For marketers, this raises an important question: as media becomes more digital, automated and audience-led, how do brands maintain a meaningful physical presence in the communities they want to serve?
One answer may be sitting in plain sight: the township wall mural.
But the opportunity is no longer simply about painting a brand message onto a highly visible wall. The evolution of township out-of-home (OOH) is increasingly about combining location intelligence, community relevance, creativity and innovation to transform physical media from passive visibility into a meaningful brand experience.
For Owakhe Media, this is precisely why innovation within the township OOH environment remains a strategic priority.
The commercial importance of South Africa's township economy makes it impossible for major consumer brands to ignore. But reaching consumers and meaningfully connecting with them are two different things.
The 2025 South African Township CX Report paints a picture of an increasingly adaptive and connected consumer. It highlights the importance of affordability, trusted local retail environments such as spaza shops and growing digital connectivity in shaping consumer behaviour.
For marketers, the implication is clear: township consumers cannot simply be treated as a homogeneous "mass market", and effective township marketing cannot be reduced to buying additional impressions.
Brands need to understand where people live, how they commute, where they shop and socialise, and which places form part of their everyday routines. This is where township OOH can play a distinctive role.
A strategically selected wall places a brand directly within the consumer's everyday physical environment. Unlike an advert that disappears when someone scrolls past it or switches off a screen, a mural becomes part of the physical landscape consumers repeatedly move through.
But not every available wall is valuable.
Effective township OOH requires an understanding of pedestrian movement, taxi and public-transport routes, retail nodes, schools, entertainment areas, road intersections and community gathering points. Township movement patterns do not necessarily mirror those of traditional suburban or metropolitan OOH environments.
The opportunity, therefore, is not simply to find a wall. It is to understand the audience around that wall, what makes them tick, where they are going and what matters to them.
Owakhe Media's recent work for Unilever's Knorrox demonstrates this thinking in practice.
Owakhe activated 23 wall murals across Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, the Western Cape and Eastern Cape, combining large-format wall murals with spaza and store branding. All sites delivered against their estimated reach targets, resulting in zero under delivery.
To put the scale into context, the campaign's monthly impression volume was equivalent to approximately 55% of South Africa's total population of 63.5 million. This does not mean 55% of South Africans were individually reached; rather, it illustrates the scale and frequency of exposure that strategically placed township OOH can generate.
But scale was only one part of the strategy.
In Soweto, the Pimville mural was positioned opposite Maponya Mall on Chris Hani Road, close to the University of Johannesburg's Soweto campus. The Diepkloof execution occupied one of the primary entry and exit points into Soweto near Nasrec and FNB Stadium, while the Orlando East site was positioned on Mashupa Road near Orlando Stadium.
Across the broader campaign, sites were selected around taxi routes, shopping centres, schools, recreation facilities and informal retail environments.
This is location intelligence applied to OOH: not merely identifying where an audience exists but understanding the places that repeatedly feature in its everyday life.
Location also creates an opportunity for OOH to play a role beyond awareness.
For Knorrox, Owakhe paired large-format murals with spaza and store-level branding within the same communities. Murals created broad visibility, while retail branding brought the brand closer to consideration and purchase.
A consumer could encounter Knorrox while commuting through the community and encounter the brand again when entering a local retail environment.
This gives township OOH an interesting role within the broader media ecosystem. Television can create national fame. Digital and social can build conversation. Search can capture active intent. Retail can influence consumers close to purchase.
For FMCG businesses such as Unilever, whose brands participate in frequent, everyday purchasing occasions, that proximity has relevance. OOH can create presence within the consumer's daily journey while retail branding reinforces the brand closer to the moment of choice.
Location creates relevance, but creativity determines whether that presence gets noticed.
As consumers become accustomed to increasingly sophisticated digital, entertainment and brand experiences, physical media must compete harder for attention. Innovation therefore cannot simply mean making a wall bigger.
The more useful question is: what can we do differently that makes this environment more engaging for the consumer and more valuable for the advertiser?
That thinking informed the centrepiece of the Knorrox campaign.
At Orlando East in Soweto, Owakhe transformed a conventional mural through an execution called "Bringing the Kitchen to Life." The installation was inspired by Knorrox's"We Give A Bull" campaign, a purpose-led initiative focused on supporting community kitchens and highlighting the brand's promise of nourishment and everyday cooking into the heart of the community.
A three-dimensional kitchen structure extended from the mural, while a live smoke effect simulated a cooking environment. The location itself was selected for its connection to daily food-purchasing behaviour and community activity.
The innovation was rooted in the product occasion. Knorrox is associated with cooking and everyday family meals, so rather than simply communicating that association on a wall, the execution brought the cooking occasion into the physical environment.
The result was an execution designed not only to be seen, but to disrupt the familiar streetscape and invite a second look.
The Knorrox execution forms part of a broader evolution within township OOH.
Three-dimensional elements, hyper-realistic artwork, Wi-Fi-enabled murals, glow-in-the-dark treatments, augmented reality and interactive formats are expanding what a wall can potentially do.
Owakhe has been exploring this intersection for years. But technology for technology's sake is not innovation.
A Wi-Fi-enabled mural can connect physical exposure with digital engagement. A 3D execution can create visual disruption. Sensory elements can bring a product occasion to life.
This is where the potential of township murals becomes particularly interesting: the physical wall can deliver visibility and frequency, while creative and digital layers can transform it into an experience, an engagement point and a bridge between physical and digital media.
"For Owakhe Media, innovation is not about abandoning the fundamentals of township OOH; it is about strengthening them," say Muzi.
Those fundamentals remain important: the right location, strong production quality, culturally relevant creative and a clear understanding of how consumers move through their environment.
Township consumers experience the same sophisticated entertainment, technology and brand communications as consumers anywhere else. There is therefore no reason the advertising environments serving these communities should accept a lower standard of creativity or execution.
For Owakhe, innovation is consequently as much about respect for the audience as it is about technology.
It means continually asking how the medium can be better executed, better located, more relevant and more engaging, ultimately creating greater value for consumers and advertisers.
The future of township OOH should not be framed as traditional versus digital. The greater opportunity lies in combining the strengths of both.
The Knorrox campaign demonstrates what that can look like: strategically selected murals built community visibility; store-level branding brought the brand closer to purchase; and an experiential 3D execution demonstrated how creative innovation can take a traditional medium further.
The numbers demonstrate scale, but the more useful strategic lesson lies behind them:
For brands like Unilever seeking to reach South Africa's township consumer, the question should therefore not simply be: How many people can we reach?
It should also be: Where are we reaching them? Why does that location matter? Does our execution understand the community in which it lives? And are we giving people something worth noticing?
When those questions drive the strategy, a wall stops being simply another advertising surface.
