18/04/2026
Most people look at telecoms adspend and assume whoever spends the most is winning.
Vodacom is out there spending over R350 million and running close to 65,000 ad executions in six months. On paper, it looks like complete dominance.
That type of thinking is just a lazy way of reading the market, because not everyone is trying to win the same game.
MTN is far more opportunistic. You see bursts of activity when it actually has something to say.
Telkom keeps showing up, steadily, without trying to match scale for the sake of it.
And then there is Cell C.
If you are just looking at spend, you would write them off immediately.
That would be a mistake.
At the end of the day, their lower spend is not a weakness, it is the strategy. They have gone asset-light, leveraging partnerships instead of infrastructure, which means they do not need to behave like the bigger players.
You are already seeing this play out. Just look at the number of sponsored partner posts with Cell C and LinkedIn creators lately. That is not random activity, that is targeted, efficient distribution.
So how the hell do you expect to compete if you are benchmarking yourself against spend alone?
Too often, people in our industry only measure activity, not alignment. In this market, more spend does not mean more impact - It just means you are louder.
https://ornico.co/telecoms-ad-spend-report-2026/
