The Full Story is ThinkStory's monthly newsletter, the complete marketing breakdown South African businesses need to make confident, informed decisions.
This month we're exploring four insights that change how businesses approach marketing:
- Brand building drives long-term growth: the research shows the optimal 60/40 split between brand investment and performance marketing.
- Lessons from LeaderEx Sandton: South Africa's largest business gathering showed why the long and the short of marketing have to work together.
- Training AI tools for authenticity: how to turn generic AI output into content that sounds genuinely like your brand.
- Sora 2 reshapes creative possibilities: OpenAI's latest tool puts professional video within reach of businesses of every size.
60% of marketing spend should go to brand building, 40% to performance, according to the IPA's landmark research.
Why brand building wins long-term
Performance marketing fills the pipeline today. But brand building is what keeps it full tomorrow.
The research is clear. According to the IPA's 'The Long and the Short of It', brands that put 60% into brand building and 40% into performance marketing see significantly greater long-term growth. Emotional brand campaigns are twice as likely to drive large profit gains as rational, sales-driven ones.
The cost of short-term thinking is real: a shift towards short-term activation has produced a 10-point drop in campaign effectiveness since 2006, driven by underinvestment in brand building. Brand-focused advertising contributes more to long-term sales growth, with effects that endure for years, while activation produces quick spikes that fade.
In South Africa's competitive market, being the brand people think of first is worth more than any single campaign win.
LeaderEx Sandton: where theory meets practice
Last month at LeaderEx 2025, South Africa's largest gathering of business leaders (9 to 12 September, Sandton), we sat in on a standout workshop, 'It's Both/And Not Either/Or: The Long and The Short', hosted by Halo and Heidibeee & Co.
The insight: most businesses fall into the trap of focusing exclusively on either immediate performance metrics or long-term brand building. The workshop showed why integration matters. Performance marketing delivers short-term results; brand building creates sustained value.
Beyond the formal sessions, the real insights came from conversations with business owners. Many faced familiar challenges: unclear messaging, websites that don't convert, marketing that fails to communicate real value. It reinforced that clear communication and transparent partnerships address real market needs.
Read the full LeaderEx recap for deeper insights.
Training your AI tools: better output starts with better instructions
Most businesses use AI tools straight out of the box. That's leaving value on the table.
The difference between generic AI content and authentic brand messaging comes down to training. Every tool (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity) has an instructions section where you teach it about your brand, voice and values.
What to include: brand voice guidelines (conversational, jargon-free, warm), forbidden words and phrases, your audience's challenges, industry terminology, and examples of your best content.
AI trained on your brand produces content that needs minimal editing, stays consistent across platforms, and sounds authentic rather than artificially generic.
If you'd like to train your AI tools properly, get in touch and we'll help you develop custom instructions that turn generic output into content that genuinely sounds like your business.
Sora 2: the creative industry's moment
OpenAI released Sora 2 on 30 September 2025, marking what its research team calls 'the GPT-1 moment for video generation', a significant leap in creative capability.
The tool now generates realistic video clips with simultaneously generated audio (dialogue in multiple languages, sound effects, soundscapes) from text prompts. It handles complex physics and tells longer, coherent clips in a single generation. Watch OpenAI’s Sora 2 announcement to see it in action.
Here are a few clips we generated with Sora 2 Pro. Tap to play with sound.
“We've worked with Sora 2 Pro on several projects now and it's incredibly impressive. But it takes real effort, quality story, scripts, storyboarding, structure and prompting, to get output good enough for professional use. If you're going to allocate resources to these platforms, work with a team who knows how to get the most out of them.”Matt Masson, Managing Director, ThinkStory
What this means: video production traditionally needed cameras, crews, locations and budgets. Sora 2 generates professional clips in minutes. Filmmakers mock up storyboards instantly, marketers test advert concepts without production costs, and small South African businesses can now create content that once required substantial investment.
That said, AI only generates what you tell it to. It can't decide what story needs telling, understand South African cultural nuance, or know which emotional beats resonate with your audience. Strategy, cultural insight and authentic storytelling remain deeply human skills.
The creative professionals who thrive will embrace these tools while doubling down on the strategic thinking and cultural understanding AI can't replicate.
What's next for your business?
We're in the final quarter of 2025 with unprecedented marketing tools and possibilities. The businesses that thrive aren't necessarily those with the biggest budgets; they're the ones willing to try new approaches and stay ahead while their competitors wait for certainty.
At ThinkStory we believe every South African business has a unique story worth telling. Whether you're balancing brand building with performance marketing, integrating AI into your workflow, or planning your 2026 strategy, the right approach starts with the right conversation.
Ready to have that conversation? Schedule a 15-minute call with our team to explore what's possible when playing it safe stops and building something that lasts begins.
