Generally you can tell within about two seconds if an ad has nothing to say. Drone went up the mountain. Family laughing around the braai in slow motion. Someone with a warm voice telling your journey. Logo lands, ad ends and by the next break it’s out of your head completely.
In this country, storytelling is promised in almost every pitch deck. It seems to be much less common in actual work, largely because it takes more time to do properly and involves telling a client that their product should quietly sit in the background for most of the runtime. That’s a discussion worth having. The proof is in the back catalogue of our own industry.
Why Storytelling Matters in Advertising
Bell’s showed a film made by King James in Cape Town called ‘The Reader’. An elderly man learns to read. It takes months and you watch him struggle through it alone. At the end he walks into a pub and puts a book in front of his son and tells him he has read it. His son put it in writing. They drink a whisky.
The whisky is on screen for like four seconds. South Africans are still talking about that ad more than a decade later, usually with a slightly embarrassed admission that it made them cry. There aren’t many product-led campaigns that have that kind of shelf life.
This is what a good story gives you:
Speed. First feeling, second information. A story comes at two and a half seconds. In eight seconds, your viewer has scrolled past your product benefits list.
Traction in a complex market. South Africa has twelve languages, a number of overlapping histories and a very sharp collective radar for who’s faking it. Honest work travels here. Generic work gets ignored in every language at once.
Recall. People remember what happened to a character much longer than they remember a claim. Ask anyone for a bank’s positioning line. Then ask them about the guy that got paid in R1’s.
Free distribution. Stories get sent to group chats. Value propositions don’t.
Key Storytelling Techniques for South African Advertising
1. Start with a real tension
Every story needs something pushing against it. Sanlam’s “One Rand Man” is the cleanest example we have. A guy receives his entire monthly salary in R1 coins. You then watch him carry buckets of change to pay rent, count coins out for a beer, and physically see his money leaving his hands.
South Africans are notoriously poor savers, with household debt standing at about three-quarters of after-tax income. Telling people off about it has simply never worked. Instead, Sanlam manufactured a situation and watched the audience get uncomfortable.
So before you write anything, figure out what your audience is really struggling with and build from there.
2. Be specific enough to make someone uncomfortable
Nando’s has made a career out of saying what everyone is thinking but nobody wants to say. Xenophobia. Racial assumptions. Whichever politician is embarrassing us that quarter. Some of those ads got pulled but all of them got talked about.
Your brand might not have that licence, and that is fine. Specificity is the part to steal. Family is a category, not a story. A mother taking two taxis to fetch her kid from crèche because the school bus route got cancelled is a story. Detail is what makes work feel true.
3. Use local reference properly
Chicken Licken’s “Big John,” from Joe Public, told the story of an African man who found Europe before Europe found Africa. This was big, funny, beautifully shot, and timed to land alongside a Marvel release that had the whole country talking. The hashtag was tending higher than the film.
That campaign worked because the culture was the idea. The lazy version of this is to throw in a gumboot dance and a “sharp sharp” and hope nobody notices that there is no story underneath. Audiences notice every time. Costume borrowed as culture kills trust quickly.
4. Write characters, and let them be flawed
“Urban female, 25 to 34, LSM 7 to 9” has never made anyone feel anything. Give your main character a want, an obstacle, and a bad habit. Perfect people are boring on screen and no one believes them anyway.
Here, representation matters, and it goes beyond casting. When the person on screen genuinely sounds like your audience, and their kitchen looks like their kitchen, the work stops feeling like an ad and starts feeling like recognition.
5. Make it work on mute
Around 85% of social videos are watched without sound. Play your edit on silent and show it to someone who has never seen it. If they can’t follow what is happening, you have a radio ad with pictures attached. Get it right before you spend the media Rands.
6. Keep the brand in a supporting role
This is the hardest note to give a client. Your logo is not the star. It’s the brand’s job to make the resolution happen and then step back. Bell’s knew that, which is exactly why people still remember the whisky.
When a product has to appear in every frame, it usually means the story is too weak to hold attention by itself. That’s a writing problem, and more logo is not the solution.
7. Earn purpose before you claim it
Purpose-led work is everywhere at the moment and a lot of it is empty. South Africans are very good at spotting when a brand is milking a social issue for reputation.
Try something easy. Would this campaign pass the test if you asked the community in it to sign off publicly? If that question makes you flinch, walk away. A brand talking about youth unemployment while paying its interns nothing will get found out, and the internet will do it loudly.
Cultural Considerations in Storytelling
Measuring the Impact of Storytelling
Likes are the weakest number on your dashboard. These are more useful:
Conclusion
None of this is some sort of secret formula. Find a real tension. Put a specific person in it. Be honest about who you are talking to. Keep the brand humble enough to let the story breathe.
Many agencies will skip all of that because it is slower and means telling clients things they would rather not hear. We quite enjoy that part.
If your brand has something real to say and you’re tired of work that looks like everyone else’s, let’s talk. Have a look at what we’ve made and let’s craft something impactful together.