MMA / Marketing + Media Alliance - South Africa

Nabd and Huawei Partner to Provide Personalized Arabic News to Huawei Smartphone Users in MENA.

Gabriela Kusters — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 12:22:57 +0000

October 13, 2020

Submitted by Nabd App

Dubai, October 2020 | Nabd, the world's largest Arabic News Aggregator platform, has today announced its strategic partnership with Huawei, whereby Nabd provides personalized Arabic content for Huawei smartphone users in the MENA region via “Huawei Assistant” and “Huawei Browser”.

The new alliance between Nabd and Huawei enables the delivery of personalized Arabic newsfeeds within both Huawei Browser and Huawei Assistant. It will provide millions of Arabic users across the globe with the latest news that matters to them. This is done by leveraging Nabd’s smart content engine that relies on real-time data obtained from Nabd’s massive audience reach.

Earlier this year Huawei launched “Huawei Assistant”, bringing a new level of intelligent performance to users, by helping them to find services and information when and where they are needed. This collaboration enables Nabd to deliver personalized and highly engaging news through a tailored Newsfeed embedded in “Huawei Assistant” and “Huawei Browser” to keep users up to date with the latest and most relevant top stories.

“At Huawei we are always striving to deliver the most compelling and exciting content, features and services to our users and our partnership with Nabd is a great example of this. We are delighted with our collaboration with Nabd, which will allow millions of Arabic speaking users across the region to access personalized news content on their smart devices. Huawei is focused on giving users truly exceptional experiences and we plan to continue expanding our range of offerings that help users in their daily lives,” said Adam Xiao, Managing Director, HMS and Consumer Cloud Service for Huawei Consumer Business Group MEA.

“We’re truly proud of this strategic collaboration with our partner Huawei which is in-line with our strategy to reach Arabic audiences across the world in order to deliver valuable Arabic content that matters to them on their preferred devices. Our joint mission with Huawei will result in delivering a more personalized user-experience and highly-engaging Arabic content to Huawei smartphone users in the Middle East and North Africa region,” said Abdur-Rahman El-Sayed, Chief Executive Officer at Nabd.

In recent years, Nabd has seen an exponential growth in the MENA region. This strategic partnership will cement its commitment to continuously support its partners and publishers by tapping into a new audience and increasing their reach on multiple platforms.

About Nabd (http://nabdapp.com/en)

Nabd is a Personalized Arabic News Aggregator, enabling Arab users across the globe to stay up-to-date with their favorite topics on the go. Today, Nabd reaches over 21 million users, generating over 2.1 billion page views monthly, making it the biggest Arabic app globally. It is currently available for IOS, Huawei, Android devices, and on Nabd.com.

MMA CONNECT – HEIDI BRAUER BOOK LAUNCH SEPTEMBER 3, 2026 Sandton Convention Centre

Melike Türkyilmaz — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:55:55 +0000

Pick a Page with Heidi Brauer

A live, unscripted launch of More th&n a Book

Join renowned South African marketer and business leader Heidi Brauer for a book launch with a difference.

More th&n a Book brings together 68 short lessons drawn from Heidi’s extensive experience in business, marketing, leadership and life. But rather than standing on stage talking about the book, Heidi is handing the agenda to the audience.

Pick a page. Start a conversation. See where it takes you.

Each page becomes the starting point for an unscripted conversation – sparking stories, insights, reflection and laughter. With the audience choosing the pages, no two sessions will ever be the same.

Join us for an engaging afternoon of ideas and conversation, followed by wine and light refreshments, with copies of More th&n a Book available to purchase and have personally signed by Heidi.

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Cannes Lions 2026: Competitive Advantage Has Migrated | MMA Insight Report

Serkan Karaman — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 13:18:00 +0000

mma-cannes-lions-2026-competitive-advantage-en-report-mma-academy-revised_son.pdf

mma-cannes-lions-2026-competitive-advantage-en-mma-academy-mena.pdf

Released:

February, 2026

File Size:

8.06MB

Keywords:

2026

AI in marketing

MMA DACH

MMA MEA

MMA MENA

MMA South Africa

Türkiye

At Cannes Lions 2026, 13,000+ marketing leaders from 92 countries gathered around a single question: Where does creative advantage come from once AI handles capacity?

This report argues that the advantage has migrated. It is no longer a technology problem. AI compresses production and testing, but it cannot decide what is worth making, how a brand should behave, or which investment deserves to scale.

The new premium sits on five capabilities: Judgment, Aesthetic Instinct, Trust, Capability and Financial Integration. Each one is nameable, ownable and measurable.

The report brings together the lenses of the MMA ecosystem: The global view of MMA CEO Greg Stuart; the MMA MEA reading spanning MENA and DACH, from the MMA CONNECT CANNES interviews and MMA MENA member reflections; and field observations from MMA Türkiye members. These lenses do not always point the same way, and that is the point.

