“South Africa’s digital industry is a highly innovative space, full of opportunities and challenges and as industry leaders in digital media we are often at the coalface,” says Gustav Goosen, Head of The SpaceStation. “Events like Digital Salt are a vital tool for digital players to get together and unpack the ups and the downs as a collective. We are extremely proud of our second ever Digital Salt and the level of speakers who attended this year and we look forward to doing this again in 2018.”
The 2017 Digital Salt programme was kicked off by Natasha Fourie (head of strategy at The SpaceStation) who spoke on the future of digital media, looking at Mobile, Content, Data and AI. She was followed by Brett St Clair, formerly of Barclays and now heading up his own consultancy, who spoke on disruption and innovation in the digital space. Next up was Dina Amin (head of Publisher Partnerships at Google Middle East & Africa) who spoke about programmatic advertising, targeting and measurement of digital advertising. Dina was followed by a robust panel discussion around fake news which included top news editors: Mondli Makhanya, Editor-In-Chief, City Press; Ferial Haffajee, Editor-At-Large, HuffPost SA and Adriaan Basson, Editor-In-Chief at News24, moderated by our event MC Jerusha Sukhdeo-Raath who heads up News24 Video.
The second half of the conference included: Nic Robertson (from UberEATS) who spoke about the future of retail and e-commerce utilising data and driving disruption. He was followed by Vicki Mybugh (PwC) whose talk dealt with how consumers are shifting, how the measurement landscape is changing and the evolution of the industry to digital and mobile first. To close off the event Digital Salt presented a panel discussion on viewability, ad fraud and click baiting. The panel was made up of Gustav Goosen, Head of The SpaceStation; Jaco Lintvelt, MD of AMNET SSA and iProspect SA, Dentsu Aegis Network and Dina Amin (Google), moderated by Brett StClair.
Adds Gustav: “Globally innovation is a key driver of the industry and what was very evident at the event was the level of innovative talent we have in South Africa. The future is looking very bright indeed.”
To follow the Digital Salt discussion online go to #DigitalSalt2017 or @SpaceStationZA. Photographs of the event can be seen at www.digitalsalt.co.za or www.thespacestation.co.za/news in the coming weeks.
