The study, the Best Agency to Work For South Africa 2025 / 26, draws on feedback from more than 230 agency professionals across creative and media disciplines. The Scopen report ranks the most attractive agencies in the country to work for based on a range of indicators, including professional pride, respect, organisational credibility, work-life balance and employee benefits, says the company.

The findings place Brave Group alongside a select group of advertising agencies in which workplace sentiment aims to be not merely positive but structurally sound. In releasing its rankings, Scopen said that satisfaction levels across the sector remain high, with only a small proportion of professionals indicating they are considering a move, adds the company.

The recognition aims to carry particular weight, given where the agency was only a few years ago. In an industry that has long relied on the implicit acceptance of long hours, creative exhaustion and inadequate pay, Brave Group says it was not immune to the pressures that generate such conditions.

"The journey since then has been intentional and, in several respects, structurally unusual," says Musa Kalenga, CEO of the Brave Group. "Rather than confining transformation to policy documents, at Brave Group we embedded change into our commercial architecture, articulating a strategy we call, 'Shared Value’."

"Our operating principle is that the agency dares, cares and shares. As a Shared Value Agency, this strategy informs decisions on remuneration, ownership, performance management, and technology adoption," adds Kalenga.

One of the most substantive changes the group says was introduced was a quarterly performance scorecard system designed to unlock financial incentives, redistributing a portion of agency earnings directly to staff. The intention was to make the scorecard empowering rather than punitive, and to create a clear, repeatable mechanism for sharing the agency's commercial success with the people who generate it.

"The big focus two years ago was how we find ways to remunerate people more fairly, and how quarterly performance can unlock incentives for people, so that we can more meaningfully redistribute what we as an agency can make," says Kalenga.

Both initiatives, along with deliberate attention to career progression and performance conversations, were introduced during a period that Kalenga characterises as commercially difficult. The South African marketing services market has been under sustained pressure, and Brave Group has not been exempt. Kaenga suggests that the agency holding to its commitments during that period is part of what the Scopen recognition reflects.

Separately from its people practices, Brave Group has deployed artificial intelligence in ways that aim to have measurable implications for the day-to-day experience of working at the agency. The group has addressed the operational challenges of weekend working and the cycle of creative revisions by integrating its proprietary platform, Forge and related AI. Overworking and unending creative iterations are among the most acute sources of stress in creative agency environments.

On weekend working, the agency reports it now sits at approximately 90% work-free weekends. On first-time approval of creative work, the agency claims a similar figure, the result of deploying AI to sharpen the quality of outputs before they reach clients. The practical effect aims to be a reduction in the revision cycles that generate much of the psychological burden associated with creative work, says the company.

"First-time approval is a huge tick in the right direction, and that is the result of us using AI and technology in a creatively collaborative way," Kalenga says. "Wellness within agency and creative contexts is dependent on the number of reverts you keep going through. Creative people can face psychological and emotional challenges because they are always putting their work up for critique. 90% first-time approval changes that dynamic significantly."

The Scopen findings point to a sector where respect, pride and credibility sit alongside practical considerations as determinants of where talented people choose to work. Brave Group's appearance in the rankings aims to show the agency has made meaningful progress across both dimensions, says the company.

"Transformation is a journey, and we've just appointed new leadership, so the company is still going through a period of recalibration," concludes Kalenga. "But the evidence from Scopen, combined with our own internal tracking, gives me a lot of pride. It makes me feel as though we are on track and making good progress, despite knowing we've got a way to go."

For more information, visit www.bravegroup.co.za. You can also follow Brave Group on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, or on TikTok. 

*Image courtesy of contributor