Outside the brief

Anyone who has worked in South African out-of-home (OOH) long enough knows the moment. A strong idea lands on the table. The location is right. The audience insight is sharp. The permissions are possible. The media owner or media operator understands the environment because they work in it every day. A brand manager says, with complete sincerity, that the campaign must “meet South Africans where they are.” The room leans forward. Then procurement asks: “Is the supplier on the preferred list?”

The room leans back. Not because the idea is weak, but because it must now clear a wall before anyone may judge it on merit. That wall has three names: the preferred-supplier list, the preferred media-owner panel and the preferred-agency framework. Each can be a sensible governance tool. Stacked together and left closed, they decide in advance whose innovation gets seen and whose is filed under “non-compliant.”

Let it be said plainly: this is not a hit piece, nor an attack on the agencies, networks or media owners currently winning work inside these frameworks. Many are excellent at what they do, and no one needs to apologise for being on a preferred list. The argument is with a system that has narrowed around them. The question is simple: does the list still manage risk, or has it begun to manage possibility out of the plan?

That narrowing carries a real cost. South Africa’s township economy is widely estimated to be worth more than R1tn a year. This is not a niche, nor an emerging market waiting to be discovered. It is the mainstream economy for millions of people, with its own landmarks, rituals and languages of attention. Yet much of the system controlling formal media spend still treats township relevance as something to be visited, translated and validated from the outside.

Source note: The R1trillion figure is an indicative scale marker; township-economy estimates vary by methodology.

Where audiences live, local knowledge is not a niche advantage. It is the brief ~ Kabelo Kale

How the funnel narrows

Preferred frameworks begin with good intentions. Brands want vetted partners, predictable pricing and audit trails. Procurement wants compliance. Legal wants recourse. Nobody enters the room announcing a plan to exclude innovation.

The problem is what happens next. Exclusion arrives by accumulation: one reasonable safeguard placed upon another until the system rewards whoever is best at paperwork rather than whoever is best at media. The panel becomes a closed loop – the same names, reviewed by the same committees, against criteria that can sit far from the realities of briefing a mural in Katlehong or negotiating site access with a taxi association in Randburg.

The filtering can start before the idea has even had a fair hearing. We receive a prescribed briefing template to complete before our sites may be considered, written as though every valuable media environment can be understood through the same fields. God bless the media owner or media operator whose site is rich in audience knowledge, access and cultural value but short on the particular detail the template has decided is intelligence. The idea may be right for the street and wrong for the spreadsheet – and too often, the spreadsheet gets the final word.

At that point, the logic reverses. Instead of starting with the audience and asking which medium reaches them best, the planner starts with the approved vendor sheet and asks which vendor can be stretched to fit the brief. That is no longer audience-led strategy. It is inventory management presented as planning discipline.

Once the list becomes the measure of safety, everything beyond it is treated as risky by default. A township-based operator with original sites, community consent, insurance and a clean installation record may have to justify itself as though it were untested, while an incumbent with a familiar logo benefits from trust already built into the system.

Exclusion by procedure, not by intent

This is how a neutral-looking system produces an unfair result without ever declaring an unfair intention. Heavy paperwork, unannounced admission windows, opaque scoring and multi-year renewal cycles may not exclude deliberately, but they can exclude effectively.

A small, inventive OOH owner in Diepsloot or Khayelitsha does not employ a bid office to translate a tender into legal, financial and compliance dialect. They have a phone, a working relationship with a rank chairman, a public-liability policy and a reputation that took years to earn in a community that does not hand out second chances.

When the admission process is calibrated to the capabilities of a holding-group company, it silently disqualifies everyone who is not one. The media owner or media operator may be excellent, the sites exceptional and the audience exactly right, but the format of the application filters on something that has nothing to do with media quality.

Opacity carries another risk that should be named without accusation. When criteria are unpublished, renewals unexplained and panels permanently closed, the system becomes harder to audit and easier to mistrust. Transparent rules protect honest people inside the process, protect the client, and cost far less than reputational damage.

The visible result is sameness. Every plan begins to resemble the last one: same formats, same locations, same metrics. Innovation rarely dies in a boardroom vote. It dies in an email that reads, “Unfortunately, this supplier is not on the panel.”

The validation tax

Procedure is only one part of the problem. The other is validation. Frameworks presented as neutral are often calibrated to imported standards. A European or North American methodology, a global behavioural template or a familiar dashboard arrives pre-approved; a local media owner or media operator who invented a format because the audience demanded it arrives as an experiment.

Call it the validation tax: the surcharge an idea pays for not having been approved somewhere else first. A locally engineered format designed for South African streets may have to explain its legitimacy before anyone measures its effect, while a familiar imported platform often arrives with credibility already attached. The issue is not whether imported tools have value. It is whether local proof is forced to work harder than foreign precedent.

Local agencies using imported behavioural templates can also benefit from this structural advantage. Their offerings pre-qualify because the standards were written around them. The framework looks neutral and plays like a home fixture.

None of this is a rejection of global learning. The problem begins when imported validation becomes more credible than local proof, even in environments where local media owners and media operators understand the audience, the space and the operating conditions better.

What gets lost on the street

For clarity, S-OOH refers here to spatial out-of-home: media designed around the specific ways people move through public, commercial and community spaces, rather than around inventory categories alone. Its value lies not only in visibility, but in how well the format understands the behaviour, rhythm and social rules of the place it occupies.

What gets lost in that translation is South African out-of-home at its most original. This is not a downgrade from mall and highway media or other traditional outdoor formats. It is a category in its own right, built around how people actually move through South African space. Taxi ranks, station precincts, spaza walls, car washes, barber shops and high-street foot traffic are not secondary locations. For millions of South Africans, they are among the primary attention environments of the day.

