Featuring Danny Greeff
Are agencies overlooking the power of uniting creative and distribution? In this thoughtful conversation, Danny Greeff of RebelRebel reveals how Social Display Advertising is quietly transforming digital strategies—especially in Africa’s dynamic media landscape.
[0:00] From Bildx Studios, this is Colours of Social Media podcast. I'm Enoch RobotBoy Appiah Jr., and in this episode, we are breaking down how agencies can unlock better performance, move faster, and innovate at a skill using social display advertising.
[0:20] Social display advertising, only known as just social display, is one of those formats many marketers have heard about, but few truly understand how to use strategically.
[0:32] Now, as digital advertising becomes more competitive and performance-driven, agencies can no longer afford to treat creative and distribution as separate conversations.
[0:45] Joining me today on Riverside is Danny Greeff, founder of Rebel Rebel, a media sales business helping brands and agencies build better digital advertising experiences. Danny is a veteran of the African programmatic industry and also advises international art tech companies entering and navigating the African market. Today, we'll unpack what social display really means, why it matters right now, and how agencies can begin leveraging it as a creative and performance advantage. Let's get into the conversation with Danny Greeff.
[1:24] All right, so Danny, first of all, I want to thank you for deciding to join me on an episode of Colours of Social Media. I know it was a short notice, you know, via LinkedIn, but then you decided to join to talk about social display. And basically, that'll be the conversation that we are having today. But then we can't talk about social display without talking about Rebel Rebel. That is your company. So I want you to take us through the founding days of Rebel Rebel, most importantly, why you founded Rebel Rebel.
[2:06] All right, great. And you know, thank you so much for inviting me onto the podcast. This has been a fan for a long time. And obviously, we've been chatting on LinkedIn and email in various different cases. So yeah, it's a privilege to be on here. And thank you to all your viewers for watching this really when they do.
[2:22] So yeah, I mean, talking about the founding of Rebel Rebel, I mean, the founding of Rebel Rebel and social display are very much intertwined. To give you a quick background on myself, I've been in programmatic advertising since 2010. And while I'm always and always have been the biggest fan of the technology behind media buying and programmatic media buying specifically, I always felt that the creative opportunities available to us as programmatic buyers were incredibly limited. So we would spend time building out these great campaigns with lots of data and different kind of programmatic dark arts. And when we get to launching, creative would be late, creative would not be great. And campaigns would suffer because creative is a big part of what makes a good campaign for form. So that frustration led me to kind of start looking for other opportunities and how we could help our clients specifically at the business I was working at, at that stage. And it came to a head in late 2017, I was at a conference in New York City with a colleague of mine. And we bumped into quite literally bumped into a guy called Casey Sarin, who just started a company called Spaceback.
[3:37] And we got to talking and he told me all about his dream or his idea of social display, which was completely unknown at that stage. There was no category. I really liked the idea. We exchanged details. I came back to South Africa and launched the first social display campaign outside of North America in early 2018 for I think it was PepsiCo at that stage. And after seeing that results, seeing the results of that campaign, I was hooked. And I decided to start thinking about building a business around just offering this creative platform to brands and agencies in South Africa. So Rebel Rebel came about after another trip overseas to see the guys at Spaceback in San Francisco in 2019, kind of told them what I was going to do. They gave me the green light to represent the product throughout Africa, came back and registered the company.
[4:30] And as you can say, the rest is history. So I've been working with the team at Spaceback on social display since then. And I'm proud to say it's never been better. The category is very competitive at this stage, but Spaceback continues to lead the way in terms of what kind of functionality they're bringing to the social display category. Thank you for that. No problem.
