PART ONE
In the dynamic world of advertising, where creativity meets strategy, few stand out like Gareth Pretorius, the Creative Director who’s worked with some remarkable brands. Known for his fearless approach and deep understanding of the industry, Gareth has carved a niche for himself by blending practicality with innovation. In this interview, we dive into his journey, from his unexpected transition from journalism to advertising, to his award-winning campaigns that challenge the norms of conventional advertising. Gareth’s insights offer a fresh perspective on the ever-evolving landscape of creativity, client relationships, and the real value of awards in the advertising industry.
Read his interview below with our CEO, Lynette Whittaker, and head of content, Esther Jacobs.
Can you share with us what initially drew you to the advertising world? What were your earliest inspirations?
Well, it’s an interesting story. I had actually studied journalism and wanted to pursue it, but halfway through, I realised that journalism was not about expressing yourself. It involved a lot of law and was very different from what I had imagined. Then I had the opportunity to study advertising, which was more expressive and allowed for opinions and creativity. I was good at writing and art, so I entered the field without knowing whether I would be an art director or a copywriter. I took both exams, and the lecturer looked up to me and said, “You can do either, but if you study art direction, they might let you write occasionally. If you study writing, they’ll never let you art direct.” So, I chose art direction for practical reasons. Later in life, I evolved to do both.
But really, a better answer to your question is about the benefits of advertising and why one should be in it. Today, there are many options for kids to use their creativity. Unlike when Lynette and I were 20, there are many ways to monetise art now. Back then, you could either be a starving artist on the street, work for an agency and sell your soul, or work for a place like Jetline. Now, they can work for game design companies, launch their own animations, or sell arts and crafts on platforms like Etsy. We don’t have the pull of exclusivity anymore, but we do offer variety.
If you become a game developer or a conceptual artist, you’ll be doing the same type of work every day. The same goes for graffiti artists, fashion designers, etc. The most beautiful thing about advertising is that every day brings something new. One day, you’re working on high-level film; the next, you’re figuring out low-level animation. You might be crafting two words for a billboard or writing smartly for an SEO article. There’s always a different challenge to apply your skills to, and the problem of yesterday is never the problem of today. Other industries often face the same problems repeatedly.
Can you walk us through your creative process when a new campaign comes your way? What’s the first thing you do?
I don’t really have a creative process, at least not in the artistic sense. I’m not a holistic artist connected to the universe. I have a very practical approach. I do as much research as I can, looking at competitors and their strategies. I adhere to some core principles, particularly the TBWA model of disruption. Standing out is key, whether you’re a bird among other birds in a tree or a flower in a garden. The same applies to advertising. I focus on simplicity and avoid overcomplicating things. I don’t believe in a formal creative process, but I always prioritise standing out and having a clear purpose.
As a creative director, you obviously have your own voice and vision for your concepts. How do you balance that with client expectations?
I don’t have clients; I have partners. They know their industry better than I do, just as I know more about communication than they do. It’s about working together and leveraging each other’s expertise. If I were working with a wine farmer, I wouldn’t lecture him about wine; I’d collaborate with him, respecting his knowledge of his industry and competitors.
You’re a two-time Loerie Award winner, and the advert you did for PPC Cement is incredible. What was the concept behind it? What made you envision this concept?
Well, let’s start with understanding how awards work. There’s a thing called the Gunn Report. You can’t get hold of the Gunn Report unless you spend a lot of money on it, and it has the rankings of individual creatives and agencies around the world based on their performance. This report is used to measure agencies and creatives against each other.
For example, winning a gold at the Louries might earn you, say, five creative points, whereas a shortlisted Cannes entry might be worth 25 points. So, a shortlisted entry at one award show can be more valuable than a gold award at another. There are many award shows across Africa, like the African Cristal Awards, and a few others that are lovely and recognised creatively but not by the Gunn Report. Winning at these shows doesn’t contribute significantly to your standing.
I have a lot of respect for D&AD (Design and Art Direction) because they have years where they don’t give out awards if the work isn’t good enough. If no good design entries are submitted, they’ll simply not give out awards rather than awarding subpar work. Please double-check these figures, but I think you have about a 0.045% chance of winning at Cannes and a slightly higher chance of being shortlisted.
So, as a small advertising agency, would you recommend saving up a lot of money to enter the Loeries?
Look, why should I be judged by a bunch of peers on how good my work is? The public is the real judge. If the public and the target audience like the work and it’s effective for the client, that’s what matters. Take the Old Spice campaign, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like.” It was incredibly effective and based on a simple insight that had been overlooked for years. They realised women buy men’s deodorant, so they targeted their ads at women, leading to a huge increase in sales.
Effective work is inherently creative because it stands out. Creative awards can shortcut the trust-building process with clients. If I have a list of awards, I don’t have to convince a client to trust me; the awards do that for me. Practically, awards are just a tool for building trust.
