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Net#work BBDO's #SendMe ad aimed at President Ramaphosa

By Juanita Pienaar

8 Mar 2018

Yesterday, Net#work BBDO tweeted about their #SendMe full-page ad in Business Day, in which CCO Mike Schalit wrote to President Cyril Ramaphosa.

Net#work BBDO's #SendMe ad aimed at President Ramaphosa

Here Boniswa Pezisa, CEO of Net#work BBDO lets us in on how BBDO was started, the history of the company and its values and how this ties into what they are trying to achieve with the ad.

As Creative Activists, We Believe It’s Time We Raise Our Hands Too and Mobilise For A Creative Summit. To Ideate For Solutions To Take Our Country Forward pic.twitter.com/qIs89A3Wsb
— Boniswa Pezisa (@BoniswaPezisa) March 8, 2018

“We were born on 1 May 1994. So, you can either look at it as we were nuts or that we saw an opportunity. We see ourselves as a bunch of creative activists, so we liked to think that we saw it as an opportunity. Mike Schalit, one of the founding partners, always says, ‘Well, we just decided to start an agency to sell all those baked beans that we stockpiled.’”

“When everyone was hoarding baked beans, we were working out how to sell them.” – Mike Schalit

Refining and reforming the agency's culture

Pezisa explains that starting an agency at that time gave them a lot of clues and reformed and refined their culture. "We are hand raisers as an agency. And in fact, it's part of our values. So, when we employ people, we really try and look for a hand raiser. Because if you're not a hand raiser, you're not going to fit in here quite well because to be a hand raiser you have to be a doer,” she says.

Get on it and do it and stop talking about it.

“Today it is no secret that South Africa has come to an interesting time in its history, again 24 years later," says Pezisa. "Now we actually have to rebuild this country. That takes all sorts of minds and approaches and strategies. One of them is creativity.

"I used to work at an agency that was integral in developing the peace campaign because at that time we had all these killings in KwaZulu-Natal and in many areas in the country where we were killing each other and it was certain that in order to do this the nation needed to be mobilised around peace for us to actually have a peaceful settlement. That campaign was developed by creative people."

Mike Schalit, Anthony Kawitzky (Marlboro Originals), Clinton Mitri (COO at BBDO South Africa), Emma Strydom. Images supplied.

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Pezisa says this really resonated and there was a song written about it. Interesting enough Mike Schalit worked on it as well. "That campaign and the song to really mobilise it and we were all wearing these two doves on our lapels and stickers on our cars. It was an interesting time. In fact, the foreign media arrived here expecting a bloodbath and we gave them peace. Which was something amazing. And our country is at that point again where if we pull together, a miracle can come out of this again," she says.

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Sustainable organisation

"We looked at this and discussing it, as a board and a bunch of creatives, we asked what if we raised our hands to the state president. He's got so many challenges facing him but one thing that he hasn't looked to is creativity. So, we are raising our hand!"

Here we are, we're putting up our hand @CyrilRamaphosa - we want you to #SendMe Today, we placed a full page ad in the @BDliveSA
so its clear we're ready https://t.co/vJayVJC87f @mikeschalit pic.twitter.com/I4AyiOE4Cp
— Network BBDO (@NetworkBBDO) March 8, 2018

Pezisa says that the word sustainability wasn't as fashionable as it is today but from day one BBDO was a sustainable organisation. “We were really committed to sustainability and doing things that were going to transform this country,” she says. “Because we actually realised that there was a reason our company was founded at that time. Back then it wasn't a public holiday but it was Worker's Day all around the world, except in South Africa. And we (BBDO) are workers.”

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It's in that motivation, says Pezisa, to say that they are raising their hands to the president and that they are going to do the best they can to actually have a creative summit with him to really liberate the creative star power of this country. “As a creative industry in this country, we punch way above our little budgets and everything else in terms of just the output that comes out of here,” she concludes.