Born in Soweto, Nunu Ntshingila-Njeke, 51, earned a bachelor of arts at the University of Swaziland. She landed her first job as an account executive at Ogilvy & Mather in 1988.
Early in her career, she was selected to join the MBA program at Morgan State University’s School of Business and Management in a historically black college in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.
She returned to South Africa to become communications director for Nike South Africa.
Source: BlackEngineer
Four years after returning to South Africa, Ntshingila landed the job of deputy managing director at Ogilvy & Mather, where she was assigned to turn around the agency’s largest account, SA Tourism.
She subsequently managed the Johannesburg subsidiary of Ogilvy before being promoted to CEO in 2004, a position she held for seven years.
In this position, she managed 12 business units that made up Ogilvy & Mather in South Africa, along with 40 affiliate offices across Africa.
In 2011, Ntshingila was appointed to Ogilvy & Mather’s 30-member global board, representing Africa and overseeing 450 Ogilvy offices in 120 countries.
Source: BlackEngineer
While at Ogilvy, Ntshingila was in charge of some of South Africa’s most recognized brands, including BP, Cadbury, Coca-Cola, DSTV, KFC, SABMiller and Volkswagen.
Nunu has received the advertising industry’s highest honors. In 2003, she was a Businesswoman of the Year Award finalist. In 2004 she was a finalist in the Shoprite Checkers/SABC Woman of the Year award. She was named Financial Mail’s Advertising Leader of the Year. In 2005, she was named Business Personality of the Year at the Top Women in Business and Government Awards. In 2012, Nunu was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by Financial Mail for her work in leading and transforming the advertising business in South Africa.
Facebook’s focus at first will be on growing its business in anchor countries — Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. Other countries important to Facebook include Senegal, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, Mozambique, and Ethiopia.
Facebook is partnering with telecom operators, governments, agencies and other stakeholders to sell advertising continent wide.
“Our mission will be to connect brands and consumers in Africa, creating value for all parties in the process,” said Ari Kesisoglu, regional director for Facebook Middle East and Africa.
Facebook’s active user population in Africa grew 20 percent from September 2014 to June 2015, according to the online social networking service with headquarters in Menlo Park, California. It now claims to have 120 million users. More than 80 percent of them access Facebook from their mobile phones.
“Mobile is not a trend,” said Nicola Mendelsohn, vice president of Facebook for Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Russia . “It’s the fastest development in communications we’ve ever seen. This couldn’t be truer in Africa – where so many people are mobile-only. This new office is a significant milestone for Facebook and our teams want to partner with businesses across the continent.”
Ntshingila will join Facebook in September and work with businesses and agencies across the region, Mendelsohn said.
“Africa is important to Facebook, and this office is a key part of our strategy to expand our investment and presence across EMEA,” Mendelsohn said. “Facebook is already a central part of people’s lives in Africa, and with more than a billion people in Africa, we want to do more to help people and businesses connect.”
Source: BlackEngineer
Ntshingila was group chairwoman of Ogilvy & Mather SA in 2012 when she received a Lifetime Achievement Award and standing ovation at the AdFocus Awards.
Ntshingila was credited with helping transform South African advertising. Despite leaving ogilvy and returning several times, Ntshingila came to personify Ogilvy, according to FinancialMail.
“What sets her apart is not just her success in growing and diversifying Ogilvy, but her wider position as a role model. As a successful black woman in an industry used to white, male faces at the top, she helped break through South African stereotypes,” the report said.
Her successor as Ogilvy CEO, Abey Mokgwatsane, summed up her achievement like this: “Her success isn’t measured simply by the fact that as a black woman she was running South Africa’s biggest communications company. What was really amazing was that before long, people didn’t notice any more. They didn’t care. It became no big deal.”
Source: FinancialMail
In 2012, Business Insider named Ntshingila one of the world’s 30 Most Powerful Women In Advertising. Chairwoman Shelley Lazarus said, “Nunu is the fearless and charismatic leader of the South African business and she represents the future of Ogilvy.”
Source: BusinessInsider
Ntshingila is considered the highest-ranking black woman in the African advertising industry. She’s known as the first Lady of Advertising, according to AfricanSuccess.
Source: AfricanSuccess
Ntshingila’s Ogilvy bio said her most important achievement may turn out to be her role in the creation of a pan-African joint venture with WPP’s Scangroup. “This deal, more than anything, represents Ntshingila’s confidence in Africa, and her optimism about the future of the continent and the crucial role that South Africa has to play in its growth and development,” her bio said. “In all likelihood, it will become the legacy that she leaves not only to O&M, but to the advertising world at large.”
WPP-Scangroup is a subsidiary of WPP and is listed on the Nairobi Securities Exchange. It is the largest marketing and communication group operating a multi-agency model across multiple disciplines in sub-Saharan Africa, according to Wikipedia. The group has a presence in 25 sub-Saharan Africa countries.
Members include ad agencies Ogilvy & Mather, SCANAD, JWT and BluePrint Marketing; media firms GroupM, MediaCom Africa, Mindshare and MEC; public relations agencies Ogilvy PR and H+K Strategies; market research agencyMillward Brown; specialty communication firms Roundtrip and Geometry Global and digital companies OgilvyOne, Squad Digital and SCANAD Digital. In all, over 1200 people are employed across all the groups.
Source: Ogilvy, Scangroup, Wilipedia
