Black Economic Empowerment in the Cape Peninsula advertising industry: A multiple case study approach

Abstract

Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) endevours to enable Black people in South Africa (SA), to make a notable contribution to the economy by irrevocably changing the racial profile of ownership and employment echelons of all organisations in SA (SA DTI 2004: 4–5). The transformation process in SA has been a long and difficult one, with the government slowly promulgating BEE legislation. The South African advertising industry has been criticised for its sluggish empowerment progress, which led to two parliamentary hearings in the early 2000s to scrutinise accusations of racial discrimination and slow transformation advancement. The Association for Communication and Advertising has been a dominant driving force of transformation within the advertising industry, but there have been few studies that have successfully examined BEE progress within this industry in recent times. Therefore, the chief objective of this study was to investigate transformation progress made by advertising agencies in the Cape Peninsula, as well as the challenges and benefits that result from employing BEE procedures in terms of Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment ownership and Employment Equity. The abovementioned was comprehensively investigated by using a multiple case study approach and by interviewing the top twelve traditional full-service advertising agencies in the Cape Peninsula. The advertising industry has employed a multitude of innovative BEE strategies to facilitate transformation progress and to address a number of inherent problems. Consequently the recommendations of this study would be useful to the national advertising industry, other sectors and government to assist in streamlining the SA transformation process.