Well, that’s what the client wants. They want to see results, not just awards.
Exactly. Awards are a shortcut to trust. If I have a lot of awards, I don’t need to spend as much time convincing clients of my capabilities. The awards do that work for me. In the end, what truly matters is delivering results for the client and improving their business.
Back to PPC Cement. I think it’s an absolutely incredible concept. The recognition you got for it was good, but in terms of the results for the company, did you see a great return?
I can’t actually remember back then because I was much more involved in the creative department and paid very little attention to the results. At the time, those ads were sometimes awarded for creative innovation rather than results. We integrated 3D into the real South African world really well for one of the first times, which is primarily why it was awarded and got its recognition. But there are other projects I am far more proud of that didn’t receive awards.
Like which ones?
One example is the “If We Lose the Bees, We Lose Everything” campaign. We had a pandemic in the Cape where we were losing a lot of honeybees, which affects everything. Yet, most conservation campaigns focus on saving panda bears, which, while important, don’t impact our world as directly. So, my team and I collected bees that had died naturally, preserved them, and used them to create giant artworks of endangered animals like tigers, rhinos, and panda bears. Below these artworks, we wrote, “If we lose the bees, we lose everything.” It was displayed at the Belmont Hotel. I’m very proud of that piece, even though it wasn’t awarded.

Another example is the Helios “Re-Sight” campaign, which was shortlisted at Cannes. Even though a shortlist isn’t a trophy, it still counts as an award. This campaign was significant because it marked Mauritius’s first awarded presence at Cannes. We provided UV-protected sunglasses to 2,500 fishermen who wouldn’t have had access to them otherwise, potentially saving their eyesight. Combining doing good with creating good publicity for the client and winning awards is very fulfilling.
Campaign: ENL. Helios Eyewear. ReSight.
I loved that campaign. So what was the goal of the campaign then? It was obviously to help the local communities, but what was the marketing goal?
You’re dreaming if you think you’re going to get a brief that says, “Help save the day, here’s a whole bunch of money.” It doesn’t work like that. They came to us saying, “We can make recyclable sunglasses out of plastic. How can we use this to make a campaign to bring awareness to the fact that we are now making recyclable sunglasses out of used plastic?”
From there, we said, “Let’s gather all the plastic out of the lagoon that’s killing the lagoons and then provide the fishermen with the recycled plastic sunglasses.” Two birds, one stone — much easier. We could have very easily just put up a big billboard with a pair of recycled sunglasses and said, “We now make recycled sunglasses.” That was the brief. The brief doesn’t come with an intent to bring awareness to small communities and try to save them — that doesn’t happen. They just say, “I want to sell my recycled sunglasses.”

So was it your idea specifically to give them out to the community and to people that really needed them?
I was working for the agency at the time, so legally I’m obligated to say it was their idea. But yes, I was instrumental in the team in both making it and executing it. My name is credited where it is credited on the awards for it.
So what was the biggest challenge then, especially with the clients and convincing them to give away so many pairs for free?
Well, the clients came on pretty quickly. They came on board when they realised what the potential was. They were also good people. They also wanted to do good. Like I said, there are no frickin’ clients. There are only partners.
There are only people. There are only human beings. There are only people trying to solve problems. This idea of a client as a person who pays you is the wrong way to approach advertising. These guys were particularly aligned with wanting to do good.
That was behind the ethos. It was behind the bigger company driver. They were good people, so it was easy to do good work with them. There was no convincing, where there was a whole bunch of sharks in a boardroom and we had to walk in and fight the sharks and sell the idea. Logistically, it was really difficult getting a whole bunch of relatively isolated communities together to try and pull off something coordinated. That was difficult.
Distribution was difficult. Things like that, that’s difficult. Walking into a boardroom and selling good things to good people, that’s not difficult.
How did you get the communities on board?
That wasn’t me. We had the Rotary Club involved. We had the Fisherman Club involved. We were running things from a higher community, but what we did was we leveraged the communities around us. They could reach these people, help these people.
The thing is, I’d say I still think everybody at the bottom is essentially good. Everybody wants to do good. Some of us don’t have the time. Some of us can’t fit it in logistically, but if you speak to enough people, if you talk around, if you go along and if you really believe in it, you’ll find the people.
If you can get a corporate behind you, that’s when the magic happens because corporates can put money behind it. When corporates can put money behind it, people can free up their time. When time gets freed up, good things can happen.
So you’ve obviously had a lot of campaigns in the past that have been traditional broadcast. How do you think digital media has reshaped the strategy when it comes to campaigns?
I don’t think it has.
You don’t think so?
I don’t think it has.
I mean, does anyone really watch TV and watch television adverts anymore?
