Machete is an integrated brand communications agency founded in 2002 by award-winning copywriter and creative director, Nicholas D. R. Shepherd.
Our self-owned premises are in Observatory, Cape Town, but we service clients throughout Southern Africa. We are 50% Black-owned and 100% behind the progressive economic transformation of our country.
In the course of the past sixteen years, Machete has developed into a small but highly productive, full-service agency, staffed by a team of dedicated people who love what they do and do what they love: develop creative brand communications that work.
We pride ourselves on having a ‘big agency’ creative resources, but ‘small agency’ personal contact, agility and commitment.
In an industry of constant HR churn, we have enjoyed an exceptionally stable studio over the last decade and a half. And have been privileged to enjoy long, mutually rewarding, and increasingly efficient relationships with our key clients.
To our blue-chip, big-brand creative talent, we have added a squad of digital natives: hardcore coders, savvy social mavens, left-brain split-test optimizers, and automated marketing maestros. A powerful alliance of creativity and logic.
A riotous profusion of brands assaults the senses at every turn and in every medium, from billboards, flyers and print ads, to television and radio, email, websites and smartphones. Estimates put the number of commercial messages we are exposed to every day at well over 4 000 – some as high as 30 000!
However that figure is calculated, there is no doubt that never before has the human nervous system been subjected to such intense levels of information overload.
As a protective mechanism, our jaded 21st century minds filter messages more and more ruthlessly, ignoring the obvious, the clichéd, and the unrewarding.
If your brand is to cut through this clutter, you need a robust but sophisticated tool with a very sharp edge.
We call it the machete of creativity.
But it’s role is not just to cut through to the audience’s attention for an instant: it’s real function is to open a relationship pathway between the heart of your brand and the heart of your audience.
And that’s where permission-based marketing comes in, in the form of data-driven but audience-centred campaigns that – paradoxically – succeed in communicating with individuals, rather than mass markets.