Inside:

Why marketers now have two audiences, humans and large language models, and why the correlation between their verdicts is close to zero across 480 Cannes entries
Why trust surfaced as the currency in three regions independently
The CMO and CFO language gap, and the financial integration formula built to close it
Creators, CTV and retail media as the new measurable stage
A 90-day CMO agenda derived from the findings

Key Takeaway: Sustainable creative impact = AI efficiency × human intuition and judgment. If either factor is zero, the product is zero.

Education Section:

Perspectives

Document Not Released Yet:

Document Context:

General

Region:

Europe, DACH, Türkiye, Middle East & Africa, KSA, MENA, South Africa

Marketing Organization

Categories:

AI in Marketing

CMO

Redirect Immediately:

Content Type:

Analysis

Marketing Arena:

Knowledge Center

Intelligence & Trends

Carbon1 (PTY) Ltd

MMAGlobal — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 18:52:23 +0000

www.carbon1.co.za

Ecosystem:

Solutions Provider

Region:

Middle East & Africa South Africa

The Billboard Worked. Now We Can Prove It.

Serkan Karaman — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 08:47:25 +0000

June 22, 2026

Submitted by Vicinity Media

New Release | Vicinity Media Measurement Stack

The Billboard Worked. Now We Can Prove It.

By Neil Clarence, COO at Vicinity Media

There's a reason marketers have spent the last decade pouring budget into digital advertising. It's not just that digital reaches people — it's that digital tells you exactly what happened afterwards. The click. The conversion. The online sale. Every action logged, timestamped, attributed.

The problem is that this level of information has created data blindness. Dashboards full of impressions, bounce rates, CPMs and click-through rates that tell you a lot — and somehow still leave you unsure whether any of it actually moved anyone into a store or to a website.

Meanwhile, the billboard on the highway has been quietly doing its job. Brands just couldn't really prove it.

Vicinity Media's Omnichannel Analytics™ measures what out-of-home and mobile advertising actually does in the real world — not through a mountain of probabilistic data (that's data that means something probably happened but has a degree of uncertainty) but through three clear, factual analytics that any marketer can understand and act on.

Did people actually walk into our stores?

The metric: Visit Uplift

A leading men's skincare brand ran a DOOH campaign across multiple locations. The marketing team's question was straightforward — which of these billboards actually drove people into the stores that stock our products?

Vicinity’s Visitability technology measures exactly that. It tracks whether people who were exposed to a DOOH screen subsequently visited the relevant retail locations. Not only does it confirm whether the campaign drove foot traffic — it shows which specific screens were responsible for which stores. A billboard outside a mall in Sandton might drive traffic to the Clicks inside it. The one in Rosebank might not. Now you know.

For a brand buying DOOH, this is the number that changes the conversation. "We think this billboard is in a high-traffic area” becomes "This screen drove a 15% increase in visits to the store 200 metres away." With data this clear at hand, site selection and optimisation becomes a simple science.

Did more people visit us online?

The metric: Web Uplift

A large fashion retail chain ran a national DOOH campaign. Their Geolytics integration — Vicinity's proprietary location technology embedded on their website — tracked what happened online when the billboards went live. Did website traffic increase around the DOOH boards selected?

The result was a clear and immediate uplift (24.4%) in traffic to the kids' clothing section of their website during the campaign period. The billboard wasn't just building awareness in the abstract. It was sending people online to browse and buy.

Did people search for us more?

The metric: Local Search Uplift

You're a national fast food chain. You run a DOOH campaign across digital billboards in the Cape Town CBD for three weeks. The question you actually care about isn't how many people walked past the screen — it's whether seeing your campaign made them more likely to look you up. Did you buy the right screens to target your audience?

Local Search Uplift answers that directly. It tracks spikes in Google, Apple and Bing search activity for your brand in the specific geographic areas where your campaign ran. If people in the CBD started searching for their nearest branch more often during your campaign than before it, that's a real signal of real consumer interest — not a modelled estimate.

The insight is simple, and it's exactly what a brand needs to justify out-of-home spend: our billboard made people go looking for us.

Three numbers, one clear picture

What makes Vicinity Media's approach genuinely different isn't just the measurement — it's the clarity. Rather than overwhelming brands with a dashboard of dozens of metrics, the Omnichannel Analytics platform distils the data down to three signals that map directly to the questions every marketer is asking:

Did we get noticed? Local Search Uplift answers that.
Did we drive traffic? Visit Uplift answers that.
Did we change behaviour? Web Uplift answers that.

The technology behind each of these measurements is proprietary and purpose-built — a decade of direct publisher integrations, 1st Party location data and technology that simply doesn't exist anywhere else. But the output is refreshingly simple.

Billboards and mobile advertising have always been powerful. The missing piece was proof. Now there's a straightforward way to get it — without drowning in data to find it.

