Marketing masterclass: Why “boring” brands are losing attention
This was the topic at the final session 2025 Marketing Masterclass, hosted by Daily Maverick in partnership with the Association for Communication & Advertising (ACA) and the Marketing Association of South Africa (MASA), eatbigfish Africa's David Blyh.
Special guests Mariska Oosthuizen, chief marketing officer at Sanlam Group, and Arpan Sur, senior director of marketing sub-Saharan Africa at Mondelēz International unpacked unpacked why safe, predictable marketing is failing, and what brands must do instead: be braver, be more human, and be impossible to ignore.
When a cow outperforms your campaign
The session opened with a sobering revelation: a 30-second video of a cow simply chewing grass scored 2.8 out of 5 on system 1's emotion resonance test of professionally produced advertising, outperforming 50% of thousands of other ads in the IPA database (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising in the UK).
This alarming statistic set the stage for a conversation about breaking through what Blyth called the "sea of sameness" drowning modern marketing.
"If you're broke, you can't be boring," declared Oosthuizen, whose team at Sanlam and their agency, Accenture Song, recently won Gold at the Effies for their boundary-pushing F-Show campaign.
This mantra has driven Sanlam to create breakthrough work despite spending a fraction of its competitors' budgets.
Stop interrupting, start entertaining
Both speakers championed a fundamental shift in marketing philosophy: stop interrupting what people are interested in and become what they're interested in.
Sanlam exemplified this with The F-Show - an unbranded comedy show at Theatre on the Square that taught financial literacy through laughter.
Only after audiences were thoroughly entertained did the brand reveal its connection. The campaign tackled two critical tensions: election-year financial pressure and the taboo nature of financial conversations.
"Imagine if every single piece of communication you saw was entertaining," Oosthuizen reflected. "How much more people would engage in what we do?"
Sur took this principle to unexpected places with Lunch Bar's 60th anniversary campaign, creating Bra Lucas with their agency Ogilvy - a fictional conspiracy theorist who linked the chocolate's history to UFO sightings.
"My number one competitor isn't Nestlé chocolates," Sur explained, holding up his phone. "It's this. If the ads aren't interesting enough, the consumer just swipes away."
Getting closer to the consumer, not the powerpoint
Mondelēz’s "hothouse process" challenges every convention of traditional briefing. Starting six months before campaigns launch, agencies aren't briefed in boardrooms but taken directly to a consumer immersion.
For Halls Candy, that meant giving agency partners R10 each to shop in Soweto spaza shops for half a day.
Even more radical: there often is no brief at all. "If you have to brief, do it in one line," Sur insisted. "If it's five pages of a Word document, you've lost it."
This unconventional approach has yielded exceptional results, including the above campaign for both Lunch Bar as well as another award-winning campaign for Cadbury Dairy Milk.
The process culminates in open pitching sessions where ideas can come from anywhere - agency or client side - because "great ideas don't follow a linear sequential process."
Consistency without predictability
Sur offered a powerful metaphor for brand consistency: think of your brand as a book with your campaigns as chapters.
"Each chapter can have different styles - humour, drama, surprise - but they must all contribute to the same story."
This philosophy underpins Cadbury's global positioning of generosity, expressed locally through campaigns like Real Mzansi Names - which used Nelson Mandela's story of being renamed at school to encourage South Africans to make the effort to pronounce each other's names correctly.
"It's one book, one story, but with lots of chapters," Sur explained. "Don't try to change the book. Write interesting chapters."
Selling bold ideas inside the business
Getting buy-in for breakthrough ideas requires courage and conviction.
Oosthuizen had to personally convince Sanlam's CEO to approve the The F-Show campaign. Her strategy? "Be the consumer champion.
Nobody can argue with the consumer. If you can convince your organisation that an insight will resonate with your target market because you truly understand them, it's hard for anyone to argue."
Sur shared how his team once unveiled a Halls campaign to senior management by making them wait at a bus stop in 40-degree heat with no water, then revealing an idea about the cooling sensation of the product.
"How do you interestingly tell your story, so it cuts through the clutter?" he asked. "Sometimes you need to put them in the consumer's shoes."
When limitations become creative fuel
Both brands have turned limitations into creative catalysts. Sanlam's modest budgets forced innovation across multiple platforms - from the One Rand Man (the story of a consumer paid entirely in R1 coins) 12 years ago, to Uk'shona Kwelanga, a WhatsApp drama series about a family dealing with funeral costs that won many awards including at Cannes, to 2-Minute Shower Songs release during Cape Town's water crisis.
"Sometimes when you have big budgets, you actually get a little bit lazy," Oosthuizen observed. "It's good to have constraints to play within."
Similarly, Mondelēz’s constraints led to creative solutions like Cadbury's Generosity Map- an AI-powered campaign that tracked thank-you tweets to map South Africa's most generous cities, ultimately helping improve the country's ranking on the World Giving Index.
Fear is killing creativity
When asked why so few South African brands embrace breakthrough thinking, both speakers pointed to fear and tactical short-termism.
"The mistake brands make is communicating from their own state, not the consumer's state," Sur explained. "There's too much nervousness, and that doesn't bode well for creating resonant ads."
The session closed with powerful advice. Oosthuizen urged marketers to "stay crazy," referencing Apple's iconic campaign: "because the people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do."
Sur's final wisdom cut to the heart of strategic thinking: "Break the stereotype and shape culture, don't follow it."
What it really takes to break through
The session made clear that breaking through isn't about shouting louder - it's about being braver, more entertaining, and more human. When research shows that a cow chewing grass can outperform half of effective advertising, the message is clear: conventional thinking is the enemy.
As Sanlam and Mondelēz demonstrate, when you resolve real consumer tensions through entertainment rather than interruption, when you trust your creative partners and put consumer insights over corporate caution, and when you maintain consistency while delivering surprise, you don't just break through the clutter - you make it irrelevant.