Some local media owners and media operators have already shown what this can look like on the ground: multisensory murals people stop to touch and photograph, lenticular work that changes message depending on where you stand, installations that respect commuter flow, keep wheelchair paths clear and are still maintained long after the launch photographs are filed. That is not decoration. It is engineered cultural relevance.

Yet formal buying processes still classify this work as “alternative,” “niche” or “below-the-line.” The vocabulary becomes the verdict: work made for the street matters less than work made for the highway. That is not a finding. It is a habit, and habits can be retired.

When the ignored becomes undeniable

We have seen a version of this pattern before. Stokvels were once treated by formal financial institutions as informal, even faintly suspicious – something happening beyond the reach of “proper” financial services. Then the scale of money moving through them became harder to ignore, and the conversation changed. Stokvels did not become legitimate because anyone generously included them; formal markets were forced to recognise what communities had understood all along.

Township and street OOH is on the same trajectory. The audiences were always there. The spending power was always there. What changed is that a few brands decided to look past the stigma.

Work by brands such as Castrol and MTN across taxi ranks, car washes, informal mechanic spaces and auto-spares sites matters here not as name-drops, but as proof points. Those examples showed that these spaces are not inherently too complex, too informal or too risky for serious brand investment. When the operating model is respected, funded and measured properly, the so-called alternative environment becomes a mainstream OOH channel. The lesson is not that every street-level idea should be approved automatically. It is that familiar discomfort should not be mistaken for strategic risk.

Outside the preferred list, there is more. More reach. More cultural precision. More trust. More formats that people actually notice.

Accessibility and utility are qualifiers, not garnish

Recognition, however, is not enough. If street-level OOH is to move into the mainstream, two qualities must move with it from the margin of the template to the centre of the decision: accessibility and public usefulness. Any plan that claims national relevance has to work for everyone who uses the space. Ramps, sightlines, tactile elements and safe pedestrian flow are not enhancements; they are conditions of entry.

A campaign can carry world-class creative work and still fail a basic test of public communication if a wheelchair user cannot approach it safely at a taxi rank. Many strong local media owners and media operators already build toward this standard. Preferred frameworks should require it, and should score it.

OOH can also solve problems while it communicates. In townships where waste management is a daily pressure, a site can do more than carry a message: it can support responsible disposal, waste separation, collection or public education, provided the solution is designed with the community and the people responsible for maintaining it. Sustainable wall murals can reduce material waste, use lower-impact production methods, create local work and leave the site better than it was found. That is media delivering value twice – once for the brand and once for the place hosting it.

That broader value is exactly why the template has to change. A framework built mainly around dimensions, traffic counts and CPM, the cost-per-thousand metric that still dominates many media-buying decisions, cannot properly score accessibility, environmental design, maintenance or measurable community benefit. It should not demand that an idea become conventional before it can be considered credible; it should create room to test whether the idea works.

What narrowness costs the client

This narrowness eventually lands on the client’s balance sheet. The cost appears in three places: missed audiences, weaker ideas and false efficiency. First, the brand loses coverage because approved inventory does not reach every market that matters. The township economy is not mysterious; it is under-represented in too many formal planning and procurement systems.

Second, the brand loses competitive tension. When the same few vendors rotate through too many briefs, there is little incentive to propose anything new. Planning becomes a spreadsheet routine – compare CPMs, select an approved option, sign off – and creativity is reduced to a rounding error.

Third, the brand can mistake low cost for strong performance. CPM matters, but it does not measure dwell, recall, cultural relevance, community response or whether the work entered a local conversation. An impression that leaves no memory, no action and no local relevance is not efficient simply because it was cheap.

Doors, not walls

The answer is not less governance. It is better governance – procurement that serves the brief instead of shrinking it. Five decisions can begin now: reserve a meaningful test budget, publish the rules, open admission windows, fast-track credible pilots, and broaden the scorecard beyond CPM:

1. Ring-fence at least fifteen percent of every OOH budget for credible boutique, regional and township partners that meet safety, permissions, insurance and delivery requirements. This is not charity; it is a planning discipline that brings overlooked audiences and ideas into the room while still protecting the client’s standards.

2. Publish admission requirements, scoring criteria and fixed renewal dates. Open applications regularly and give every qualifying media owner or media operator a decision within thirty days.

3. Create a fast-track pilot for formats outside existing categories that can demonstrate relevance, reach, safety and operational readiness. Give the idea a controlled opportunity to prove itself before a template rejects it.

4. Require conflict-of-interest declarations, independent review and transparent reporting for every preferred agreement.

5. Then broaden the scorecard. Measure more than CPM: recall, dwell, cultural relevance, accessibility, sustainability and practical community value.
   

None of these changes weakens governance. They make it more intelligent. Procurement should protect the strategy, not quietly become the strategy. At the next OOH briefing, every client and agency can ask one decisive question before opening the approved vendor sheet: who is the audience, and who understands that audience best?

The bigger opportunity

That question opens a larger opportunity. South African media does not need to import its next chapter; it needs to fund the people already writing it. The township, the street, the taxi rank, car washes, township wall murals and the spaza walls are not fringe media. They are the front line of daily life for millions of people across the country. Brands that work there with respect, operational rigour and genuinely local creativity can build equity no imported dashboard can replicate.

Preferred lists are not the enemy. They should be doors rather than walls: firm enough to protect standards, open enough to admit excellence. When they exclude suppliers without testing their ideas, they also exclude audiences, relevance and growth.

The opportunity is already being built — in public, locally and at street level ~ Kabelo Kale

The next South African media boom is not waiting in a global template. It is already being built in the routes, ranks, walls and gathering places that shape daily life. The opportunity is at the door. Our systems must now decide whether they are designed to recognise it.

Open the gates. Back the builders. Fund the culture.