Fluff, waffle, gumph… whatever you want to call it, the world is full of unnecessary drivel that stands in the way of us getting to the point. An off-hand joke I made about redaction ending up becoming the big idea for the first ever global campaign for Sprite Zero Sugar where our heroes keep their cool in the face of heat by cutting out the unnecessary from their lives - just like we cut out the sugar from Sprite Zero Sugar - leaving them to be refreshed with nothing but the delicious taste of Sprite.

The 2022 Qatar World Cup saw players receive a whopping 225 yellow cards. That’s a lot of heated moments. And when there’s heat, there’s an opportunity for Sprite to cool things down. But without an official FIFA sponsorship deal, how could Sprite compete?

We worked with MIGU - China’s biggest live streaming sports platform - and bought the smallest media space we could think of: the yellow card. Throughout the World Cup, whenever a yellow card was issued, our live in-game triggers pushed alerts across multiple platforms, connected devices and digital outdoor in real-time for a total of 7.8bn impressions. Fans then instantly exchanged the yellow cards for a total of 225,000 free ice-cold Sprites.

Totally worth the thousand or so lines I wrote for this.

People experience both physical and mental heat at every turn these days: commuting, shopping, browsing social media, and even in dating (I’m looking at you, Tinder catfish.)

We wanted to show people that Sprite was the refreshing solution to all this heat in a simple way (i.e. free) without over-explaining it. So, we worked the Sprite can itself into various contextual lines, using the copy on the can as part of each line.

Needless to say, I wrote A LOT of lines for this as I became intimately familiar with numerous online dictionaries, thesauruses, and Scrabble word solvers.

Huggies Gold is South Africa's most premium baby nappy. To show this, we created parodies of the TV show "MTv Cribs", where ostentatious celebrities take us on tours of their lavish homes. In our version, though, babies take us around their actual cribs to show just how premium the luxurious Huggies Gold makes them feel.

Tweeted by Banksy himself as "a piece of art" and found regularly popping up on those “OMG best outdoor ads EVER” Buzzfeed articles, this piece for Feed SA remains one of my favourites.

Feed SA is a charity dedicated to feeding disadvantaged people throughout South Africa. Despite the rapidly growing numbers of homeless and hungry people on the streets, more fortunate citizens tend to drive by and ignore them.

We were briefed to help Feed SA target consumers more efficiently in order to increase contributions. So, we placed decals of hungry, begging street children at the bottom of supermarket shopping trolleys bearing the Feed SA website and the line, “See how easy feeding the hungry can be?” Any food placed into the trolley appeared to be going to the child.

We also shot this ourselves on the agency camera and printed it in-house, proving that sometimes all you need to make a difference is a good idea (and a tweet from Banksy.)

For too long now, South Africans have been played by a government and private sector riddled with corruption, collusion, and confusion. It’s a game with few winners, and one we as a country just can’t seem to stop playing. So, in true Nando’s fashion, we turned Mzansi (South Africa’s local nickname) into Mzansipoli, our own version of Monopoly that calls out the misdeeds of those controlling our country with some spicy humour. Now you can beat the game that’s been playing YOU!

Wild Bean is a chain of coffee shops located at BP petrol stations around the country. We wanted to promote their coffee in a different way from the usual depictions of energy or staying wide awake, so we created a press ad of all the awful things you could possibly swallow if your mouth was left open in a sleepy yawn.

Each of the items was hunted down and painstakingly pinned in place and labelled to create the display, a feat made possible by my very patient art director and several litres of Wild Bean coffee.

NOTE: Please click the image to open it in all its high-resolution glory, or scroll down to see a few of the objects close up.

With the rand being as weak a currency as it is, travelling around the world as a South African can be expensive. But it’s less expensive when you get the best forex rates with Shyft, the global money app.

Lunch Bar (named Picnic outside South Africa) is no ordinary chocolate bar: it’s a bar that’s packed full of amazing stuff like wafer, nuts, caramel, and chocolate which all come together to give you much, much more than you’d expect. It’s thus the chocolate bar of choice for talented people who have much. much more to themselves than meets the eye.

Oh, and if you’re not fluent in South African slang, “oviaas” is a colloquial way of saying “obviously”, a term popularised by the Lunch Bar commercials.

&Beyond operates a series of high-luxury safari lodges across Africa and India, catering predominantly to wealthy businesspeople in the upper LSMs.

We were briefed to come up with print ads informing potential guests of &Beyond's unique philosophy and famed lodge experiences. And what better way to do that than by writing a series of odes to the very symbol that birthed the company in the first place? (Plus I love any excuse to crank out long body copy. I'm weird like that.)

P.S. Unless you have ridiculously good eyesight, the copy for all three executions is at the bottom.

Cell C offers South Africans the cheapest international call rate of any mobile network: just 99c per minute. To highlight just how affordable this is, our spot features a guy who (SPOILER ALERT) appears to be learning French from an audio lesson, but is then revealed to be a live caller from France.

