RAPT Creative has taken Scopen’s 2023/24 Agency Scope South Africa by storm.
Ranked fourth on Scopen’s Agency Performance Table, it scooped four first places (tied first place results), to achieve a top 10 ranking in nine out of the 11 categories Scopen deems most important to agency performance, to be ranked seventh on the Overall Creative Agency of the Year.
Scopen partner and CEO of the Independent Agency Search & Selection Company (IAS), Johanna McDowell says that to describe RAPT Creative’s debut performance as ‘successful’ would be an understatement.
“‘Stellar’ is a more apt description,” she says, “It is quite remarkable that such a relatively young agency like RAPT Creative debuted so high on the Agency Performance Table.”
She adds, “Both the president and CEO of Scopen International, Cesar Vacchiano, and I noted this achievement and were delighted to see such strong results for an agency that was new to the study and relatively new in the South Africa agency landscape.”
“RAPT Creative is blown away by its Top 10 ranking in nine out of 11 categories deemed most important to agency performance by Scopen, and over the moon that, of those nine, it ranked as number one agency in four categories – account service, integrated services, innovation and data/analytics,” says founder and CEO Garreth van Vuuren.
“We are also excited by our third-place ranking for digital capabilities, fourth for value for money and fifth for effective creativity.
“RAPT Creative has been working particularly hard on ensuring that we have the best-integrated capabilities that will allow us to be more effective and efficient with the work we produce,” he says.
“We’ll be using this report as a tool in our business planning, to identify opportunities and weaknesses for us to work on,” he adds.
The agency, which opened its doors just before the global pandemic spiked, achieved 100% revenue growth year-on-year during 2020 and 2021 by pivoting to brand solutions to its clients during lockdown to ensure they continue to stay top of mind and grow revenue.
This was a rarity when many were seeing major retrenchments and shutdowns, a fact acknowledged when it was named ‘Small Agency of the Year’ by Financial Mail’s AdFocus in November 2022, and a finalist for Financial Mail’s AdFocus medium agency of the year for 2023 and Van Vuuren was personally honoured for the part he played in the agency’s success when he was named as one Mail & Guardian’s top 200 Young South Africans for 2023.
Since 1990, Scopen’s studies (called Scopess) have offered in-depth intelligence across various areas of the communication, marketing and advertising industries and identified needs, marketplace dynamics and future trends for advertisers, agencies and media professionals.
Agency Scope, for example, is published every two years after in-depth meetings with the highest-level decision-makers across marketing, communications and advertising, from the largest to the smallest spending marketers in South Africa.
It identifies trends within the advertiser-agency relationships and the perception and image of the agencies.
Scopen’s 2023/24 Agency Scope for South Africa conducted 528 interviews in total with 312 marketing professionals from 220 companies, 155 creative-agency professionals, 45 media-agency professionals and 16 media owners.
