The pitch that numbers couldn’t justify — approved, launched, and critically acclaimed.
The pitch that numbers couldn’t justify — approved, launched, and critically acclaimed.
Presentation Design
Sales Copywriting
Branding
M-Net Edge Channel
The pitch that numbers couldn’t justify — approved, launched, and critically acclaimed.
A channel for lovers of film. A curated, cinematic, unapologetically premium content experience — for the audience who always felt the existing offering wasn’t quite built for them.
M-Net Edge Channel
Overview
Jan du Plessis is not a man who needed to be convinced that great content matters. A legend within the South African media industry, Jan had built a career on the conviction that what people watch shapes what they feel — and that the audience for truly exceptional film and storytelling was larger, more loyal, and more commercially valuable than the market had recognised. His vision for M-Net Edge was specific and ambitious: a dedicated channel for content that moved people. Film. Storytelling. The kind of programming that audiences talk about, recommend, and remember. Not another general entertainment channel competing in an already crowded landscape — a specialist destination for the audience that DSTv had never quite built for directly. To make it real, Jan needed to sell it. First internally. Then to the Naspers board. Then to the South African market.
The context made this a uniquely complex pitch. DSTv was operating at a critical commercial inflection point — Netflix was approaching the South African market, and the subscriber retention challenge was real. Any new channel proposal arriving in that environment would face heightened scrutiny: is this a commercial asset or a vanity project? Does this help DSTv compete or does it consume resources without measurable return? Jan had two things working in his favour. The quality of his instinct — built over decades in an industry he understood better than almost anyone. And Reel Media, who joined the engagement to help build the commercial and content case for the channel. What Jan needed was a presentation that translated his instinct into a boardroom-ready argument. Not a summary of the idea. Not a slide deck of content categories and audience demographics. A pitch that made senior executives feel, in the room, what the channel would make audiences feel at home — and that gave them the commercial rationale to say yes to what their instinct was already telling them.
M-Net Edge Channel
The Challenge
The fundamental challenge was structural, and it was clear early in the process. The numbers, as they emerged from research and planning, were not going to do the heavy lifting. Audience sizing for a specialist premium content channel in the South African market was genuinely uncertain. Content licensing costs were significant. The ROI case was real but not overwhelming on paper — not the kind of financial projection that makes a board vote feel straightforward. In most corporate pitches, weak financial projections are a problem to be solved. In this one, they were a signal to be read correctly: the numbers were not the argument. The channel concept itself was the argument. And concepts — especially first-of-their-kind concepts with no direct local precedent — are not evaluated through spreadsheets. They are evaluated through conviction. The pitch needed to create conviction first. The numbers needed to follow, not lead.
The buyer group compounded the challenge. The internal stakeholders — department heads, directors, managing directors — were not a generic corporate audience. They were media professionals. People who had built careers in storytelling, content, broadcasting. Before they became executives, they had joined the industry because they loved it. That history was strategically significant. And it cut both ways. On one hand, these were people who could evaluate a content vision with genuine sophistication. They would know immediately whether the channel concept was genuine or manufactured. They would recognise creative passion — and its absence. A generic corporate pitch would not survive this audience. On the other hand, the professional responsibility these executives carried meant that personal enthusiasm was not enough. They were not being asked to say “I love this idea.” They were being asked to stake their professional credibility on a recommendation to the Naspers board. The emotional case needed to be strong enough to move them. The commercial framing needed to be credible enough to protect them. Emotion to decide. Logic to justify. Both, in the right sequence, with the right balance.