[4:56] My viewers and audience, I'm sure you've heard of a new term here, social display. Please hold up to that. Daniel Warr is one sheet for social display ace in a minute. But Danny, before you explain what social display is, I want to know you've worked with African and international art tech players from what you are saying, how you founded Rebel Rebel. But what I want to know is that how would you describe the current state of digital advertising in Africa? I think it's an interesting state at this point in time simply because I feel like it's dominated by global entities like Google, Meta and TikTok at this point in time. Down in South Africa, obviously, TikTok is a very dominant force. And I know that throughout the rest of Africa, there's only a couple of countries that they're monetizing in. But from the conversations we're having with clients, we see a lot of spend moving those ways. So I think if we look at the mature markets like the US and Europe, they've gone through this kind of evolution and are sitting in different spaces now. So I think Africa is kind of going through that. And we've seen it all before in the other markets. And it's important to note, we have to just understand what's best for our clients. And I think us as Africans are, I think, a lot more in tune with what we see simply because we can see what's happened in other markets before. So we can see what's worked, what hasn't worked.
[6:30] So I think we're a lot more educated around new platforms coming in and what are the actual benefits of it. Obviously, people who are part of global agencies get fed that information from global offices and can understand how these things work. And there's JPPs and global agreements. So it's a very kind of convoluted environment. But I still think that the state of digital in Africa is fantastic. We're doing so much work across Southern Africa now, Namibia, Angola, Botswana, Mauritius as well. And the uptake is really, really great.
[7:06] Inventory levels are fantastic. Inventory quality is fantastic. And agencies in these markets are incredibly switched on about what works for their clients and what won't work.
[7:15] So it's good when you've got great products. It's not great when you've got terrible products pushing in there because there's a lot more of a scrutiny that goes about choosing product partners in Africa. I mean, in South Africa, I can see the states over there because you guys have the opportunity to try a lot of platforms as compared to West Africa. No, even Nigeria, they get to try some platform. But in Ghana, it takes a long time for advertisers and agencies to try a platform. If not working with people like you, then we don't get the chance to try running media on other platforms. So that is, I mean, just my two cents on the sake or the state of advertising in Ghana. But then let's go into the main topic that set up this social experience. When you say social experience, what does it actually mean in today's media ecosystem? Great. So social display is essentially using content that lives on social platforms as creative in display and video environments. So if we think about how something like a social media platform, like a TikTok or Facebook or Instagram are walled gardens. So if you're creating content within those spaces, it's living in those spaces and you can only promote it within those spaces. Social display is almost a ladder out of that walled garden to take the best performing content that you're seeing on social and create better performing and much better looking display ads that you can then run across programmatic advertising systems like DV360, for example.
[8:58] So the kind of thinking behind the creation of Spaceback specifically was that we sit with amazing content on social media platforms because creative agencies go there first, right? They develop that social content first because it's for Valentine's Day, it's for Mother's Day, it's for Father's Day. It has to be on time. When that creative is launched there as advertisers, we know that that creative is approved by client. It's already there on the platform. And we can see in real time what the audience is actually seeing or interpreting that content as through likes, comments, shares. We've got all that kind of social indication. So the hypothesis was essentially saying, why are we creating additional banners for open exchange and premium environments on display and video when we've got amazing creative this side? So Spaceback and social display is literally a way to go take this and use it over there rather than spending money on creating banners when you've already created social content. And it works across, I mean, most social content now lives in meta, Instagram, and TikTok. So if your social display partner supports that, it's a great creative tool to then increase your reach outside.
[10:13] Hmm. From what you are saying, I'm going to look at it with two eyes here as a creative and as a media person. For the creative, right, save start. This creative doesn't need to create additional assets for display platforms. And then for the media person, it's just a matter of picking the creative, the asset that the creative design and just transporting it to display platforms, right? Which is totally perfect. But then I want to understand why do you think this form of execution that is social display is often underutilized by agency. I don't know, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't know the guitar, but then why do you think social display is often underutilized by agencies?
