Tshidi Phali from Havas Media’s digital team took home the Social Wiz of the Year Award. The award honours and recognises the brightest and most promising marketer under the age of 25, who has mastered the use of social media to elevate brand awareness and it’s engagement through strategic communication with audiences. Phali is in fact a social media trader at Havas, meaning first and foremost her daily expertise surround back-end management (go-lives, planning and optimisations) of social campaigns on the tech side of the platform. This means she gets to see what few have eyes on: the actual technology behind the building of brands on social platforms. Taking this one step further, she then works with the greater biddable team to ensure the learnings and curation of content happening on social plugs into the greater marketplace online.
In the past year, Havas has specifically focused on producing ad-tech professionals who not only understand the way the consumer and content interact on biddable platforms, but who also understand how to take these insights into other departments. This places Phali and her team as the glue across agency departments from an insights and learnings perspective. “That’s the whole point of the data we generate in ad-ops – making sure clients know precisely what works for them, and raising the bar on performance for the industry as a whole”, says Phali. Data from biddable platforms is then integrated with learnings on ATL media, piped through into the creative teams as best-practice guidelines, and then brought full-circle into the hands of clients.
“Havas has thrown everything into developing young professionals like Tshidi”, says Katherine Couzyn (MD of Havas Media), “and with young experts like her at the helm, we plan to bring this integrated approach to the rest of the continent as well. We’re very proud of her!”