MMA CONNECT JOHANNESBURG + CMOSUMMIT SEPTEMBER | 3 September 2026 | Sandton Convention Centre - JOHANNESBURG

Serkan Karaman — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:18:18 +0000

As part of the Leaderex CMO Summit, MMA South Africa will host MMA Connect under the theme THE GROWTH MANDATE: Building brands, audiences and organisations that perform. Across a full day of keynotes, panels and conversations, leading marketers will explore Brand as Performance, Movable Middles, Retail Media and Winning Marketing Organisations, alongside a programme of intimate, practical workshops designed for deeper learning and industry discussion.

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MMA AI Adoption Study 25 | South Africa

Serkan Karaman — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 22:26:53 +0000

mma_ai_adoption_kantar-south_africa_orj.pdf

Released:

February, 2026

File Size:

8.06MB

Keywords:

2025

MMA MEA

Sub-Sahara

report

MMA AI Adoption Study 25 | South Africa, conducted by MMA Academy and Kantar Insight, provides a focused view of how organizations in South Africa are adopting AI across Marketing and Customer Experience (CX). The study is based on interviews with CMOs and senior marketing executives and examines AI awareness and adoption stages, priority use cases, measurable goals, how impact is measured, and the organizational conditions enabling progress, including leadership readiness, culture, governance, obstacles, and talent development plans.

Education Section:

Benchmark Studies

Research

Document Not Released Yet:

Region:

Middle East & Africa, South Africa, Sub-Sahara

Marketing Organization

Categories:

MMA Research

Marketing Organization & Design

Think Tanks

ALC

Research & Insights

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Report

Marketing Arena:

Retail Media Measurement Made Easy: A Guide

Serkan Karaman — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 11:40:51 +0000

mma_academy_-_retail_media_measurement_made_easy.pdf

Released:

February, 2026

File Size:

4.6 MB

Keywords:

measurement

retail

retail media

Advancing Knowledge.

Empowering Our Community. Shaping the Future of Marketing.

As part of MMA Academy’s ongoing commitment to elevate the marketing and media ecosystem, we are proud to launch the

MMA Academy Whitepaper Series: A curated collection of expert contributions designed to foster shared learning, encourage dialogue, and advance industry-wide understanding of emerging opportunities and challenges.

This series reflects our mission to give back to the community by creating an accessible platform where members can share their expertise, research, and insights for the benefit of the entire industry. Each whitepaper in this series is developed in collaboration with MMA member organizations, offering diverse perspectives that contribute to collective growth. While these papers are authored by our members, they represent educational contributions to the community, not brand endorsements.

Our vision is rooted in:

- Knowledge Sharing: Providing marketers with practical frameworks, strategic guidance, and real-world applications.

- Community Empowerment: Enabling professionals at all levels to access high-quality learning resources.

- Thought Leadership: Amplifying the voices, research, and innovative thinking of our global network.

About this edition

This inaugural edition features insights contributed by Odette Van Wyk (MMA SA Retail Media Taskforce Leader) from Resonate Consulting, focusing on retail media measurement and the path toward more transparent, actionable evaluation frameworks. Their contribution exemplifies the spirit of this series; members sharing expertise to strengthen the entire marketing community.

As MMA Academy, our goal is to support and accelerate this exchange of knowledge so marketers everywhere can benefit from the collective intelligence of our ecosystem.

Education Section:

Guidelines

Research

Trends Reports

Document Not Released Yet:

Region:

Middle East & Africa, South Africa

Data

Marketing Growth

Marketing Organization

Shopper Marketing

Categories:

Retail Media

Redirect Immediately:

Tags:

retail media

retail

Measurement

Content Type:

Whitepaper

Marketing Arena:

Measurement

Knowledge Center

Tools & Playbooks

MMA SA SMARTIES AWARDS 2026

Serkan Karaman — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 10:02:36 +0000

As a build-up to the much-awaited SMARTIES AWARDS GALA CEREMONY, MMA South Africa is hosting MMA NEXT! CONFERENCE. A half-day event centred around the SMARTIES 2026 category pillars (Impact Media, Marketing Impact, Customer Experience (CX), Experience Tech, and Web3)

For questions and inquiries, please contact Mpho Dlamini

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MMA SA NEXT! CONFERENCE '26

Serkan Karaman — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 09:50:27 +0000

The future of marketing is no longer in the distance but a reality actively influencing today’s strategies. This theme will delve into cutting-edge technologies, bold creative strategies, and consumer behaviour, we will focus on real-world applications, actionable insights, and regional activities reflecting the market we live in.

We will celebrate bold creativity, advanced technology, and evolving consumer expectations, The MMA NEXT! Conference series will inspire businesses to seize current opportunities, adapt to challenges, and set the foundation for enduring success in this fast-paced landscape.

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