[11:04] Look, I think, you know, anyone in agency, anyone in the agency space these days, there's a lot of work going along, right? I think about some of our partners here in South Africa where they're having to or not having to, but they are dealing with, you know, 200 media owners in one market trying to get a share of spend. So a lot of the time, I think it comes down to, you know, you're only as like if you're out of sight to out of mind. So people will use it, they'll test it. And then like I said, in the beginning, you know, it's a very kind of competitive space. So within, you know, two or three weeks, there's a new product, and there's always this innovation budget after it. So yeah, the guys that are working with us, you know, predominantly from an always on point of view see the value straight away. And it doesn't take more than about two to three campaigns to actually prove that to our clients. I think, you know, there's also possibly a hesitancy to use it because I think the education level around social display isn't as great as it could be. And, you know, that's partly due to me not doing a big enough job around like a category job. And, you know, we're working with that, you know, we're working to do that quite strongly this year. But, you know, those that do pick it up, and those that do start using it see the value straight away. And they eventually become kind of an always on component to all of their campaigns. I mean, changes, you know, it's difficult to change. We are we are used to display Google ads, DV3CC, then with more social media, meta art, VRU. So I think you have to put in more work done. Yeah, because you have to change our mindset.
[12:50] That's what I'm on the podcast for, right? This is stage one of educating more people, right? Yeah. So looking at social display, what I can pick from execution of social display is that performance wise is great. Speed is great. And it's also an innovation, right? It's just a whole new angle altogether. Now, yes. And you are not in your head. Which fees are correct yet?
[13:21] So why are these three especially critical for agencies now? I think, you know, in a world that we live in now that is dominated by the big three, really.
[13:32] And obviously, it's dominated like that because it's global agreements, it's JBPs, you know, they are not strings attached, but they are guardrails that are put in, in place.
[13:44] It goes back to why, you know, we started working with social display is I think just the standard banners just get completely overlooked, they get blocked, they get skipped, they get ignored.
[13:53] There's a reason that ad blocker installs are rising every single year across Africa is because of really terrible creative and really terrible banners. I mean, here in South Africa, at the moment, we've got the scourge of online gambling banners on every single publisher site here. So me as the, you know, looking at it from a consumer point of view, ad blindness is realer than ever. So I think what, you know, when social display comes into play is if you look at the ads, they don't look like ads, it looks more like content. And I think from a consumer point of view, consumers feel a little bit more comfortable interacting with these ads. Obviously, you have to get your targeting right. So you're targeting the right kind of offer to that right prospect. But still, it's a softer approach to advertising. And I think that is why we see a much higher level of performance from social display ads than we've ever seen on standard display. We've also seen it now, you know, we've been testing a lot in the CTV space as well.
[14:54] So taking social video content and putting it on the biggest screen in the house on the same day. So, you know, a brand comes out with a social, you know, kind of a teaser campaign with a 15 second video on Facebook. We lift it off in the morning, make it a CTV ad. And in the evening, people who are watching CTV at home get to see this beautiful social media creative, whereas, you know, if we had to put it on TV, it would take a long time to book it in, and it would be a long time ago. So we're able to move at that speed of culture, which is, I think, really important these days. What changed in consumer behavior, or let me say platform capabilities that makes social display more relevant today than, say, two to three years ago?
[15:43] Again, I think, you know, we're seeing, I keep mentioning TikTok, and maybe they're going to pay me for the promotion I'm doing here. But I think, you know, we're seeing a lot more of the population these days moving towards big social media platforms and spending the dominant time or dominant part of their browsing behavior in platforms like Instagram, like TikTok, you know, people aren't going to news portals anymore to find things out. So, you know, they're seeing the homepage takeovers and all of the fancy stuff we used to do five, six years ago. It's just not having much resonance anymore. I think, again, it goes back to the point is like, you know, we're able to now lift influencer content that has been created by brands and make those ads. So people who are following these influences are going, hey, like that is, you know, again, I'm too old for influences. But hey, that's Mr. Beast on an ad. Like, I'm very much interested in that rather than just an ad saying, you know, click here to find out more information. So I think we're doing a better job with social display, making ads relevant to the target market, as opposed to just the standard click here, find out more, learn more, book a place drive, we're actually being able to kind of use content that's been proven to work in that display environment, thereby kind of making it a lot easier for users to go, hey, I trust this, I'm going to interact with it.
[17:12] So it's basically the trust factor that the audience have with their influences. In this case, it gets transported into display platforms. So they are familiar with the influencer.
