Rob Stokes is leading the Internet out of Africa

ith his short-cropped red hair and slightly freckled face, Rob Stokes resembles a waiter. Perhaps a second- or third-year university student – pursuing an LLB or BCom Accounting degree, perhaps – making ends meet by bringing people coffee and muffins. Or even French toast. But he is that friendly, open-faced waiter who remembers his regulars and leaves an impression on them. He is that stranger with whom you do not mind sharing some details of your personal life. And when you have a morning meeting at that coffee shop, after paying the bill and leaving the tip, you will mention to your breakfast partner: “Watch out for that kid. He is definitely going places.”

Thing is, though, Stokes is most certainly not a waiter. As the chief executive officer of the pioneering digital ad and marketing agency, Quirk eMarketing, he has already been to more places than most people his age.

Into his third year of a Business Science degree at the University of Cape Town (UCT), the cash-strapped student was fortunate enough to attend a lecture by entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth, which prompted the thought: “If he can do it, so can I.”

The business that would eventually evolve into an international digital ad agency of note initially started out as a general computer one-stop.

“In the beginning, we really did anything to make money. We didn’t really have the luxury of ignoring opportunities. So we did everything – from selling hardware to networking people’s offices,” relates Stokes.

“I remember being on my hands and knees, networking the office of an estate agent in Rondebosch.”

Within about 18 months, he became involved in building websites, a path that eventually led to doing a great deal of e-mail marketing. Soon the focus started swaying heavily toward e-mail marketing, search engine optimisation and websites, and it simply grew from there. But even in 2001, the idea of using the Internet as a marketing tool was such a novel concept that many people had no idea what to do with it.

“When I did my thesis on e-mail marketing at UCT, my lecturer didn’t know how to mark me. He openly admitted that to me. He said it made sense, but he wasn’t entirely sure,” Stokes recalls.

As Internet adoption increased, the services of a company such as Quirk starting making more sense to potential clients.

“I can’t claim to be the first on any of the things that we’ve done, but I think, certainly, we were the first agency to do it all. I think we saw very early on how all the online marketing tactics – and there are many of them – tend to work very well together,” he says.

So, where other agencies chose to master one or two aspects of digital marketing, Stokes took the brave – some would say foolish – route of mastering the entire spectrum of tools available for using the Internet as a marketing tool.

“There was no one who really felt they could do it all and, in fact, we used to get a lot of criticism. Up until 2006/7, people would say: ‘You’re unfocused. You can’t do all of that.’ And it certainly was very difficult,” he says.

“But I think we’ve evolved now to the point, with almost 100 staff, where we can quite confidently say that we can do a great job across the entire field of online marketing.”

Stokes is first to acknowledge, though, that while Quirk may have a solid handle on all things digital, much of that credit goes to his team. “I’ll be the first to admit that I’m just not as in touch with the very specific tactics that my teams use.”

I put it to him that his real skill, then, is in finding the right people for the right job. He denies the charge, with very little hesitation: “No. I think my role at Quirk – and I think the thing I’m best at – is future-proofing the business.

“For example, I noticed three and a half years ago that online reputation management was going to become big. And so I had an idea to build a piece of software around it and then went to Craig [Raw], our chief technical officer, and I said: ‘This is my idea.’

“So we built the first prototype and clients loved it, and we’ve developed it ever since,” says Stokes.

“Two years ago, I said: ‘Online video is going to be big; let’s get good at it.’ So we’re not only good at creating the videos, but we’re good at marketing them, which is far more important”.

Despite the current success, he freely admits that it was not easy, and the temptation to give up was strong.

“For the first six or seven years, it was really hard. We weren’t making any money. Without the depth and quality of Internet penetration [that] we’re just starting to see in the last few years, our services didn’t make a lot of sense.”

The feeling that the beginnings of a really good team was taking shape, who understood what was going on, kept him going and they had to “be successful eventually”.

With seven lean years behind them, does that mean seven fat years are ahead?

Has Stokes conquered the paranoia that the business could suddenly fall apart? “I have that paranoia everyday!” he says, bookended with a confident, contagious laugh.

