Sarel du Plessis new MASA CEO

His 32-year career in the media industry has been spent in advertising, marketing disciplines and newspaper publishing. He started his first publication while still at the Rand Afrikaans University (UJ). During his early career at Republican Press he held numerous titles in the agricultural publication Farmers Weekly: advertising representative, marketing and promotions manager and co-founder of Smallholder. He was then appointed as the managing editor of Boereforum, a free monthly newspaper distributed to farmers in the northern regions of SA.

He has also held a number of positions at Times Media Limited of regional manager for KwaZulu-Natal, business manager of the Business Day and sales and marketing director for Times Newspapers, publisher of Sunday Times, Business Day and others.

At the Media24 stable, du Plessis was the senior general manager and founder of Ads24, publisher of its Sunday newspaper division RCP Media, chair of Mooivaal Media and represented it on a number of industry boards such as SAARF, ASA, etc. His last stint there was as CEO of News Media North, where he was the publisher of Rapport, Beeld, Volksblad, Sondag and Mooivaal media.