Khaya Dlanga
Khaya Dlanga was Senior Communications Manager of Creative Excellence and Digital at Coca-Cola South Africa for six years. He was behind the Share a Coke campaign which began in Australia but South Africa raised the bar, so much so that the work Khaya created for South Africa ended up being adopted by 94 countries. While with the company, the advertising work developed by the rest of the world passed research at a rate of 26%, he began an innovative process that saw over 85% of the work he developed pass research.
In 2015, when Warren Buffett opened his AGM, the first thing he showcased was the Share a Coke campaign developed in South Africa and remarked saying that great creativity and innovation can produce great results.
As a result, all work produced during his tenure scored some of the highest Link test scores ever produced by Coca-Cola South Africa (CCSA) in the last 20 years. Of the ten best scoring ads ever produced by CCSA, 60% (occupying 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 10th place) of them were produced in that period, utilising the tools and research learnings he implemented. He was recognised several times at Coca-Cola’s Global Marketing Excellence Awards on a number of occasions.
Khaya has been awarded more than 40 advertising awards, including many Loeries Grand Prix and multiple gold awards including a Gold Loerie for Marketing Effectiveness, Two Gold Cannes Lion, a Black Eagle and honorary membership in the University of the Witwatersrand Chapter’s Golden Key Award.
His YouTube videos have been viewed more than 6.5 million times and he has more than 9 000 subscribers to his channel, putting him in the top 5% of most viewed and subscribed users in the world when he still made videos – 10 years ago.
More than 460 000 people follow Khaya on Twitter and 160 000 on Instagram and he was named “Africa’s top blogger” by the Highway Africa Conference in 2009.
He was named in Jeremy Maggs’s book, Annual on Advertising, Media and Marketing as one of the “100 most influential people in media” and was 2009 Financial Mail’s “Ad Focus New Broom of the Year”.
Khaya was a frequent writer for the Cape Times and the Mail & Guardian online, News24 online – where his articles would feature in the the 10 most read articles of each of the platforms every year. He has also published the best-selling book ‘In My Arrogant Opinion’.
His second book, ‘To Quote Myself’ was published in 2015, which had the dubious honour of being the most stolen book in the country when it was published. It was a runaway bestseller and was shortlisted for South Africa’s most prestigious award, The Sunday Times Alan Paton Literary Award – a rare feat for a memoire.
In September 2018, his latest book, ‘These Things Really do Happen to me’ was published. The book was been shortlisted for the SA Book Awards: Favourite bestselling Adult Non-Fiction Book of the Year.
Khaya is currently on the Exco of rain and is Chief Marketing Officer at the company, South Africa’s unlimited data network. It’s the fastest growing mobile network in South Africa and the only data only mobile network in the world. As the only network of its kind, there is no-one to learn from and as such, has to blaze a trail through innovation in all aspects of the organisation.