Durban and Cape Town agency entered a single submission: the business itself – and scoops one of two awards in the category.
TDMC (The Digital Media Collective) collected the Bronze Award for Large Agency of the Year at this year’s The Mark Awards by MarkLives.com, South Africa’s longest-running marketing and media industry publication. The award reflects TDMC’s respected presence in the South African digital media agency landscape.
Now in its second year, The Mark Awards has quickly become one of the industry’s most closely watched nights, recognising the agencies, brands and people shaping South African marketing. Agency of the Year asks judges to weigh up a business as a whole: its people, structure, strategic direction, client relationships and campaigns – the work it does and how it does it.
“Awards aren’t the scoreboard we run the business against. Our clients are,” says Cheryl Ingram, founder and CEO of TDMC. “We intentionally didn’t build a campaign for this one. We put in who and what we are and left it at that. Getting placed against agencies that entered a dozen categories tells you something about the work our teams turn out every day, no dressing up or puffery.”
Founded in 2013, TDMC now employs more than 70 people across offices in Durban and Cape Town, managing a portfolio of over 120 brands across sub-Saharan Africa. The agency runs three business units – Media, Creative and Commerce, under what it calls its end-to-end “Demand. Shelf. Doorstep.” proposition.
TDMC is also a rare beast in the digital media playing field as it holds Google Premier Partner, Meta Business Partner, Shopify Plus Partner and Klaviyo Partner accreditations together, a combination no other agency in the region currently holds.
TDMC’s client roster includes long-standing relationships with clients in a variety of categories, including Homechoice, Toys R Us/Babies R Us, Joekels, Jockey, Salomon, Retailability, and Futurelife, among others, as well as a successful pro bono partnership with the National Sea Rescue Institute. Of immense pride for Ingram and her fellow directors is that the agency’s internship programme has become its main route into the business: 28 of its current 70 staff started out as interns.
“The part I’m proudest of isn’t sitting on the trophy shelf,” says Ingram. “It’s that a third of this business grew up inside it. We’d rather train people properly than buy them in ready-made, and this result belongs to them as much as anyone.” Media director Caleb Shepard received the award and is a product of the company’s robust internship program, having first dipped his toes in the TDMC eco system as a student.
The award comes on the back of a significant recent partnership with the CA&S Group, intended to link TDMC’s digital and commerce capability to physical distribution across Africa. The new partnership with one of Africa’s largest FMCG service businesses is another feather in the cap for Ingram and team and signifies a new era for TDMC, not only as one of South Africa’s most accomplished and respected digital agencies but certainly one of the continent’s.
“We know at TDMC that clients don’t just want a supplier who executes a brief,” Ingram says. “They want expertise that is coupled with transparency and a team who’ll tell them when the brief itself is wrong or needs to shift based on our proven knowledge – that’s a harder business to run but it’s also a better one to be in, and we’re not changing that to win more metal.”