M-Net Edge Channel
The Solution
The strategic decision that shaped everything else was this: do not lead with what the channel is. Lead with what the channel does — to audiences, to the DSTv brand, and to the market position of M-Net at a moment when the platform’s relationship with premium content needed to be unambiguous. Working with Reel Media, we built the pitch around the emotional reality of the audience the channel was designed for. Not a demographic segment. Not a viewership projection. A feeling — the specific feeling of being a film lover in a content landscape that had never quite curated its offering for you. The sense of arriving somewhere that finally understood what you were looking for. This was the emotional targeting framework applied at its most deliberate. Before a single financial slide was reached, the audience in the room needed to have felt something. They needed to have been reminded — in their own professional and personal experience of content — why this mattered. Why an audience would be grateful for it. Why the DSTv platform would be diminished without it. Once that emotional foundation was established, the commercial framing landed differently. Not “here is the business case for a new channel.” But “here is why the audience we both believe in deserves this — and here is the commercial logic that makes it defensible.”
PowerPoint Adobe Photoshop Adobe Illustrator Sales Copywriting
Design carried an extraordinary proportion of the persuasive weight in this engagement. With the financial case unable to lead, and the emotional case requiring visceral rather than intellectual engagement, every slide had to function as a piece of visual storytelling rather than a vehicle for data. The brief we held ourselves to was uncompromising: every slide had to sell the dream. Every visual had to evoke something. Every sequence had to build belief in the idea rather than merely describe it. The deck was designed to feel like the channel — premium, curated, emotionally intelligent, and impossible to dismiss as ordinary. This required a different creative discipline than most pitch decks demand. The instinct in corporate presentations is to reach for data when confidence is low. Here, the discipline was to resist that instinct — to trust the story, trust the visual execution, trust the emotional architecture — and let the commercial framing serve as the justification for a conviction the room would arrive at through a different route. Over eight weeks, the presentation was refined through the iterative process that high-stakes multi-stakeholder pitches require. Each internal conversation revealed what was landing and what needed sharpening. By the time the pitch reached the level of the Naspers board, it had been tested, refined, and built to a standard that Jan himself had complete confidence in. That confidence was not a small thing. Jan is a media professional of rare calibre. When he believed the presentation was excellent — when the person who cared most about this vision felt that the presentation was doing it justice — that was the signal that the argument was ready.
M-Net Edge Channel
Performance Results
After eight weeks of internal stakeholder engagement, the presentation had achieved what it was designed to achieve: belief. The managing directors, department heads, and directors within the Multichoice Group had been moved from initial evaluation to active endorsement. Not reluctant approval — genuine conviction that the channel was worth backing and worth taking to the board. By the twelfth week, Jan had secured the approval he needed. M-Net Edge was greenlit. The Naspers board, presented with the commercial case embedded in the emotional architecture that had been refined through eight weeks of internal pitching, committed to the content investment required to launch. What the numbers alone could not justify, the story delivered.
M-Net Edge Channel
Final thoughts
There is a particular kind of pitch that no spreadsheet can save. The numbers are real but not decisive. The market data is supportive but not conclusive. The ROI projections are credible but not overwhelming. And the person in the room — the one who built this idea, who has lived inside it for months, who knows in their bones that it is worth doing — cannot transfer that certainty to the audience through logic alone. Most people in that situation reach for more data. More slides. More financial modelling. More analysis in the hope that one more number will close the gap between interest and conviction. It rarely does. Because the gap is not analytical. It is emotional. The decision to back an unproven idea — to stake professional credibility on a first-of-its-kind concept, to authorise significant spend on something that cannot yet be fully justified on paper — is not made through spreadsheets. It is made through feeling. Through the visceral sense that this is worth doing. That the audience it serves deserves it. That the brand behind it will be stronger for having had the courage to build it. Logic justifies that decision afterwards. But emotion makes it first. The M-Net Edge pitch succeeded because it was built around that truth rather than against it. Every slide was designed to create a feeling before it made an argument. Every visual was chosen to evoke rather than explain. The entire commercial narrative was sequenced to bring the audience to conviction through the same door that Jan himself had walked through — the door marked passion, creative belief, and genuine love of the craft. If you are sitting on an idea that you know is worth backing — but whose numbers do not yet make the full case — the question is not how to make the data stronger. The question is whether you are brave enough to lead with the story, and skilled enough to build the argument that earns the yes from the heart before the head has finished evaluating.