The LX is the most luxurious and capable Lexus SUV yet. It’s built to be able to go anywhere you choose, and thus it’s perfect for people with the success and the means to do the same. (Case in point: ask me how we got it up onto that helipad.)

After our “Voiceover” spot I did for Lunch Bar (also available on this very site), the brand shifted direction to be the chocolate bar for the man who hustles hard to get where he wants. This positioning is especially relevant for our South African target market as most young people in our townships have more than one job, running everything from barbershops to corner cafes to car washes.

So, we created the story of Tumi, a streetwise hustler who has a couple of different vocations and even owns his own small business. His streetwise nature means that even though he’s managed to snag a part as an extra in a war film, he’s still not shy of a bit of his own shameless self-promotion.

But what if someone actually phoned the number we see in the ad, you might ask? Well, we set up a fake voicemail system with an elaborate series of job offerings from the enthusiastic Tumi: have a listen right after the spot.

Panado is South Africa’s most popular painkiller. It’s also available as Panado Pediatric Syrup, a milder version for kids because they can’t handle the same dose as adults. To let parents know about this kid-friendly variant, we diluted down the plots of adults-only TV shows like Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and The Walking Dead to a dose more suitable for children.

The “Mighty King Steer” is the biggest, most stomach-stuffing burger available in South Africa. And that’s all the setup you need for this campaign, so just watch the commercials already!

2020 was a pretty rough year (thanks for that, Covid.) As the voice of the people in South Africa, Nando’s wanted to celebrate the festive season by saying “voetsek” (basically “go f**k yourself”) to the pandemic by having the world’s most iconic complainers - Karens - do what they do best.

We recorded a series of popular carols as radio spots where we modified them using South African lingo to take shots at both Covid as well as our government’s completely inept handling of it in typical spicy Nando’s fashion. We also staged a live group of not-so-merry carol singers outside Nando’s outlets.

COVID-19 and the associated lockdown has had a devastating effect on the advertising industry, particularly our suppliers like photographers, retouchers, voice artists, and many other people who help us do what we do.

This is a campaign from my agency at the time, M&C Saatchi Abel, done in partnership with the Lexus client to help suppliers during the pandemic. The idea was simple: pay them now for work they will do later.

Ugh, don’t Hallmark holidays make you gag?

We thought we’d do something other than the pithy cards and clichéd gifts that abound on Mother’s Day and write a tactical radio spot to promote Comedy Central. We took the old mainstay of “Yo’ Mama” jokes and turned them around into delightful compliments, reminding listeners to say something nice to their mamas on this special day.

&Beyond operates a series of high-luxury safari lodges across Africa and India, catering predominantly to wealthy businesspeople in the upper LSMs. We needed to create print ads to catch the attention of these travellers who need something a cut above the average lodge.

To differentiate &Beyond from the traditional wildlife and landscape porn that litters travel magazines, we appealed to our workaholic target market by showing them what it might be like to reminisce one day on nothing but memories of work.

The best part is that we made this campaign without spending a single cent. Everything was shot on my iPhone, comped together by my amazing art director, and distributed via &Beyond's social media channels.

(Unless you're particularly fond of squinting, you can find a more readable version of the copy below the executions.)

DStv is South Africa’s only satellite TV broadcaster, showing the latest and most premium shows to a wide range of high-LSM subscribers. Our brief was to let viewers know that DStv broadcasts nothing but the best, so we created a radio campaign to show them just that.

This campaign still holds a place in my advertising-hardened heart as it was the first award I ever won: a Bronze Loerie. (Hey, a win is a win.)

M-Net Movies offers viewers 8 channels of back-to-back movies, with themed months adding even more choice of cinematic magnificence.

Our brief was to create a series of print ads for Dish magazine, the monthly publication sent to all M-Net subscribers, informing them of the abundance of content on offer. However, we didn't have a single cent to spend, so we created copy-based executions around the fact that "8" read sideways is also the infinity symbol.

(If your neck is taking strain from cocking it sideways as you read, the copy is at the bottom.)

Tracker is a personal and vehicle tracking provider. Their brand positioning plays in a far more emotional space than South Africa's many other tracking brands, focusing less on the intrinsics and more on the human benefits of the product.

Our story is based on true events surrounding Wiley Pitman, a corner store owner in 1940s Florida. He's famed for being the man behind the scenes that took a young Ray Charles under his wing and taught him how to play piano. This gave us the ideal analogy for Tracker: it pays to look after the things that matter.

M-Net Movies is a series of 8 TV channels packed with an almost infinite number of great movies. Movies so great, in fact, that you'll do almost anything to make sure you're at home to watch them.

We brought this idea to life with a TV spot to promote the channel, telling the story of a guy who befriends a homeless man for less-than-altruistic purposes. Although the initial budget for the ad got slashed by 90% and we had to completely rethink the style and art direction days before the shoot, the simple, low-fi look and feel ended up giving the ad a unique charm all its own.

Fun fact: the spot got pulled after a week of flighting because someone complained that we were encouraging people to abuse the homeless. Whoops.