Growing Greatness by Pepe Marais

Author:Pepe Marais
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: [ISBN here]
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
Published: 2018-06-12T18:49:37+00:00

Long live Take-Away Advertising

In June 2009 I was invited to judge the Direct Category at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival, the World Cup of our creative industry. I was representing South Africa amongst the best creatives on the planet on our industry’s most prominent and prestigious platform.

On the first night, all the judges were invited by the CEO of the event to an opening gala dinner. I was sitting at my table when someone tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Hi, I am Antoine Houtsma from The Netherlands. I have been looking forward to meeting you since 1998.’

Cannes remains one of the professional highlights of my career, showcasing the extraordinary magnitude to which we can express ourselves in our craft as creators of advertising. The experience gained from sharing a room with 30 highly talented creative professionals from 27 different countries, sifting through thousands of entries in order to find the best communication the world has to offer, was priceless.

It was only when I looked at our South African industry from this global perspective that I realised how isolated we were geographically within a greater global context. Imagine my surprise when I was invited to dinner by a group of judges on my panel, only to be interrogated over a three-course sit-down meal about our ‘revolutionary’ Take-Away advertising model.

One of the key interrogators was the very same Dutch creative director who I had met at the gala dinner the night before. It very soon became apparent that if ever there was someone seemingly as obsessed with the Take-Away model as I was, it would have to be Antoine Houtsma. As it turned out, Antoine had closely followed our model and the growth of our agency since its inception in 1998. Suddenly his opening statement at our first meeting made sense.

Based on our shared passion for changing the face of advertising, we became friends instantly, spending most of our spare time in each other’s company during the judging week, talking about anything and everything – from the power of disruption to the Take-Away advertising model to the joy of owning your own business. ‘One day when we own a global advertising group, we will be hosting our annual agency party on our own Joe Public yacht,’ we joked.

Antoine, who at that stage was working at a company called Doom & Dickson in Amsterdam, was very clear that he would eventually start his own agency. I couldn’t support this notion more, motivating him through telling our story. In the end, we agreed that if he ever decided to resign from his current agency to start his own, it would be under the Joe Public name and Take-Away model.

On returning to reality in South Africa, I found myself back in the trenches with Gareth, Laurent, Xolisa and our team, fighting off a full-blown recession on all fronts. And although Antoine and I stayed in contact by email, our global ambitions on the faraway shores of Cannes were soon a distant memory.

The recovery of our

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