Okay, if you want to talk about control, yes, we’ve got a lot more control. Adverts still interrupt you. They interrupt my YouTube videos. They interrupt your YouTube videos. So there are still interruptions. They used to interrupt “Santa Barbara”. Now they interrupt “how do I make my pot plants at home” episodes. There are still interruptions.
Either they come in a still format where they don’t move at all, or they come in a format where they move. How’s that very much different from old advertising? Or there are podcasts where you can only hear them, which is, I guess, basically radio.
If you have the premium version of YouTube, you can choose not to see any ads. So that has definitely affected it. So your higher income groups that can afford to have ad blocking and not see ads, don’t see ads anymore.
So, I mean, that’s where my principles come from. I don’t think we should be advertising. I think advertising has completely f***ing lost its way.
And I think interrupting is bullshit. Nobody wants to be interrupted. We just haven’t listened.
Advertising hasn’t listened for decades when everybody said, please stop f***ing interrupting me. We’re like, hold on, I’d just like to say one more thing. And we’ve carried on for like 1 million years doing that. So it’s time we listen.
There are different ways to do things. There’s product placement that works. There’s SEO that works. There’s a whole bunch of things that really work. There are positive stunts. There’s community upliftment. There’s sustainability. There’s a whole bunch of things that actually really work.
Shopper marketing, as much as I personally despise it and don’t like working on it, is highly effective. And my hat’s off to anyone who plays in that, because shopper marketing is like a battlefield. That’s like a war zone. And listen, that strategy is insane. Like I said, hats off, but I wouldn’t want to be involved in that. And it works. 100%, it does work. That’s important, because that’s where people are.
One of my favourite things to ask the clients is, when did you last click on an ad that was about a brand that wasn’t your own or one of your competitors? Let’s say you’re not into manga. When did you last click on a manga ad? Which one convinced you to suddenly switch over?
Well, I’ve bought a lot of shoes online because of ads.
That’s just smart targeting and making sure that you see ads about shoes. But that’s no different than putting a billboard outside of a place where people drive past and see the shoes. Both can be equally effective.
Sales funnels are all changing. I think we need to change at a much, much, much, much more rapid rate. I think we’ve proven to ourselves that what brands at their best are, are communities.
If you look at Nike, if you look at Apple, if you look at Red Bull, if you look at these massively successful brands, they’re cult followings. You can tell any Apple user that there is a better version of a computer and they’ll swear you into the ground. They will not believe it. They don’t believe in Samsung. They don’t want to talk about Sony. They don’t want to hear about Huawei. They are an Apple user. That’s brand loyalty. That’s because they have high salience. That’s because the brand has done them well, served them well for many years. The brand is a badge. They want to be part of their community.
Brands are communities. When you become a stupid, outstuck community like Harley Davidson or one of those macho men ones, you’ll end up dying because the world is changing.
So I personally think that the high-level brands like Apple, Harley Davidson, still have brand loyalty and followers that will follow them to death. But I think the younger generation, with general brands, there’s no loyalty anymore. They’ll flip for anything. I mean, lower prices, nicer ads, freebies, whatever. So I think from millennials and younger, there’s almost zero brand loyalty.
But you do get it in the big brands. So you will find it with Nike and you will find it with Adidas in those generations, the youngest you want to go to, whatever. It is there. But it didn’t take them one year to get there. How long has Nike been fighting as hard as they possibly can to make you understand what they are? How long has Apple been doing it as hard and as good and as honestly as they possibly can? Same with a lot of the other big brands out there that are remaining salients. It doesn’t happen in a year.
But Lynette gets a brief on a table. She’s meant to achieve it by Tuesday. So my thing to that would be that, yes, there are brands and there are brands with real purpose and there are brands and if they have good strategy behind them and they understand the purpose and they believe in the purpose and the brand, the ad agency believes in the purpose and the communication is right and talking to the right people, and they believe in the purpose.
You will create salience as a young brand. There are millions of new little brands that have popped up that are really, really, really good and that do stick there. But like Lynette says, what you battle with is customer loyalty.
And the reason we battle with customer loyalty is because we’re playing the price game at the moment. Everybody’s either going more or going cheaper or going, let’s just get it out there, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, be known, be everywhere. And what happens is you end up screaming in a crowd. You’re contributing to the noise, but you’re not standing out.
Find a different way to stand out because at the moment, you’re just another person in the crowd screaming, making a noise. And that’s what most brands are doing at the moment. If you think about most clients, most strategies, how many of them can you walk into and go, why do you exist? And can give a one-word answer, for this is what I’m doing. Okay, this is what I’m going to do for you as an agency without giving them a 50-page bullshit slide on half of what they don’t actually need to buy.
So as long as everybody’s honest with everybody and is a true person, then there is a place for new brands to put a lot of new steps in the world and old brands that nearly died to come back and re-embrace the world and take on the new world as something else. I mean, there’s a lot willing to happen. Communication is never going to go away, but advertising in the old way, I’m not sure it works.