Uber South Africa launched their coastal Summer 2016 campaign this month, with strategy, planning, buying, and implementation handled by the In Touch Media team. Uber promoted their services in major coastal cities that summer, including Cape Town, Durban, and Port Elizabeth, targeting the significant influx of domestic tourists and seasonal visitors that these cities see over the November-to-January period.
The Brief and the Approach
The brief for a coastal summer campaign in South Africa has several defining characteristics that shape the media strategy. The audience is not primarily local commuters, who are the core audience for most urban OOH campaigns. It is people who are out of their usual routines, exploring unfamiliar streets, arriving at airports and bus terminals, and spending time in retail and entertainment environments they would not normally visit. That profile points to a specific set of outdoor formats.
For the Uber campaign, the strategy combined high-footfall retail environments, coastal route roadside positions, and airport formats across the three target cities. The goal was to intercept potential riders at the moments they were most likely to need a reliable, app-based transport option: arriving at the airport, leaving a restaurant or entertainment venue, shopping in an unfamiliar centre, or commuting along an unfamiliar route.
Execution Across Three Cities
Running a coordinated campaign across three cities simultaneously requires careful logistics. Each city has different media owner relationships, different inventory availability for the summer window, and different production lead times depending on format. In Cape Town, coastal route positions and waterfront-adjacent formats were prioritised. In Durban, the beachfront and harbour corridors were the primary environment. In Port Elizabeth, the approach was more concentrated, with fewer total sites but positioned at the highest-traffic nodes available.
All bookings were confirmed in writing and signed off with the respective media owners before any artwork was submitted for production. Installation was coordinated across all three cities to ensure the campaign went live simultaneously. A Campaign Gallery, including photographs of each installed site and a geographic map, was delivered to the client within three business days of the last installation being completed.
Summer OOH Planning Lessons
The Uber campaign reinforced several principles that we apply to every summer brief:
First, coastal summer campaigns need to be booked early. The best positions on coastal routes in Cape Town, Durban, and Port Elizabeth are in demand from October onwards. Clients who brief us in November are working with whatever inventory is left, which is not necessarily where the audiences are highest.
Second, the audience profile during summer is genuinely different from the rest of the year. A campaign planned on the assumption of standard commuter patterns will miss the visitor traffic that can dominate these environments in peak season. Good summer planning requires an understanding of how audience composition at specific sites changes when the holiday crowd arrives.
Third, multi-city campaigns benefit enormously from a single point of coordination. Managing multiple media owners across multiple geographies without a central planner is a fragmented, time-consuming process for a brand's internal marketing team. Having In Touch Media handle all supplier communication, production coordination, and installation monitoring in a single engagement means the client's time is spent reviewing output and approving creative, not chasing suppliers.
"Our long-standing relationships with media owners across South Africa's coastal cities mean we can move quickly when a brief arrives and the season is already underway."
If you are considering a summer 2016/2017 outdoor campaign, the window to brief and plan is now. Contact us with your target cities, audience profile, and budget indication, and we will come back to you with available options and a preliminary strategy.