Ogilvy Cape Pioneers Digital Marketing Academy

Ogilvy Cape Town has shown their commitment to digital with the
launch of the Ogilvy Digital Marketing Academy. Following the
appointment of online heavyweights, Nic Wittenberg and Laurie King
who are heading up Ogilvy Interactive Cape, the agency has invested
in a training programme to give the staff practical education in
digital. The ODMA is being pioneered at Ogilvy Cape Town and will
be run and lectured by digital industry leader, Dave Duarte.

Ogilvy Cape Town is the first large South African agency to tackle
Digital Marketing at such a strategic level. One of the primary
objectives of the ODMA is to spark a digitally-oriented culture at
the agency.

“Agencies are talking up digital and we’re tackling it on two
fronts. Firstly we’ve been recruiting the best people in the
industry and secondly we’re training up our current staff to get
those who need to be, up to speed. To do this, we need expertise,
and that’s where Dave Duarte comes in,” says Ogilvy Cape Town
Managing Director, Gavin Levinsohn. Duarte is a lecturer at UCT’s
Graduate School of Business and Managing Director at Huddlemind.
The company consults to numerous multinational corporations to
provide education and research as well as collaborative online
learning platforms.

“The Ogilvy Digital Marketing Academy will help participants to
distinguish between fads and trends in the digital space, to speak
the language of digital marketing, and to collaborate more
effectively in campaigns whenever necessary. It is not enough to
simply have a team of digital experts in an ad agency. Digital
Media is more effective when it is integrated meaningfully into the
DNA of a campaign, and this requires all the agency players to be
clued up about digital and what can be done with it,” explains
Duarte. The 10 week course is designed to develop a shared
understanding of digital marketing at Ogilvy Cape. The course will
cover everything from the fundamentals of digital marketing tools
to advanced digital marketing strategy.

“The ODMA is a step to bridging the online skills divide and aims
to get one of the country’s leading agencies on-board with highly
knowledgeable and skilled practitioners at every level of the
organisation. Each delegate will be able to mark their own progress
and improvement, and the agency will be able to identify star
performers and high-potential candidates to lead or join digital
media initiatives,” adds Duarte. “The future is undeniably digital.
There will come a time when digital - be it in the form of
interventions, campaigns, interactions or even internal workflows -
are not part of what we do, but simply, what we do and how we work.
Our current investment in digital is a pre requisite/
non-negotiable,” concludes Levinsohn.