The Lead Creative | Client agency partnerships that deliver
Their The SEO in GEO campaign won gold in Channels: Channel innovation and silver for Channels: Search Engine Optimisation at the Bookmark awards 2025.
In addition, Ndlungisa was ranked second on the inaugural Bookmarks Brand representative listings for 2025 at the end of last year. Rogerwilca was ranked fifth on the Agency rankings.
For the campaign, the agency embraced AI to develop GEOFF, a proprietary tool to reach the School’s target audience.
Ndlungisa says while many trends are happening at the speed of light, what is important for institutions is to listen to their stakeholders, from students to executives, and to ensure they make a true connection through human insight.
From the agency side, Shah says it is important to know when a trend is going to stick and when it is a fad. While Rogerwilco keeps a tab on all predictions, she says foresight does not always sit with these predictions.
“It is more about noticing data and patterns and then saying is it tells the same story.”
A shared purpose
Talking about GEOFF, Shah explains that with AI how people search has changed. GEOFF taps into this changed human behaviour optimising GEO to reach Stellenbosch Business School’s target audience.
GEO is about brands being mentioned, described and recommended. So the AI has to recommend you.
For Ndlungisa GEOFF was possible because of the shared purpose of themselves and the agency.
“We operate on a level where we're in a partnership versus just another supplier. There's a lot of transparency in the work that we do. There's honest collaboration and there's trust.
“We work from a place of collaboration and get to a place where the brief is just to execute, but to think of us as a strategic ally.”
Room for experimentation
She adds that there is also always room for a little bit of experimentation - with 80%of what we need to do and 20% should always be there to experiment responsibly.
“It allows us to do it quite responsibly because we'll still meet our targets in what we need to do.
“But we're still also pushing the buttons to grow further and to take smarter risks and continue to be ambitious together.”
Shah says making space for experimentation comes from the data and what it could be telling you.
“With user behaviour changing, you have to experiment, and we definitely need to experiment with different creatives, different messaging, different platforms, different timings, etc.
"But we must tie this back to experimenting responsibly and grounding everything based on the data and the patterns."
It needs to be measurable. It needs to tell you a story.
“But all of this is only possible when the clients have that willingness to test different things.
Partners
“As Ndlungisa said, they treat us as partners. When the client is willing, when the client is so open to always testing and learning and growing, that's where agencies like us can actually experiment and do great things,” says Shah.
If you can build this relationship, then it's no longer just a box-ticking exercise of just doing your campaigns or just doing a particular project.
For Ndlungisa, transparency is important - about the brand, the business objectives and the priorities.
“And then I need to give the agency time and space to think, and they have to give me the same space and grace.
“They also need to be able to push back, as I do. It's all from a place of us trying to get to a place better than where we are.”
Test and learn
Shah says that in particular for digital marketing, test and learn is a key for every agency and every client and it is those are the brands and agencies that win.
Think about how agencies and the agency model are changing, she says.
“2025 was a year full of buzzwords and everything around AI, so many agencies started to build proprietary tools.
“Everybody wanted to embed AI. This is not only the agencies' fault as brands wanted to onboard AI.”
She says, while many of these tools have continued to mushroom in 2026, only a few of them will stick.
“The reason is that, like any new disruptor, it takes time to actually stabilise and in terms of making it ground.
“Once everybody has made sense of what this AI is, its role in marketing and how we're going to make use of it, then the tool that answers those questions is going to stick.”
But, she says, it still comes back to clients who are open to experimentation and agencies taking on that responsibility, and the client and agency having a transparent partnership.
About The Lead Creative
The podcast is hosted by The Lead Creative founder Mongezi Mtati and Bizcommunity's marketing and media co-editor, Danette Breitenbach.
Together, they examine the importance of platforms like Cannes and local award shows, such as Bookmarks and Loeries.
The Lead Creative podcast shares analysis, trends, and strategic brand intelligence through a series of conversations with great minds behind some of the leading brands, businesses, organisations and top ideas that we all love.
From advertising thought leaders, forward-thinking brand leaders, innovative digital marketing minds, to content creators, the podcast delves into what makes the world engage with some of the top brands.
