OLC Experiential has a new space

Business director Garon Bloom, strategy director Lisa Alton and MD Jerome Cohen.

MD Jerome Cohen said he met Chang in the early days when the now trend analyst was working for Elle Magazine, and that those days were all about positive energy, but looking at the last two years, “it was also time to catch a wake up because it becomes really about survival at the end of the day”. And that’s exactly what OLC Experiential did. “We transformed the business from a vertical to an horizontal structure which helped us to double our turnover in the last two years.”

Five months into the year, OLC has already won seven new accounts and successfully repitched KIA and Huawei. Now there’s the issue to sustain this growth. Cohen said that in order to do so, anticipation and innovation are key, as well as resilience, which becomes the underlying tension with any business that wants to succeed today. “Trust me on this one, we definitely have the most resilient team in South Africa that anyone could hope for and we even had to bring some of them from Belgium. So big up to the biggest experiential team in SA which we are really proud of.”

Cohen believes “everything is possible, even when it seems impossible”. He called his team and clients to “dream, work hard, dare and never give up”.

Dion Chang

Commenting on the new space, Chang said that to start with, Joburg was a no-brainer. And secondly, he’s just glad Cohen’s done well with it “because you’ve seen the mantra in terms of the consumer mindset: ‘less stuff, more stories’; everybody’s looking at less stuff, obviously in SA you’ve got a dual economy so you’ve got a middle class that’s building assets, but generally, globally people are consuming very differently, and I think that’s the space Jerome plays in” – translating this for brands, which is challenging because many brands and related companies are still very much focused on sales and the bottom line. Chang said these value mindsets need to be re-evaluated to be more in line with the new world order.