For all the talk about a lack of skills in South Africa’s advertising industry, its man of the moment, Groovin Nchabeleng, may just have the answers.
Nchabeleng, this year’s AdReview advertising person of the year, also comes in handy when another South African ill, the lack of entrepreneurship, is discussed.
In what seems like a lifetime ago, a young graduate walked into the offices of international advertising agency Leo Burnett as a starry-eyed junior account executive. It was 1995. Eleven years later, the same youngster returned to buy a majority stake and become the group’s chief executive (South Africa).
Nchabeleng, who lists creative and business skills as the major challenges facing the industry, may not need to look too far for ways to turn the situation around.
“The first account I was put on to was the SAA account. You would remember that South Africa was transforming at the time and so was SAA. I was the first black person to work on their account and, one day, the account director asked me if I had been on a plane. I said no. Then he asked [SAA officials] how they expected me to work on their account when I had never been on one of their planes.”
The upshot of that conversation, held three months into the job, was that Nchabeleng flew business class to New York and stayed at a five-star hotel on Lexington Avenue.
The world was never going to be the same again for the youngster who, hitherto, had called driving to Durban with friends a long-haul trip. Suddenly it was much bigger than Atteridgeville, the township east of Pretoria where Nchabeleng was born and raised. Time at Leo Burnett’s New York office further suggested that the world was indeed a village and all could be citizens of it if they so wished.
“I came back with a different mindset. My peers knew me as the guy who had been to New York. I was the hero. Very soon thereafter I was the blue-eyed boy of Leo Burnett. I never looked back.”
Not all employers have the resources to take their most promising employees to New York. But, as was proven in Nchabeleng’s case, motivation and mentoring to the best of an organisation’s ability can go far in getting the best out of recruits — and being proud of its input when the time for them to move on arrives, as it did once the entrepreneur bug bit Nchabeleng.
After Leo Burnett lost the SAA account, Nchabeleng joined a few agencies before venturing out on his own in 1999 to start Blueprint.
The founding of Blueprint was the logical next step from where he had begun. With job opportunities having opened up with the dawn of democracy in the mid 1990s, the turn of the century was the era of equity ownership.
Though the company had raked in business worth R50million in its first few years of its existence, the reality of the advertising world’s cosmopolitan nature could not be escaped.
That, along with cash flow and other resource problems — some real, others perceived — that small to medium-size enterprises face, meant that Blueprint had to rethink its operating model as a proudly, wholly owned black business unit able to compete head-on with others in the industry.
A second attempt to convince Zeona Motshabi and her partners to sell the controlling stake of Lobedu Communications Group — the entity through which Leo Burnett ran its South African operations — to Nchabeleng’s investment vehicle, Koni Media, succeeded.
Nchabeleng had travelled full circle. He was back at Leo Burnett. This time, though, he was the boss.
“It showed the maturity of BEE; one BEE company could sell to another BEE company.”
It is a journey that should have all the hallmarks of what appears to be Nchabeleng’s favourite word, at least for the interview: fulfilment.
“Nothing is impossible if you believe, focus and work hard. One of the ladies who worked at Blueprint said to me at the time: “So it is possible for me to come back and buy Blueprint one day. I said, yes, it is.”
But the most humbling experience remains the honour bestowed on Nchabeleng by industry players.
“To be recognised by your peers … [takes a deep breath] there is an element of fulfilment. I don’t want to sound like I am denigrating the other achievements, but when it is your peers saying we recognise what you are doing, it is different.
“It says to me that they recognise leadership skills, creativity … They are looking at you in totality,” he says, as though the honour has yet to sink in.
And, despite being only 35, the youngest winner of the award, NchaÂbeleng is not about to rest on his many laurels.
Again, the impression imprinted on him by the Americans about seeing things in superlative terms looms large. He is reluctant to go into details about what is next for him, except to say: “I haven’t even scratched the surface.”
The industry cannot say it has not been warned.