Machete Creative 12 February, 2025 About

Intrepid. Responsive. Robust.
And that’s just the coffee machine.

Meet Team Machete

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.

 

BIG AGENCY TALENT, SMALL AGENCY COMMITMENT

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.

 

A POWERFUL ALLIANCE OF CREATIVITY AND LOGIC

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.

Yip, it’s a jungle out there.

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.


THE AGE 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.

 

CREATING PATHWAYS TO THE HEART OF YOUR BRAND

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.

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Director General

Nicholas Shepherd

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Senior Art Director

Richard Bates

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Production Manager

Patti Nel

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SEO

Linde Ndaba

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Art Director

Grant Caithness

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Developer

Cassy Johnston

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Video Editor

Gelson Kampandira

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Senior Art Director

Jeremy Pender

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Lead Developer

Tonderai Mutsinze

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Digital Designer

Nasif Salaam

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