First-party data has become the most valuable targeting in South African advertising. Audiences built on real purchases and real behaviour, not broad assumptions, are what separate a campaign that finds its buyer from one that hopes. Retailers and e-commerce players have spent the past few years turning their data into audiences and media, and the brands buying them are reaping the rewards.
There has been one catch. Getting to those audiences has meant a separate conversation, plan and negotiation with every partner, every time a brief lands. The value was never in doubt. Reaching it was the work, and that friction has held back the market.
Flow Platform has done more than ease that friction. It has brought a first of its kind to South Africa’s advertising industry: a single marketplace where advertisers can discover, book and measure first-party audiences and the campaign packages that data partners build. Audience Marketplace 2.0 puts hundreds of first-party audience segments from more than 35 data partners in one place, ready to discover and book, alongside campaign packages, the ready-to-book audience and media packages that partners like Woolworths, ARC and Bash create for their brands.
What’s more, every audience is tiered based on the underlying data so you can see what you are buying and plan and allocate budget with far more flexibility. Tier I is for precision targeting, Tier II for brand consideration and range, Tier III for reach at scale. Match the audience to the brief, not the brief to the audience.
In practice it is simple and fast. You browse and filter audiences by tier, partner or channel, add what fits to your basket and activate across your chosen channels, including Meta, Google and TikTok. What used to take weeks of back-and-forth now takes minutes. The audience planner turns your selections, first-party segments and campaign packages alike, into one approval-ready plan, while Flow’s AI strategist Nova helps surface the audiences that match the objective. Built-in insights round it out: a macro view of the whole marketplace before you commit, a read on where you stand against others buying first-party data in your category, and campaign reporting in the same place you booked. One brief, one plan, one booking process.
The results speak plainly. In Q4 of 2025, Pokerbet’s Meta campaign on Flow, built on verified first-party shopper audiences, delivered a 156% return on ad investment from 2.67-million impressions. Over a fiercely competitive Black Friday, Nivea and Dentsu used verified shopper audiences to reach 60 times more high-intent shoppers, at a 32% lower cost per click. Estée Lauder grew sales by 71%, and Veuve and Moët saw a 53% lift in sales value over the festive season. First-party data performs, once you can actually get to it.
“For years, South Africa’s problem was never a shortage of brilliant audiences. It was that nobody could buy them properly,” says Gil Sperling, co-founder and co-CEO of Flow. “No one, anywhere, has brought the audiences, the partner packages and the planning together the way Audience Marketplace 2.0 does. Tens of billions of rand move through digital advertising in this country every year, and we are opening the door for far more of it to reach the audiences that actually drive sales. That changes what every brand in this market can do with a single brief.”
The timing counts. As advertisers commit budgets for the year ahead and weigh every rand more carefully, a single plan you can build quickly and activate with confidence is worth more than a dozen you have to assemble by hand. Audience Marketplace 2.0 is where demand meets data. It turns the hardest part of commerce media, getting hold of it, into the easiest.
Browse Flow’s Audience Marketplace 2.0 or book a demo and the team will walk you through it.
Commerce Media, in full Flow.
