SA agencies take top spots in MMA EMEA Smarties Business Impact Index

Sarah Utermark, country director of the MMA SA and Digitas Liquorice’s CEO and founder, Miles Murphy.

Liquorice was named as #1. The Global Index also has two South African digital agencies in its top 5 ranking with Digitas Liquorice at #2 and Yonder Media at #3.

Significant achievement

The MMA BII ranks agencies, (media, creative and specialist), holding companies, agency networks, advertisers, brands and technology enablers that deliver the highest level of business impact through mobile-first campaigns from the entries to the MMA 2017 Smarties. The Index is based on the World Advertising Research Centre’s (Warc) methodology, the global authority on advertising and media effectiveness.

“This is a significant achievement for South African digital agencies and a testament to their ability to grow their clients’ business models through mobile. They have performed exceedingly well against their peers, outperforming most of the global players, highlighting that South African agencies are as well developed in mobile as their global counterparts. This despite the perception that these countries are further along the development curve when it comes to mobile,” says Sarah Utermark, country director of the MMA SA.

“It’s an honour to be recognised on both the global and local stage, particularly when it’s for an organisation as prestigious and renowned as the Mobile Marketing Association,” comments Digitas Liquorice’s CEO and founder, Miles Murphy. “Each of our campaigns entered into the 2017 Smarties had different business objectives, therefore the impact varies.

A lot to be proud of

However, Amarula’s #NameThemSaveThem raised awareness around elephant poaching with the campaign reaching 15 million people and all 400,000 elephants named. And for SA Homeloans House Rules we created a series of hilarious short video content that an audience who wasn’t looking for a home or in the mood for serious financial talk would want to watch, and generated potential leads of up to R4.8bn.”

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In the BII’s Advertisers global category South African brands also performed well. Yum! Brands ranked #4 and Distell Group ranked #25 (out of nearly 200 advertisers). Within the Brands global category Shoprite is #15, KFC #24 and Amarula #25. This out of over 270 brands.

“These South African brands and digital agencies have a lot to be proud of and demonstrate the level of expertise that we, as a country, possess. The MMA SA congratulates all the winners,” concludes Utermark.

View the full list of results here.

The MMA Smarties 2018 are open to accept entries and submissions. These will count towards the 2018 MMA Business Impact Index (2018).