WHEN he joined his former employer as a young IT guy, he was ready to change the world but one particular director took one look at him and told him he could do even better in the media department.
The executive, Peter Monaisa, told the wet-behind-the-ears intern Zali Nxabi that, though he held a lot of promise in his chosen career, he had the personality of a media practitioner.
“I told him I was not trained in media,” Nxabi recalls, “but he said he would teach me everything I needed to know.”
It was Nxabi’s lively personality that bowled Monaisa over. In no time the inexperienced media recruit was making waves, winning major accounts for Mineshare, the multinational media agency that Nxabi best describes as “they own everything, including Ogilvy”. He would stay there for six years.
But his frustration was that the company insisted on doing advertising by the book. This textbook advertising meant he could not suggest strategies to clients even when he was certain they were misunderstanding the informal market – the townships, which were Nxabi’s forte.
“I got frustrated with this strict formality. The only way I could do what I wanted was to start my own business, where I am not scared to have those unconventional conversations with clients, so I can sell them a new way of doing business, of targeting the informal market, the townships. I felt like they were getting it wrong.
“Some brands were not respecting the townships. You’d get a car brand saying they cannot advertise in the township because that was not their target market. I’d be the one shooting a video at the entrance to a township, showing the number of BMWs going in and out. I’m not talking about jalopies, but brand-new cars. I’d then take the video back to the client and ask if they still thought the township wasn’t who they should be speaking to,” said Nxabi.
He added that, historically, many believed those in the townships couldn't afford those cars.
"That is no longer the case. The tavern owner drives a car a CEO cannot afford. The vegetable vendor has a child at university, not through NSFAS. She pays! The woman who sells food, in the lexicon of the decision-makers, she’s unemployed. She forms part of the unemployment stats. That’s where we are missing the point. That woman has employed four people. The tavern owner has seven people on his payroll.
“That’s what used to frustrate me. I felt I needed to school brands, to tell them these are the people you need to look at and advertise with them in mind. These are people you need to empower – give vendors small POS machines to sell your airtime. They will be selling your product while they are growing,” he said.
Having tried, to no avail, to go rogue at Mineshare by opening the eyes of his clients, imploring them to treat Alexandra the same way as they would their Sandton audience, Nxabi quit when he felt he’d come to a cul-de-sac. When he shared his plans with his wife to go it alone, she also left her well-paying job at a reputable airline.
With Thandi, his wife, they started Streetkidz Media, whose core business is maintaining billboards: “That’s who we are. We are in the streets, doing dipstick research.”
He prepared well for starting on his own, saving the equivalent of a year’s salary “just so that the kids should not suffer at home”. He laments the short-sightedness of those who leave their jobs to start their own companies on nothing but hope.
Streetkidz would get its first assignment seven months after inception, doing murals for the ANC election campaign.
“We were given 50 walls to paint countrywide. We did it in record time, eight months. The business started growing. With that money, we built our first billboards.”
His former employers gave him R150 000 to pay for the billboard as part of their enterprise development, Nxabi says. He did not burn bridges at Mineshare and he is chuffed that “they could do this for an ex-employee”.
It is difficult not to love Nxabi! He exudes positive energy. Having acquired the billboard, he offered the space to his two friends, one after the other, at no cost to them; one was the popular footwear range and the other a prominent DJ who owns a high-end restaurant.
“I couldn’t sell an empty billboard,” he argues simply.
His next paying project was to paint murals for the Maimane Phiri Games, the brainchild of the Alexandra-based former professional soccer star.
Having done exceptionally well with this one assignment, the client – Betway – threw more work his way. “We started a relationship with them,” Nxabi says.
It still holds today, as if held together with glue.
“They asked me what more I can do. I told them. They had me on. Just from that small project in Alexandra. They came back to ask, ‘what else can we do?’ I told them I wanted proper offices. I wanted a serious corporate business. They paid for all that.
"All that” is office space at the swanky Savannah Business Park in Midrand where the 10 staff members of Streetkidz will finally move in tomorrow.
“We are swimming with the sharks,” Nxabi says about the white well-established giants in the billboards industry including “JC Decaux, former Continental, who are the biggest billboard owners in the world. They are French. They came here and bought Continental. Primedia comes second, and there’s also Outdoor, the Saatchi brothers, and so on.”
“We are small,” says Nxabi, who owns billboards in Tembisa only, so far. “These guys are big. They started building billboards at the time which cost R20 000. It costs me R200 000 to build a billboard. I cannot sell (space on) a billboard for R20 000. They can. We can’t.”
The process to set up a billboard is arduous, what with the red tape at the municipalities and the prohibitive costs, Nxabi says. It helps that, with others, they have formed themselves into the Black Billboard Owners Alliance (BBOA). “We are about 40 small owners.”
They started engaging big corporations to throw business their way and speaking in one voice, which is a rarity in black business circles, really works for the small billboard owners.
Now we are being recognised. “Now they are talking to us.” Nxabi says it helps that some big corporates are adamant that 80% of their ad spend must go to BBOA.