[17:28] Okay, interesting. Yeah, and I think it's also familiar with how social, how brands appear on social brands appear on social a lot differently to how they're appearing in display because in social, you have a caption, you have a large exactly. And you know, all of the brands who are moving social first have seen this already. And that's why they're focusing on social first.
[17:52] So you know, being able to capitalize on that social first space and go, yeah, but that could work in display as well. Just think about it differently.
[17:59] That's where we're kind of pushing. Exactly. Yeah, reaches far greater on the open exchange than any of the platforms. And you know, we forget, even though I'm saying people spend a lot of time in tech, we forget people are still logging on to websites to see sports scores, fashion, entertainment, news, business, that's never going to go away.
[18:20] But yeah, we just the advertising needs to get better on those sites. Yeah. Okay, so let's say I'm an agent and I want to run campaign, you know, a big campaign.
[18:31] Why does social display creates the biggest efficiency? Well, the creative is already built for you. So when we work with big agencies on massive campaigns, all they do is go and say to me, Danny, here are the posts that we've built for social.
[18:47] They're either live or they're pending. We build the ads out quite quickly. We then work with various partners in the SSP environment to find the greatest traffic and apply kind of contextual targeting, we apply attention targeting, all of these wonderful kind of new things. And then we're able to go live. So speed of going live is a lot faster. And then during campaigns, so mid flight, you know, we're able to take a post that you put out this morning during a campaign and create an ad out of that right now and get it into the mix straight away.
[19:18] So it's not like you have to build new creative and wait for two weeks before we can go live with it. We work with a very popular QSR brand here in South Africa that is currently expanding across Africa called Hungry Lion. And I think, you know, we do daily deals, daily deal creatives for them working with their designers to kind of optimize for social display. And I think our campaign manager on that builds about six to 10 different ads every single day that go live as part of they're always on campaigns. So, you know, the frequency of messaging is great. You know, you can put it up different messaging, it just allows for a lot more of a more control over creative than we've ever had before.
[20:00] You mentioned PepsiCo. I didn't talk about PepsiCo. That is actually one of the clients that you work with. But me, you can talk about PepsiCo. But I want to get a real campaign or maybe a case study where social display is about unexpected results.
[20:18] Gosh, there have been a few. So I'll use Hungry Lion as an example, because they're top of mind and I've just referenced them now as well. So Hungry Lion has literally, you know, they're opening 20 to 30 stores kind of every couple of weeks. They're really aggressively kind of expanding across Africa. And we're able to kind of give them the opportunity to, you know, if they're opening Lesotho or Ispatini or Mauritius, we're able to just take that content straight away and get it into their mix, you know, right away so that they don't have to wait. Their stores are opening. We've got the traffic already running through there. So people who are kind of unaware of the brand when they're opening already being shown the brand. So, you know, when we talk about how social display kind of increases things or does really well for campaigns, we have to look at obviously from an engagement rate point of view, we see on average, and I think with Hungry Lion, we see on average between five and eight times greater engagement results than they were seeing on standard banners. And this is true across a lot of the campaigns that we run in a lot of the brands that we work with. You know, there's also a big kind of focus on viewability increases too. And obviously, viewability is a lever we can pull in the DSP.
[21:40] But obviously, if we're running much better creative, that's getting much higher engagement rates, the ads are going to be kind of performing better from a viewability point of view.
[21:49] So yeah, we see an average increase of about 20% on average viewability across industry standards. And like I said earlier, you know, click through rate wise or engagement rate wise, five to eight times greater engagement rates on space back creatives than standard banner creatives.
[22:05] So yeah, I don't know if that answers the question I'm talking and I'm going, yeah, I'm wondering if I can think of other ones at all. No, it actually answers. I mean, it's a perfect result. But what I'm getting from this conversation around social displays that, you know, when it comes to the power of their ties in which one wins, some people argue that creative always wins, others will also argue that it's the platforms. So it becomes like a type of war between media, events and creativity. But from what I'm getting out of social displays that both wins.
