Facebook’s Creative Shop partnered with Ogilvy & Mather South Africa to host a three-day hackathon for graduates pursuing advertising and marketing careers. The young creatives worked closely with small and medium business clients over three days at the Facebook Johannesburg office to craft compelling digital campaigns for them.
This will help them to develop their creative and client liaison skills, particularly for working with smaller organisations. They learnt how to create outstanding creative work with a limited budget, as well as gain exposure to working against the clock to deliver a real-world execution.
“This initiative brings together two of the things we’re most passionate about: helping small businesses to grow and developing the next generation of digital and creative skills in South Africa,” says Nunu Ntshingila, Regional Director of Facebook Africa. 
Twelve graduates from Ogilvy & Mather South Africa were divided into teams to deliver campaigns for four small businesses, with mentoring from two pros from Facebook’s Creative Shop. The programme is as follows:
· Day 1 – Graduates receive training on building mobile-first campaigns for Facebook and Instagram.
· Day 2 to 3 – The teams work on the brief and create a prototype using Mobile Studio.
· Day 3 – Teams pitch their prototype to the client and agree an execution plan.
The groups will have ten days to produce their campaigns, in time to go live with ‘Cannected’, a Cannes event for local marketers who cannot attend the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
“This event is all about empowering creatives to help small and medium businesses bring their stories to life and create magical customer experiences,” says Charmagne Mavudzi, Marketing and Communications Manager at Ogilvy & Mather South Africa. “In a mobile-first country like South Africa, digital platforms offer smaller businesses a way to market themselves to their communities in a scalable and personalised way.”
Hatsu Mphatsoe, a copywriter in the O25 Graduate Program at Ogilvy says: “I loved having the opportunity to work with the Facebook Creative Shop team and Small Business clients on this campaign – it was inspiring to learn how to use Facebook’s tools to easily build campaigns that can make a big difference for small businesses.”