He adds to that: “Quirk has big dreams and ambitions. We want to be a big global player.

“We want to do incredible work, and that means taking risks.

“We’ve invested millions of rands into brands and, certainly, in the early days, we didn’t know if we were ever going to make that back. I am convinced now that we will.

“We’re constantly innovating around new things, and those things cost money – and that means risk and, therefore, you can never really sit back and say: ‘Okay, it’s all good’,” says Stokes.

Leading your own company with an international footprint is difficult enough, but Stokes has taken on the bold step of leading the South African information technology (IT) industry as a whole.

He was recently elected to head up the Silicon Cape Initiative, a programme originally conceived by his contemporaries, Rob Sussman and Vinny Lingham – themselves very young and successful IT entrepreneurs.

The initiative was launched in mid-2010 to much fanfare, even featuring an unexpected appearance by the notoriously media-shy Johann Rupert.

Silicon Cape still has a great deal of goodwill behind its name, but since its launch, not much has happened. An assessment with which Stokes completely concurs: “I think the reality is Silicon Cape lost its way a bit. It was run by people with great intentions, but who had little to no time.”

With Stokes now at the head of the organisation, he has defined three overriding goals to achieve.

The first is to encourage and profile start-ups.

The second goal is to attract more investment capital into the Western Cape to put into these start-ups, in terms of investment capital and furthering basic business education because, as Stokes puts it, “Most start-ups are focused on building the product; and that’s what you want them to focus on. But if we can just help them with some very basic tools on how to understand cash flow, how to get revenue in.”

The third goal is likely the most far-reaching and definitely the most difficult of the three: to change the monetary environment of the country.

And why does this require changing, I ask him? “Because, on the most basic level, we need the ability to charge foreigners in their own currency. It’s just not possible now, unless you’re using third-party services like PayPal.

“Currently, we have to charge Americans in rands, and they phone us up and they say: “Are you from Russia? What is this “R” sign? They’ve never seen it before and it creates uncertainty,” says Stokes.

“Also, it’s an admin headache.”

It is negative, as it hits Web-based industries hardest, since the Internet as a business environment is almost inherently international. And more so for those whose products are not material commodities e.g. software applications, Web design projects, etc.

At the Silicon Cape launch, Lingham spoke about changing the nature of the South African economy from a commodities based one into one that sells intellectual property. Stokes is keen for Silicon Cape to push forward with this.

“The reality is that South Africa doesn’t have a cheap labour force – there is this misconception that we do,” he says.

“You want to make toy cars cheaper than China, good luck. It’s not going to happen and so you can either choose to be non-competitive or less competitive in the global market; or you can find areas where we can be competitive.

“Intellectual property not only scales well and has good margins when you get it right, but can be very globally competitive, and I think it can be very much a net importer from a global cash perspective – and so it should be bringing money in and creating jobs,” adds Stokes.

I put it to him, that despite his good intentions with Silicon Cape, where will he find the time?

As Stokes himself concedes, he does have a 100-strong agency to guide and he “can’t dedicate my entire day to Silicon Cape.”

His intent is to court a corporate sponsor to fund the initiative and to hire full-time staff.

“Where I think I can add the most value is advising someone who can dedicate their entire day. So we can have someone permanently on the ground who can do everything – from organising events to liaising with the many, many people who are contacting Silicon Cape,” says Stokes.

Despite Silicon Cape’s fame, he admits “it’s actually achieved very little”, but what it has done, is galvanised the community. And that unity is an invaluable tool to be exploited because it can “really put the continent on the map”, he feels.

During the Tech4Africa Conference last year, Stokes was in touch with a host of international technology industry leaders who expressed surprise that there was so much happening in South Africa, “that there were so many skills, so much intelligence, so many great ideas.”

The predominant feeling expressed is that there is every chance that we could see a repeat of the Silicon Valley phenomenon – that things could start to bubble out of Africa.

“I think Africa has a lot more potential than people initially gave it credit for. And despite the name, Silicon Cape isn’t just for the Western Cape – it’s for the whole continent,” says Stokes. ▲

Zaid Kriel