#WPRD2025 | Ogilvy PR & Influence's MD, Samantha Presbury on PR in Africa

Samantha Presbury, National Managing Director, Ogilvy PR, South Africa, Johannesburg

With a diverse portfolio spanning local and international clients, Ogilvy’s team blends creativity and strategy to deliver impactful communications that resonate on multiple levels.

In this Q&A, Presbury shares her perspective on the dynamic nature of PR, the challenges and opportunities in the sector, and what makes corporate communications in Africa uniquely exciting.

Could you tell us a bit about Ogilvy PR & Influence and what makes your company unique?

Ogilvy PR & Influence provides strategic marketing communications and PR support, as well as social media and influencer campaign management services for clients locally and internationally.

We also have deep experience in developing and running internal campaigns, crisis and advocacy messaging, and managing the communications with a wide range of organisational stakeholders. As such, we are among the agencies coming to a new understanding of the media and communications industry.

Underpinning it all is the Ogilvy DNA of borderless creativity, but applied everywhere from above-the-line advertising to comms strategy, to international social-media influencer roll-outs to campaigns that significantly change sentiment for clients.

We also understand that even our long-established corporate-communications work need never be staid. We have developed and supported television shows for internal comms, radio series for community relations, and even citizen-protest actions for social and policy change.

We’re part of an exciting industry at the nexus of great cultural, social and economic transformation. Our company has an equal presence in Cape Town and Johannesburg, with a staff complement of over 40 people.

What does working in PR mean to you personally?

Our work is about partnering with our clients – be they private businesses, industry associations, listed companies, global multinationals or community organisations – with communications solutions to achieve their strategic goals.

Our wide range of clients from all corners of the economy means that on any given day, we might be working in the realm of skincare, mining, telecommunications, entertainment, logistics, forestry, professional services or finance. That variety – and the wildly diverse mix of talent in our team – helps to keep the job exciting. No day is ever the same!

We learn from each other every day, and we are dedicated to educating ourselves on the ins and outs of the various sectors that our clients operate in, so that we can provide useful advice and proactive approaches to trends as they are still emerging. That involves a steep learning curve, but I wouldn’t have it any other way!

Unless you get under the skin of the clients you’re working with, you don’t know them, and you will struggle to develop content that can help them differentiate themselves. Ultimately, getting to understand these various corners of the economy gives us an understanding of how they all interrelate and how many parts of our society work.

What does a typical day look like for a PR professional at Ogilvy?

We start every day with a newsroom meeting to brief each other on what’s happening in the world, especially in client sectors, and what risks and opportunities present for our clients.

We identify trends through our constant engagement on social media, on news platforms and through the daily discourse on politics, economics and in the influencer space. We meet with clients and connect them and their agenda to that ever-shifting landscape of trends, as well as online and real-world movements.

To protect our clients’ reputations, we anticipate how trends will impact them, their industries and their online communities. That requires constant engagement, a keen eye for detail, and a broad perspective to understand the context of everything.

What do you enjoy most about working in the PR sector?

I’m most excited about the way PR has evolved from being a craft mainly concerned with media relations and crisis management to a creative field dedicated to developing earned-first ideas for social media, news, internal messaging and all corners of our world.

The global integration of the comms industry has seen us doing work for clients all over the planet, and earning recognition for our work too. We were recently recognised on the global stage too, for social-media work that won eight awards at Cannes. Other work saw us winning around Africa and in the EMEA regions.

We helped create a global marine trends report for a client in Germany, and our influence team manages campaigns involving hundreds of influencers for several European clients with almost instantaneous turnaround times.

The industry is about traditional media and so much more, but all media channels are now integrated, supporting, influencing and feeding off one another.

What’s special about doing corporate communications in Africa?

I am always inspired to work with global brands operating in the local market, advising on how they can integrate into the culture and business, and activate their brands in the African market.