[22:44] The platform is, I mean, well, the platform which is displayed is giving the campaign, the numbers of the number of eyeballs for the great critic that was performing well on social media platforms to win. Correct me. This is this is basically the power of social display, right? Yeah, I think, in my experience as well, it's like, and it might be a bit controversial to say, but, you know, when a campaign does great, the creative is lauded and awarded. And it was such a great creative piece. You know, it did so well. When a campaign does poorly, it's media that gets it in the neck, right? Because we know that creative is 70%. I think it's 70%. And I might be making up stats here. But let's say 70% of the reason why people engage with campaigns is great creative. And that's been true for many, many years. So definitely when platform has a role to play, if you're going to use a great piece of creative and just put it across the open exchange with no targeting at all, it's not going to do well.
[23:56] So it's a bit of both. Like we've always been really good from a programmatic point of view. Programmatic allows us to reach that right person, right place, right time with the right product. But if the creative isn't good enough there, you're going to miss out on it. So we're just with social display, we're just plugging that creative gap where we're not asking for specific creative, we're choosing what creative we want to show to these people that we've spent so long trying to find on these massive platforms on the open web. From your experience, what mistakes do you see agencies make when they are planning social split companies?
[24:33] I think they spend with my competitors. That's the biggest mistake. So yeah, for the sake of this podcast, I don't have quite the competitors. He was just used Spaceback. Don't think of anything else. No, seriously, no. Spaceback obviously created the category. But with any kind of valuable category where people see companies doing well, they are going to be competitors entering the market. And I believe competition is the greatest thing because it forces us to go, what's really good about our product and what can we keep speaking about? But a lot of the time, it's a blessing and a curse being first to market because you've got competitors walking into agencies going, hey, we've got a product that works just like Spaceback. And then people go with that. And it doesn't work like Spaceback.
[25:25] And then the category takes a hit. And it makes my job twice as hard going in there again, and then going, oh, exactly. Because then they go, no, we've tried it. And you go, no, no, you haven't. No, we've tried something like it. And then yeah, so that's it. But I think, yeah, I mean, the question around agencies making mistakes when it comes to social displays, I think, again, it comes back to an education side of things. I don't think we as Rebel Rebel have been specifically in the last couple years as vocal about the benefits of social display, as we were in the very beginning when we started launching it.
[26:05] So, yeah, it becomes a case of, let me reintroduce you to the product, let me reintroduce you to the category and reintroduce you to the benefits that come from it. And I was sitting with a client yesterday who mentioned, and this is why I'm obviously aware of TikTok not monetizing in many African markets, going, we've got so much content sitting on TikTok that we can't do anything with it. And it's going, hey, but here's Spaceback. And they're like, oh, great, yes, it works. We can use that as a bridge between the two. So again, it comes back to that point of there's so much available in markets across Africa, different people talking about different creative opportunities, different media buying opportunities that I think agency folk are just so bombarded with innovation and new tech that it's difficult to rise to the top of that pack or that consideration set, unless you're constantly educating and constantly writing blog posts and creating kind of noise around the products, really.
[27:05] So if an agency is listening to G, right? What's the first practical step you're becoming? Well, obviously reach out to me and we'll, we'll chat about it. But I would, however, like when I'm looking at a prospect, I'm always checking out, first of all, which social platforms are they most active on? And are they actually doing a great job at building creative? So a lot of brands we've been working with, they might have a global Facebook page, for example, and there's not enough localized content on that space.
[27:38] So we will then go in and say, hey, we could start using this international content, but we'd need different copy or we'd need kind of location specific or I think country specific information to kind of make that work. But we generally just start with looking at how active they are on social. What are their actual objectives for a campaign like this?
[28:00] And kind of marrying the two and then starting to build out demos showing them this is how it would look. These are the kind of target markets we could reach. We build out audience plans for them and then actually start targeting for it. So everything is on our side is done in a managed service approach. So we're able to kind of do all the media buying and everything and control that whole process end to end for them. But yeah, I mean, to start out understanding social display and diving into it is just how great is that brand social presence? How relevant is it?
