IT: A potentially dangerous blind spot in SA advertising

Warren Lawrence, Head of Group IT at the Up&Up Group, says the view that IT in advertising is a cost centre is out of date (Image supplied)

Campaign assets live in the cloud. Client data sits in shared platforms. Creative review happens over video calls. Billing, media buying, and reporting all run through software.

Take the infrastructure down for a day, and you don't lose convenience; you lose the ability to operate.

Rarely a seat at the table

But IT in advertising rarely gets the seat at the table that its actual role in the business would justify. For long it has been treated as a cost centre that keeps the lights on, but this view is out of date.

Organisations across industries are increasingly waking up to the reality that IT is not something on the periphery; it is foundational to their business, their reputation and their compliance.

And IT in advertising is no different.

A technical foundation

Agencies that don't upgrade IT to executive level are carrying more risk than they realise. No one is suggesting turning agencies into tech companies.

Advertising will always be a creative business first. But creative work now depends entirely on a technical foundation, and in South Africa that foundation has to survive both the regulator and the grid.

Treating it as an afterthought is a bet most agencies can't actually afford to lose.

A leadership failure

This stance is supported by the Interactive Advertising Bureau of South Africa (IAB SA), which continually highlights the need for agencies to showcase the real financial value of digital technologies (like CRM, tracking, and ad delivery) to prove their worth.

The fact is that the next major agency data breach or the next campaign lost to a preventable outage will likely not be a technology failure.It will be a leadership failure, made months earlier, when IT was left off the agenda.<

h2>Power resilience an IT function

In South Africa, that risk is sharper than it is elsewhere. Loadshedding alone has turned power resilience into a core IT function rather than anice-to-have.

An agency without redundant power and network paths isn't just facing an inconvenience when the grid goes down; it's facing a full day ofmissed deadlines, unreachable systems, and client work that simply doesn't get done.

Any agency still treating backup power and failover as optional infrastructure is one bad stage of loadshedding away from a very difficult client call.

PoPIA lives in IT

Then there's the Protection of Personal Information Act (PoPIA). Agencies hold exactly the kind of information the Act was written to protect: client data, campaign material that hasn't gone public yet, financial and personal details tied to media planning.

Compliance isn't a legal department problem that gets solved with a policy document nobody reads. It's an infrastructure and process problem, and it lives squarely in IT's lap.

An agency that can't demonstrate how it actually protects client data isn't just exposed to reputational damage; it's exposed to regulatory and legal consequences that didn't exist a decade ago.

Rarely a seat at the advertising table

Despite all this, IT in advertising rarely gets the seat at the table that its actual role in the business would justify. It's common for agency IT to be understaffed, reactive, and measured by nothing more than whether the internet was working today.

Decisions get made without proper security review because the request came from a big client and needed to happen fast.

Systems get patched together because nobody budgeted for doing it properly the first time. This works, until it doesn't.

The cost of getting it wrong

The cost of getting it wrong is no longer hypothetical. Agencies hold sensitive client data, all of which makes them a genuine target.

A ransomware attack or a data breach at an agency isn't just downtime, and it isn't just a PoPIA problem. It's client trust, and in an industry that runs on relationships and reputation, trust is close to the entire business model.

Getting it right

Here are a few of the habits adopted by the agencies that are getting this right:

1. They treat IT as a business function with its own strategy, not a helpdesk that reacts to tickets.
   
2. They invest in resilience before an incident forces their hand: redundant infrastructure and power, proper backup and disaster recovery planning, and a documented security policy that actually holds up against PoPIA requirements.
   
3. They set service levels for IT the same way they'd set them for anyclient-facing process, and they hold the function accountable to them.
4. And critically, they put someone senior in charge of it who understands both the technology and the business it supports, not just one or the other.

Real business risk and value

It's time the industry started talking about IT the way it talks about creative or client service, as a function that carries real business risk and real business value, and one that deserves proper investment and proper leadership.

The agencies that figure this out first, in a market with as many operational headwinds as ours, will have a genuine advantage over the ones still treating IT as background noise.