There are many insights to be shared about the diversity of a continent like Africa. Some of our clients are also homegrown pan-African organisations, which presents a great opportunity to keep learning about the nuances and sensitivities of each part of the continent.

There is vast variation in terms of every region’s understanding of culture, race, gender and sexual orientation, for instance, not to mention how they do business and how they approach media and technology. Africa is just a fascinating place to operate.

How do you see the PR industry shaping business, governance, and society?

If I think of our involvement with a platform like the Mining Indaba – the premier mining conference in the region – it’s just a gilt-edged opportunity to help shape the dynamics around policy, community relations, critical minerals, sustainability, the energy transition, downstream beneficiation and a host of other industry trends. An event like that is like society in microcosm.

It demonstrates how comms, thought leadership and other strategies connect stakeholders and can also shape their views and the choices they make. This makes it all the more important that communications be done in the right way.

On a more intentional level, public affairs and advocacy communications can also influence governance and policymaking around legislation and key issues that need to be addressed.

With our Life Healthcare client, we have helped to raise awareness of issues around the training of nurses. With FoodForward, we have helped to advocate for how to get surplus food to those who need it. Through our media networks, we are also able to find speaking or thought-leadership opportunities for leaders at the organisations we work with.

Through our HIV awareness and behaviour change campaign for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - #ForeverWena, we were able to reach young South Africans growing up in a country where HIV remains enormously deadly, killing around 45,000 people every year. There was therefore much work to be done to help young people make informed choices.

We found that young people were tired of medical jargon and weary of being shamed for their lifestyle choices. At the same time, they were enthusiastic about finding information, protecting themselves and those around them, and working to address the HIV pandemic. We enlisted teams of influencers to meet the youth where they were already active, and to steer them towards an AI-driven WhatsApp bot for help and information regarding HIV prevention.

This was PR, influence and comms affecting society in a positive, meaningful way. We embraced culture, social influence and technology, breaking taboos and speaking with the youth, not at them, empowering them to share experiences in a safe space.

How important are platforms like Bizcommunity for you and your clients?

Credible platforms like Bizcommunity, which take an integrated approach to their content, allow agencies like ours to target credible, well-informed, curated audiences. By reaching influential stakeholders and opinion leaders, we get that depth of reach that is so important.

Audiences like those Bizcommunity attracts want rich, informative content, insights from industry leaders and news about emerging trends that they can apply in their sectors.

Being able to secure coverage in key business media like Bizcommunity is a form of third-party endorsement, because it’s earned exposure on a credible information and news platform. Because Bizcommunity understands its audience, we can also look to create content that will resonate with that discerning, well-identified audience.

It’s about providing value for the audience and the wider industry through a respected platform.

Looking back, what do you consider Ogilvy’s greatest achievement so far?

Our greatest achievement has been our growth in terms of revenue and people, as well as expanding into new industries and media spaces that create development opportunities for our team members. This allows our people to grow laterally, in terms of learning new skills and gaining knowledge. It’s not just about growing hierarchically into a managing role.

We now have a great team with an amazingly diversified mix of skills. Being able to operate credibly in the exploding influencer economy is now one of our key competencies at Ogilvy PR&I.

We’ve also been acknowledged for this at major industry awards events, winning Best in Show at the African SABRES and being recognised at Cannes. That recognition is also about validation and empowerment for our incredibly talented team members.

Awards are always an honour, even if they’re not our main priority. Our focus remains on sustained, sustainable growth alongside our clients by embracing all the opportunities of the emerging media landscape.

We’ve even been able to play a role in shaping that media environment, leading impactful, multi-channel campaigns through earned-first strategies on the global stage.

Our growth has enabled us to build our phenomenal, diversified team, diversified in terms of age, demographics, as well as skills.

Our capabilities now cover everything from influence to community management to news journalism, creative direction, videography, animation and strategy, as well as widely experienced client-service teams. I am proud of the Ogilvy’s PR &Influence team, and it’s a privilege to be part of it.