A South African creative ad agency built to move faster than the industry it works in

IMS is a creative ad agency based in Fourways, Johannesburg, working with clients across South Africa, the United States and Europe. We help businesses adapt to the way people discover, assess and choose brands today.

We're a team that gets restless waiting for the next platform shift, the next algorithm update, the next way people will search for a business, so we spend a lot of our time already there, testing it, before it becomes the industry norm.

We bring strategy, design, media and data together so that every part of a campaign works towards the same goal.

We're deliberately structured to move quickly. Decisions don't sit in committee, campaigns don't wait on office hours, and a good idea doesn't lose momentum because of internal process.

Working across countries and time zones has also taught us to be responsive, resourceful and dependable. We understand that our clients need an agency that keeps projects moving and finds solutions when circumstances change.

Every engagement starts with research, not assumptions. Before recommending a media plan, developing a campaign or writing a line of copy, we take the time to understand the business, its audience and the decisions customers make along the way.

We look at what people are searching for, the questions they are asking, the alternatives they are comparing and any gaps that may be preventing the business from being discovered or chosen.

In December 2022, IMS began exploring generative AI and its impact on search. At the time, tools such as ChatGPT were still new to most businesses, but we could already see that they would change the way people searched for information and evaluated their options.

That early curiosity turned into a real discipline: alongside traditional SEO, IMS has spent years building out Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), helping brands get found, cited and recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity, not just Google.

For us, GEO is not simply an additional service. It is an important part of how discoverability is evolving and how brands will need to position themselves for the future of search.

IMS brings together the disciplines that determine whether a business gets found, understood and chosen, both by people and by the AI tools more of them are using to decide:

●        Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), for visibility inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity

●        Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), for traditional organic visibility

●        Design, Development & UX, for websites and digital products people actually want to use

●        Social Media, for content, community and paid social that builds an audience

●        Media & Click Fraud Prevention, for search, social, display and video campaigns that protect every rand of spend

●        Strategy & Research, so decisions are backed by data, not guesswork

●        Analytics & Reporting, with GA4, Looker Studio and BigQuery dashboards that make performance easy to read

●        Discoverability Services, combining SEO, Google Ads, GEO, social listening and AI monitoring in one view

●        Data Intelligence & Insights, turning retail, e-commerce and marketing data into forecasts businesses can act on

Our client roster spans grocery retail and e-commerce, mining technology, entertainment, professional services, non-profit and life sciences, brands including SPAR2U, Big Talk Entertainment, Inside Data, LDV South Africa, The NBI, Goscor Lift Trucks, DWYKA Mining and Sinderella Costume Hire. They're less alike than they might first seem, but every one of them needs the same thing: to be easy to find, easy to understand, and easy to choose, wherever their customers are actually looking.