When news about KAIIA, a South African AI platform capable of understanding local culture and communicating in the 11 official languages, was first “leaked” to the public, some couldn’t wait to get their hands on the home-grown virtual assistant. Users quickly noticed that while the platform functioned like any other LLM, it was fixated on fried chicken. It turned out that KAIIA (Kentucky AI Integrated Assistant) was part of a KFC advertising campaign and that the LLM would do anything to experience the taste of the Colonel's chicken with its 11 herbs and spices.
This custom-trained LLM was the brainchild of a d a agency Ogilvy South Africa, specifically its Innovation Lab, which brings creatives and technologists together to solve clients’ problems. The labs are also spaces where the Ogilvy team can inspire clients to explore how to engage their customers in different ways, says Melissa Carney, MD of the company’s digital services offering, Ogilvy One. “We know that there are loads of channels you can use to reach your audience, but many of the different channels we're dealing with are very congested,” she says. “With the Innovation Lab, we try to look at how we can create something new. I don’t want to use the word disruptive, but it’s something that’s more engaging than a Facebook post or a billboard.” Carney played a big role in setting up the labs and says the aim was to bring together teams of developers, technologists and creatives to experiment, be inspired, immerse themselves in technology, and try to solve problems differently.
She’s clear that the goal is always to build something scalable. It doesn’t make sense to create an immersive campaign using an Oculus VR headset if it’s inaccessible to the audience. “We have to build stuff that can be put out into the world for people to experience. We can’t just develop something that's cool, but end up having to throw it away because it isn’t practical for a real audience. We’re not just doing this so that someone can have a little bit of fun. Are we selling more chicken? Are we getting people to eat a chocolate? Are we getting them to open an account with a bank?”
A good example of this is its TikTok Test Drive campaign, says Nkanyezi Masango, chief creative officer at Ogilvy Cape Town. Before the Audi RS3 arrived in the country, the Ogilvy team wanted to give local consumers the opportunity to take the car for a spin. According to the campaign, 94% of people who test-drive an Audi buy one, but people aren’t visiting dealerships to get more information about cars, they’re looking online. The interactive ad campaign adapted TikTok’s native “phone turn” feature, transforming the viewer’s phone into a steering wheel so they could take the car for a test drive. “Here you have something that was inaccessible being made accessible by leveraging a popular and well-used platform,” says Kabelo Moshapalo, chief creative officer for Ogilvy South Africa.
Even when we’re doing something traditional, digital will be inherent in everything we produce.
Nkanyezi Masan, Ogilvy
The agency is also playing around with is AI, says Tristan Vogt, head of Innovation at Ogilvy South Africa, who, with Carney, set up the Innovation Lab. “Beyond automating workflows, one of the exciting things we're dabbling with right now is real-time music generation. This allows us to feed real-world data into a model and create music in real-time,” he says, adding that the commercial applications are “endless”.
Recognising this convergence of advertising and innovation, Ogilvy South Africa established the Ogilvy Creative Technology Academy in 2024. The programme is made available at no charge to 15 applicants each year and is designed to equip young South Africans with digital and technology skills. “I always get asked where the best place is to study to be good in digital, but the truth is that because technology is moving so quickly, you can't actually study anything out there that’s up to date with what is happening in the industry,” says Carney. The course is SETA-accredited, so students leave the 12-month programme with a certificate and experience solving real business problems and tackling actual client work.
Developing the curriculum for the programme was a collaborative effort, says Vogt, combining insights from, among others, British adman Rory Sutherland with AI-generated content to build something that combines real-world experience and theory. “There was a lot of trial and error, but now we have a solid foundation that is built around everything we do,” he says. But this focus doesn’t mean that Ogilvy just throws technology at every brief.
Discussing how a team approaches a client brief, Masango says everything must be led by the audience. And, whatever the strategy, the work must be shareable. “If you think of something like a billboard, the most effective billboard today is the one that people will take a photo of and then share that photo. Even when we’re doing something traditional, digital will be inherent in everything we produce.” This also makes it easier for the agency to measure impact, says Moshapalo.
“That impact could be societal, or it could be getting people to buy chicken or a new car,” he says. Technology allows agencies to monitor the public conversation around a campaign, track who is part of it, determine whether the sentiment is positive or negative, and, when appropriate, respond. In the case of the Forever Golf campaign, the conversation focused on culture. Tapping into the decades-old tradition of South Africans nicknaming their Volkswagen Golfs, Ogilvy created an eight-part docuseries telling these stories and then called on Golf fans to help name the new car.
As the relationship between brands and customers shifts, advertisers need to take notice. According to Carney, the old rules of SEO no longer apply. Instead, the agency must now think about AI optimisation. If someone uses an LLM to research what cellphone contract they should get, AI models will pull data from social media comments, an influencer’s review, or Reddit. “This puts pressure on our clients to deliver on their promises and make sure their customers are happy, because the AI is going to flag that a particular product or service got a lot of complaints and suggest something else. As the custodians of our clients’ brands, this is something we need to think about.”
Masango says everyone now has access to the same technology, and the agency’s job is to make sure that it’s using creative thinking to differentiate itself. “Yes, the tech is moving us forward as an industry by enabling us to do things that we couldn’t do before. And yes, it does give us another canvas to express our ideas, but that isn’t what separates us from the pack. What separates us is our human intelligence, our creative value and our ability to tell stories that build human connections.”
* Article first published on www.itweb.co.za
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