Hull spoke to media update’s Adam Wakefield at the IAB Digital Summit in March about where digitisation is at in South Africa and why consumers no longer want the status quo.

You were appointed to your current position in January, after working for 13 years in foreign markets. What did you find the most surprising about changes within the digital market in South Africa over that time and how consumers interacted with it?

I think there are particular nuances in this market that are completely different from Europe or the US. If you look at what companies are doing here, in some ways, they follow the trends in Europe and the US.

Brazil is a market similar to ours. There’s an e-commerce explosion going on, so the opportunity ahead is massive. However, it still lags significantly behind Europe and the US.

In terms of the experiences and how the engagement takes place, the level of activity and the volume of transactions, relative to other markets, is quite low. There are two things there:

One is, since I left, e-commerce expansion is massive. On the other hand, in comparison to where I’ve been, the transaction volume is really low.

The second thing is mobility. This is probably the biggest change in 15 years. The penetration is probably north of 100%, the proliferation of smartphones, in terms of services that are available, and the hyper-personalisation of consumer interaction through the mobile device.

None of these things existed 10-plus years ago, and the merger between what’s going on in e-commerce and mobile expansion is going to change how consumers interact with the market and also change how the market needs to interact with consumers.

That’s the opportunity for us.

There are areas that concern me:

One is broadband penetration and access. This is significantly behind highly connected or networked economies. Second, broadband cost. I think the figures are in the range of 40 times other markets.

On the one hand, we’ve got e-commerce, mobile and consumer expansion going on and, on the other, we’ve got high cost of broadband and low connectivity. These two things, in some ways, are a paradox.

At a macro level, the economy is going to be more and more based on a digitised environment, and if digital opportunity creates economic opportunity, which it does, then we have to get this thing sorted out.

How long can South Africa afford to dither to ensure the bottleneck is removed and the full potential of the market and e-commerce is realised?

For sure the clock is ticking and I think, once again, that ticking sound creates a challenge and mass opportunity. I have no doubt that this community of professionals are going to make this happen.

The more connectivity you have, the more services you can provide. The efficiency you can get, the more revenue you can make, the more money people can make; these things will drive the solution to the problem.

At a simplistic level, take Uber. I would argue that Uber penetration here is much larger and also much more accessible, and in some ways more reliable.

We had a burning platform around transportation, limited public transport, and very expensive private transport. People wanted to be mobile, infrastructure in certain areas is not great, and so a combination of those human life issues created a massive opportunity for a disruptive play and that disruptive play turns out to be Uber, and now people use Uber all day long.

I use that as an example to say to the naysayers who don’t believe disruption is coming. How can it happen in your daily life with regards to transportation and not happen to your business with regards to the customer?

The consumer is going to make demands that are going to force the service providers, retailers, consumer products, and enterprises to do things radically differently. Consumers don’t want the status quo anymore.

How does Accenture Interactive dovetail with the larger Accenture group in South Africa? Where do you feed into the system given it is such a large organisation?

Accenture, for discussion purposes, has three major pillars. It has the consulting pillar, it has the operational pillar, which are the traditional business, and now it has a digital pillar.

In terms of our digital business, Accenture Interactive, which is our agency business, falls within the Accenture Digital business.

When we go to clients, the question is ‘What is our differentiator?’ Our differentiator is simply, ‘We are able to imagine, create, and deliver these extra-ordinary digital experiences that transform businesses in a way that delivers ROI’.

If you have a look at that, how would we do that? We’d bring in the bigger Accenture Group to the table. On the imagining side, on the creation side of digital experience, and some of the delivery of digital experiences will be done by our digital business and our interactive business. But then, a lot of that other delivery is around change management, change of the processes, delivering platforms to scale, and then ultimately to operate the environment, our clients want us to play some role in the operation.

You would need to collaborate and bring the best of Accenture to the client.

That’s how we see ourselves coming together.

For more information, visit iabdigitalsummit.co.za.

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