M-Net Edge Channel
Credits
Laura Howie
Jan du Plessis
Daryn Basson
Project Lead
Director
Presentation Specialist
Previous Project
The pitch that numbers couldn’t justify — approved, launched, and critically acclaimed.
The pitch that numbers couldn’t justify — approved, launched, and critically acclaimed.
Presentation Design
Sales Copywriting
Branding
M-Net Edge Channel
The pitch that numbers couldn’t justify — approved, launched, and critically acclaimed.
A channel for lovers of film. A curated, cinematic, unapologetically premium content experience — for the audience who always felt the existing offering wasn’t quite built for them.
M-Net Edge Channel
Overview
Jan du Plessis is not a man who needed to be convinced that great content matters. A legend within the South African media industry, Jan had built a career on the conviction that what people watch shapes what they feel — and that the audience for truly exceptional film and storytelling was larger, more loyal, and more commercially valuable than the market had recognised. His vision for M-Net Edge was specific and ambitious: a dedicated channel for content that moved people. Film. Storytelling. The kind of programming that audiences talk about, recommend, and remember. Not another general entertainment channel competing in an already crowded landscape — a specialist destination for the audience that DSTv had never quite built for directly. To make it real, Jan needed to sell it. First internally. Then to the Naspers board. Then to the South African market.
The context made this a uniquely complex pitch. DSTv was operating at a critical commercial inflection point — Netflix was approaching the South African market, and the subscriber retention challenge was real. Any new channel proposal arriving in that environment would face heightened scrutiny: is this a commercial asset or a vanity project? Does this help DSTv compete or does it consume resources without measurable return? Jan had two things working in his favour. The quality of his instinct — built over decades in an industry he understood better than almost anyone. And Reel Media, who joined the engagement to help build the commercial and content case for the channel. What Jan needed was a presentation that translated his instinct into a boardroom-ready argument. Not a summary of the idea. Not a slide deck of content categories and audience demographics. A pitch that made senior executives feel, in the room, what the channel would make audiences feel at home — and that gave them the commercial rationale to say yes to what their instinct was already telling them.
M-Net Edge Channel
The Challenge
The fundamental challenge was structural, and it was clear early in the process. The numbers, as they emerged from research and planning, were not going to do the heavy lifting. Audience sizing for a specialist premium content channel in the South African market was genuinely uncertain. Content licensing costs were significant. The ROI case was real but not overwhelming on paper — not the kind of financial projection that makes a board vote feel straightforward. In most corporate pitches, weak financial projections are a problem to be solved. In this one, they were a signal to be read correctly: the numbers were not the argument. The channel concept itself was the argument. And concepts — especially first-of-their-kind concepts with no direct local precedent — are not evaluated through spreadsheets. They are evaluated through conviction. The pitch needed to create conviction first. The numbers needed to follow, not lead.
The buyer group compounded the challenge. The internal stakeholders — department heads, directors, managing directors — were not a generic corporate audience. They were media professionals. People who had built careers in storytelling, content, broadcasting. Before they became executives, they had joined the industry because they loved it. That history was strategically significant. And it cut both ways. On one hand, these were people who could evaluate a content vision with genuine sophistication. They would know immediately whether the channel concept was genuine or manufactured. They would recognise creative passion — and its absence. A generic corporate pitch would not survive this audience. On the other hand, the professional responsibility these executives carried meant that personal enthusiasm was not enough. They were not being asked to say “I love this idea.” They were being asked to stake their professional credibility on a recommendation to the Naspers board. The emotional case needed to be strong enough to move them. The commercial framing needed to be credible enough to protect them. Emotion to decide. Logic to justify. Both, in the right sequence, with the right balance.
