition. We are, as one of our interviewees put it, ‘using very Eurocentric and Americanised models of understanding or testing for skill, and therefore we are not able to see the skill.’

Consider the typical African professional. She might switch between three languages in a single meeting, navigate corporate boardrooms and informal market dynamics on the same day, and troubleshoot distribution, power supply, and brand strategy simultaneously. In Europe, any one of those capabilities would be a line item on a CV. In Africa, it’s just an average Tuesday. The white paper describes these professionals as ‘jack of all trades, master of some’, a workforce of extraordinary breadth whose value is invisible to hiring frameworks designed for narrow specialists or with tight parameters.

Specialists Under Scrutiny

Here is the irony, while companies hunt for specialists, the specialist model is under siege. Generative AI is automating precisely the narrow, knowledge-intensive tasks specialists were trained to perform: data analysis, code generation, content production. McKinsey estimates that AI could automate up to 70% of tasks in routine knowledge-work roles. The niche expert whose entire value rested on one deep skill is increasingly competing with a machine that does it faster and cheaper.

What AI cannot replicate is the ability to navigate ambiguity, read a room, improvise when the plan collapses, or bring the kind of cross-referenced intuition that comes from having worn many hats. These are strengths forged in constrained, unpredictable environments, the strengths Africa’s workforce has been developing for generations. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 lists resilience, flexibility, and creative thinking among the most in-demand skills for 2030. Africa has been building these out of necessity long before they became corporate buzzwords.

The Fragility Tax

The real cost of clinging to narrow specialisation is fragility. In Africa, where operating conditions shift constantly, regulatory changes, currency fluctuations, infrastructure failures, political upheaval, a team of specialists who cannot see beyond their own lanes, break at the seams. The white paper documents how African marketers must become experts in distribution, logistics, and community dynamics alongside their ‘official’ job remit. A narrow specialist simply cannot keep up. There is a financial cost too; businesses overpay for scarce specialists only to see them poached, while the multi-skilled professionals who keep the business running, who adapt and problem-solve across functions, are undervalued because their contribution does not fit neatly into a job title.

A Different Kind Of Excellence

The shift is already underway. Companies like IBM and Google have dropped degree requirements for many roles. Deloitte’s research into skills-based hiring confirms that organisations moving beyond traditional qualifications find deeper, more diverse talent pools. Africa’s workforce has been ready for this moment all along. But recognition alone isn’t enough. Global companies need to retire the job description as a checklist of credentials and replace it with a profile of demonstrated capabilities: resourcefulness, cross-cultural fluency, resilience, lateral thinking. The person who taught herself to code on a shared phone, or who built a thriving business from a township garage, is demonstrating exactly the entrepreneurial muscle that companies claim to want.

The Advantage Hiding In Plain Sight

Africa’s multi-skilled workforce is not a consolation prize. It is a genuine competitive advantage; one increasingly aligned with where the global economy is heading. The future belongs to integrators, people who translate between domains, thrive in complexity, and see connections machines cannot. Emilie Wapnick calls them ‘multipotentialites’. In Africa, we might just call them colleagues.

Naidoo’s friend and her still laugh about those early days abroad, two South Africans bemused by the concept of ‘not my job.’ They don’t think there’s anything wrong with how those workplaces operate; healthy boundaries have real value. But what they brought with them, that instinct to see the whole picture and get it done regardless of what the job description says, was not a quirk to be trained out of them. It was an advantage. The world of work is catching up to what Africa’s workforce has known all along: the people who can do more than one thing, and do it with heart, are exactly the people you want in the room when the plan falls apart.

References And Sources

– Africa’s Beautiful Constraints: How to Transform Limitations into Advantage (eatbigfish Africa / Delta Victor Bravo, 2025)
– World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025.
– McKinsey Global Institute, ‘The economic potential of generative AI’ (2023).
– Deloitte, ‘The skills-based organisation’ (2022).
– Emilie Wapnick, How to Be Everything: A Guide for Those Who (Still) Don’t Know What They Want to Be When They Grow Up (2017).
– Harvard Business Review, ‘Skills-Based Hiring Is on the Rise’ (2024).

DELTA VICTOR BRAVO
www.deltavictorbravo.com

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