[28:30] There's a lot of brands as well where I've done this kind of prospecting and the last time they've posted something on any of their pages is 2023. That's a difficult one. Yeah, that's a difficult one to make work because if you don't have this fresh content, you might as well be using standard display banners then. Because we can't serve you a deal from back then in 2026 and think that people are going to love it, right? It's not relevant. It's not relevant.
[29:00] Looking ahead, how do you see social display evolving within the African digital advertising landscape? So yeah, I mean, that's a great question because that's currently kind of top of mind on my side. So we've been testing a lot of CTV formats here in South Africa and we're starting to test CTV in the rest of Africa as well. The problem with CTV in Africa is the lack of quality inventory at this point. So we have billions and billions of impressions of display and outstream. But I feel that digital through social display is moving into a space where it can dominate a TV market really. So I think looking forward right now, the biggest CTV supply source in Africa, at least in South Africa and the markets we're working in, we see YouTube being the dominant supply source. But as we start seeing more kind of free-to-air CTV inventory coming into play when we eventually get the big streamer inventory into Africa, so Netflix and Disney Plus and Amazon Prime, I think that's where we're going to see a huge jump where social display is going to become the, I suppose, the creative of choice simply because we can move so quickly. And the guys at Spaceback are doing fantastic work on coming up with brand new formats that speak to the TV space. So we're putting QR codes on TV ads that people can actually interact with. We're building out pause ads. So when people are pausing content, we're able to serve a social display ad in that pause space. There's great work being done in the virtual product placement space and the digital brand insertion space that Spaceback is also working towards. So yeah, I think the next two to three years is going to be a very exciting time across Africa for social display and social CTV as well. Exciting times ahead.
[31:00] Yes. All right. So finally, Danny, I want to know what my mindset shifts, right? Do agencies need to make to fully unlock their value of social space? I think they need to. I think agency is the mindset that needs to kind of happen is that, you know, they need to be aware of the fact that social display creates such a convenience for them. And, you know, I've spoken at length to many agency people who, you know, are working through weekends, working nights just because it's so difficult to kind of get everything done that is expected of them from the brands they work with. So what we pitch now when going into kind of big agency meetings is let us do the work for you. Social display can do all that work for you. Let us go and look through the content. Let us build the ads. Let us do the targeting based on your brief and just leave it with us. We'll be able to kind of help you find time. We'll be able to drive your campaigns to better results. So I think it really is like that. It's a convenience factor for me, and that's where my mindset is now is that it's gone from this is an innovation buy to this is a convenience buy, and this is going to drive a lot more results than you're going to do with your standard display. And, you know, many agencies, specifically the big kind of global agencies, they have their own kind of trading operations where they have their own DB 260 teams, and they're running programmatic advertising for all of the brands. And, you know, that space for me is where we're focusing a lot on is actually building space back into their workflows so that it becomes part and parcel of a programmatic campaign manager space where they can also play in the creative space as well as the kind of building space as well. Okay. Thank you.
[32:52] Thank you. From this conversation, what I got from this, we hit 33 minutes from this 33 minutes. What I got was that you have to be socialized if you are an agency and you want to execute social display. Not only that, your best asset that is performing well on social media platforms will get a chance to reach more people when you execute social display, which is so perfect. I mean, we want a lot of eyeballs on our best assets, right? All right.
[33:28] Danny, I know where to reach out to you, but if someone wants to reach out to you, which is the first step they need to take when they want to execute social display, how can they reach out to you? Just email me on danny at rebelrebel.digital.
[33:47] Yeah, you'll get a response as quick as possible because that's what I do. I love working with clients, new clients, old clients, and just making advertising, well, helping brands and agencies build better advertising experiences for the consumers they're trying to reach.
[34:03] So yeah, just give me an email or reach out to me on LinkedIn. You'll find me there, Danny, two Fs and I'll be in touch. Yeah, two E's, two Fs. The one F thing drives me mad, but yeah, two E's, two Fs and yeah, just give me a shout there and I'll be in touch as soon as possible. Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on. I'd appreciate it. No problem. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for the invite. Thank you.