M-Net Edge Channel
The Solution
The strategic decision that shaped everything else was this: do not lead with what the channel is. Lead with what the channel does — to audiences, to the DSTv brand, and to the market position of M-Net at a moment when the platform’s relationship with premium content needed to be unambiguous. Working with Reel Media, we built the pitch around the emotional reality of the audience the channel was designed for. Not a demographic segment. Not a viewership projection. A feeling — the specific feeling of being a film lover in a content landscape that had never quite curated its offering for you. The sense of arriving somewhere that finally understood what you were looking for. This was the emotional targeting framework applied at its most deliberate. Before a single financial slide was reached, the audience in the room needed to have felt something. They needed to have been reminded — in their own professional and personal experience of content — why this mattered. Why an audience would be grateful for it. Why the DSTv platform would be diminished without it. Once that emotional foundation was established, the commercial framing landed differently. Not “here is the business case for a new channel.” But “here is why the audience we both believe in deserves this — and here is the commercial logic that makes it defensible.”
PowerPoint Adobe Photoshop Adobe Illustrator Sales Copywriting
Design carried an extraordinary proportion of the persuasive weight in this engagement. With the financial case unable to lead, and the emotional case requiring visceral rather than intellectual engagement, every slide had to function as a piece of visual storytelling rather than a vehicle for data. The brief we held ourselves to was uncompromising: every slide had to sell the dream. Every visual had to evoke something. Every sequence had to build belief in the idea rather than merely describe it. The deck was designed to feel like the channel — premium, curated, emotionally intelligent, and impossible to dismiss as ordinary. This required a different creative discipline than most pitch decks demand. The instinct in corporate presentations is to reach for data when confidence is low. Here, the discipline was to resist that instinct — to trust the story, trust the visual execution, trust the emotional architecture — and let the commercial framing serve as the justification for a conviction the room would arrive at through a different route. Over eight weeks, the presentation was refined through the iterative process that high-stakes multi-stakeholder pitches require. Each internal conversation revealed what was landing and what needed sharpening. By the time the pitch reached the level of the Naspers board, it had been tested, refined, and built to a standard that Jan himself had complete confidence in. That confidence was not a small thing. Jan is a media professional of rare calibre. When he believed the presentation was excellent — when the person who cared most about this vision felt that the presentation was doing it justice — that was the signal that the argument was ready.
M-Net Edge Channel
Performance Results
After eight weeks of internal stakeholder engagement, the presentation had achieved what it was designed to achieve: belief. The managing directors, department heads, and directors within the Multichoice Group had been moved from initial evaluation to active endorsement. Not reluctant approval — genuine conviction that the channel was worth backing and worth taking to the board. By the twelfth week, Jan had secured the approval he needed. M-Net Edge was greenlit. The Naspers board, presented with the commercial case embedded in the emotional architecture that had been refined through eight weeks of internal pitching, committed to the content investment required to launch. What the numbers alone could not justify, the story delivered.
M-Net Edge Channel
Final thoughts
There is a particular kind of pitch that no spreadsheet can save. The numbers are real but not decisive. The market data is supportive but not conclusive. The ROI projections are credible but not overwhelming. And the person in the room — the one who built this idea, who has lived inside it for months, who knows in their bones that it is worth doing — cannot transfer that certainty to the audience through logic alone. Most people in that situation reach for more data. More slides. More financial modelling. More analysis in the hope that one more number will close the gap between interest and conviction. It rarely does. Because the gap is not analytical. It is emotional. The decision to back an unproven idea — to stake professional credibility on a first-of-its-kind concept, to authorise significant spend on something that cannot yet be fully justified on paper — is not made through spreadsheets. It is made through feeling. Through the visceral sense that this is worth doing. That the audience it serves deserves it. That the brand behind it will be stronger for having had the courage to build it. Logic justifies that decision afterwards. But emotion makes it first. The M-Net Edge pitch succeeded because it was built around that truth rather than against it. Every slide was designed to create a feeling before it made an argument. Every visual was chosen to evoke rather than explain. The entire commercial narrative was sequenced to bring the audience to conviction through the same door that Jan himself had walked through — the door marked passion, creative belief, and genuine love of the craft. If you are sitting on an idea that you know is worth backing — but whose numbers do not yet make the full case — the question is not how to make the data stronger. The question is whether you are brave enough to lead with the story, and skilled enough to build the argument that earns the yes from the heart before the head has finished evaluating.
