The Creative Counsel

Johannesburg Branch
105 Corlett Drive, Melrose
 
Johannesburg, Gauteng
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DESTINY MAN spoke to the Founder and Group Co-CEO of The Creative Counsel (TCC)

DESTINY MAN spoke to the Founder and Group Co-CEO of The Creative Counsel (TCC)

19 December 2014 by Mzo Witbooi

What is your business background? I’ve always been in buying and selling – right through school. After school, I owned wholesale, mobile and shoe import businesses and an electronics company. It hasn’t all been illustrious as I was also involved in an Internet business that went from riches to rags in the dot-com bubble! In 2001, I co-founded TCC with Gil Oved. We’ve just won the CNBC All Africa Business Leader Awards Young Business Leader of the Year 2014 – Southern Africa.

It sounds like you were a master of all trades? When I started out, I was unfocused and tried to make a buck wherever I could. I learned along the way that businesses require focus and that the sooner I focused on one of my many ventures, the sooner I could build something meaningful. I have a more focused approach now and ensure that I spend time on being the best at what we do.

What is the costliest mistake you’ve ever made? I’ve always focused on the magic of business and neglected the administration duties that come with it. My biggest mistake was not believing and foreseeing that we would build a big business one day. Unfortunately, the fact that we did not build and invest in the infrastructure that is required to run a big business came back to bite us in the end.

What were the repercussions? Not believing that we would grow meant we were always playing catch-up. Our finance and admin teams were always weaker than the business they had to support. We lost a lot of money along the way, our growth was hampered and I personally had to spend a lot of time cleaning up. I found respect for the admin drivers of a business, finance departments, IT infrastructure and admin processes and hired the best people in each of those respective disciplines to drive our business. I also earmarked budget for the creation of systems to support sales and ensure that we were building our business on solid foundations.

What would you have done differently? I would believe! If you really believe that you have a good business, you must build it in such a way that the foundation can support the largest of developments. Many entrepreneurs struggle with this. The difference between being an entrepreneur and building an empire lies in the ability to focus on the areas that don’t necessarily drive your ambition, but rather build the foundation for the future. I know we are supposed to live without regret, and as much as I learned from the mistakes, I would have preferred to avoid them and learn from others instead. But there is great value in making mistakes and this is truly the differentiator between those who talk and those who have. Many people have ideas and ideologies, but few can weather the knocks and recover from the mistakes. I make lots of mistakes everyday, but I’ve developed the capacity to keep getting up. This is the most important quality of an entrepreneur. 


The Creative Counsel: Ran Neu-Ner and Gil Oved
1 October 2012

The Creative Counsel: Ran Neu-Ner and Gil Oved

by Juliet Pitman
Walking around the extensive premises of The Creative Counsel (TCC), co-founder and joint-CEO Gil Oved makes the kind of statement one doesn’t typically hear from an entrepreneur: “People look at this company and are impressed by its growth, but in our minds there is always a degree of...

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ABOUT US

Hello. We’re The Creative Counsel – the largest sales, marketing and advertising group in South Africa. Keep reading to find out why the world’s biggest brands choose us to champion the frontline of their marketing battles.

Everyday an army of like-minded individuals go to work at our offices around the country and on the continent, with one goal – make the ideas that change how people act or transact happen. From client service to creative, from social media to field marketing, from brand partnership to mass market expertise, from events to consumer product endorsement – all our businesses and all our people are dedicated to bringing the ideas that work to life and making them happen for our clients.

So are your ideas destined to do nothing, heading for the bottom drawer or the ‘best-intentions’ pile, or will they be game changers, will they inspire your consumers to feel, to move, to share and ultimately to change the way they act or transact.

It all started with two men, two cellphones and one big bad Yellow Pages. Their commitment to ‘brilliance or nothing’ and ‘winning by a mile’ grew TCC into the country’s leading solutions-centric advertising hub that asks, “What’s the problem to solve?”, rather than, “What’s the media plan?”.

If we had to be boxed, we’d call our offering TTL, but the truth is, we have no box. TCC creates media-agnostic brand solutions based on real market insights and adds the labels later. Driven by our passion to make ideas that actually happen, we are obsessed with delivering for our clients and changing the way consumers act or transact.

TCC has gathered some of the country’s finest minds to make up the over 1500 strong staff complement that run over 300 campaigns nationally, every year. Our shiny client list boasts a number of international giants as well as proudly South African brands from just about every category and industry.

We’ve also spent wads of cash on world-class infrastructure, custom-developed campaign management solutions and gathering the latest trends and insights from around the world – all so our clients don’t have to!

So don’t look at us as an ad agency, but rather a brand partner to fight with you in the trenches of the modern-day landscape and deliver real, never-before-seen solutions that will change the way your consumers act or transact and achieve your brands objectives.

At The Creative Counsel, every idea is guided across our specialised group of companies, all driven to make it happen! We crack it, we strategically drive it across social media, connect it to the mass market, find the right partners to support it, launch it internally and externally, activate it and manage it end-to-end with our field marketing specialists and everything in between.

Because an idea is only an idea until WE make it happen!

SERVICES

BUILT TO MAKE IDEAS HAPPEN!

What does it take to make ideas happen? Simple, you need an idea-making factory – one that is specifically geared to deliver an idea from its birth to the moment it connects with aconsumer and beyond. This can’t be any ordinary factory – the TCC Group is driven by a culture where we create with the passion of artists, evaluate with the scrutiny of chartered accountants and execute with the speed of start-ups. Like any great factory, everything is process driven and automated to deliver end-to-end.

At The Creative Counsel, every idea is guided across our specialised group of companies, all driven to make it happen! We CRACK it, we STRATEGICALLY drive it across social media, CONNECT it to mass market, find the right partners to SUPPORT it, LAUNCH it internally and externally, ACTIVATE it and MANAGE it end-to-end with our field marketing specialists and everything in between.

IT’S ALL ABOUT LOVE! LOVE WHAT YOU DO, LOVE THE PEOPLE YOU DO IT WITH.

MEET THE TEAM

Elizabeth Keeve
GM Activations
Oxana Ravjee
General Manager
Tracy Lipworth
General Manager
Preetesh Sewraj
CEO
Heidi Schmidt
GM Activations
Claudia Schmidt
General Manager
Ryan Silberman
CEO
Verusha Laureles
HOD / GM Africa
Michelle Jardim
HOD
Alicia van Rensburg
HOD

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