M-Net Edge Channel
Laura Howie
Jan du Plessis
Daryn Basson
Project Lead
Director
Presentation Specialist
Previous Project
The pitch that numbers couldn’t justify — approved, launched, and critically acclaimed.
The pitch that numbers couldn’t justify — approved, launched, and critically acclaimed.
Presentation Design
Sales Copywriting
Branding
M-Net Edge Channel
The pitch that numbers couldn’t justify — approved, launched, and critically acclaimed.
A channel for lovers of film. A curated, cinematic, unapologetically premium content experience — for the audience who always felt the existing offering wasn’t quite built for them.
M-Net Edge Channel
Overview
Jan du Plessis is not a man who needed to be convinced that great content matters. A legend within the South African media industry, Jan had built a career on the conviction that what people watch shapes what they feel — and that the audience for truly exceptional film and storytelling was larger, more loyal, and more commercially valuable than the market had recognised. His vision for M-Net Edge was specific and ambitious: a dedicated channel for content that moved people. Film. Storytelling. The kind of programming that audiences talk about, recommend, and remember. Not another general entertainment channel competing in an already crowded landscape — a specialist destination for the audience that DSTv had never quite built for directly. To make it real, Jan needed to sell it. First internally. Then to the Naspers board. Then to the South African market.
The context made this a uniquely complex pitch. DSTv was operating at a critical commercial inflection point — Netflix was approaching the South African market, and the subscriber retention challenge was real. Any new channel proposal arriving in that environment would face heightened scrutiny: is this a commercial asset or a vanity project? Does this help DSTv compete or does it consume resources without measurable return? Jan had two things working in his favour. The quality of his instinct — built over decades in an industry he understood better than almost anyone. And Reel Media, who joined the engagement to help build the commercial and content case for the channel. What Jan needed was a presentation that translated his instinct into a boardroom-ready argument. Not a summary of the idea. Not a slide deck of content categories and audience demographics. A pitch that made senior executives feel, in the room, what the channel would make audiences feel at home — and that gave them the commercial rationale to say yes to what their instinct was already telling them.
M-Net Edge Channel
The Challenge
The fundamental challenge was structural, and it was clear early in the process. The numbers, as they emerged from research and planning, were not going to do the heavy lifting. Audience sizing for a specialist premium content channel in the South African market was genuinely uncertain. Content licensing costs were significant. The ROI case was real but not overwhelming on paper — not the kind of financial projection that makes a board vote feel straightforward. In most corporate pitches, weak financial projections are a problem to be solved. In this one, they were a signal to be read correctly: the numbers were not the argument. The channel concept itself was the argument. And concepts — especially first-of-their-kind concepts with no direct local precedent — are not evaluated through spreadsheets. They are evaluated through conviction. The pitch needed to create conviction first. The numbers needed to follow, not lead.
The buyer group compounded the challenge. The internal stakeholders — department heads, directors, managing directors — were not a generic corporate audience. They were media professionals. People who had built careers in storytelling, content, broadcasting. Before they became executives, they had joined the industry because they loved it. That history was strategically significant. And it cut both ways. On one hand, these were people who could evaluate a content vision with genuine sophistication. They would know immediately whether the channel concept was genuine or manufactured. They would recognise creative passion — and its absence. A generic corporate pitch would not survive this audience. On the other hand, the professional responsibility these executives carried meant that personal enthusiasm was not enough. They were not being asked to say “I love this idea.” They were being asked to stake their professional credibility on a recommendation to the Naspers board. The emotional case needed to be strong enough to move them. The commercial framing needed to be credible enough to protect them. Emotion to decide. Logic to justify. Both, in the right sequence, with the right balance.
M-Net Edge Channel
The Solution
The strategic decision that shaped everything else was this: do not lead with what the channel is. Lead with what the channel does — to audiences, to the DSTv brand, and to the market position of M-Net at a moment when the platform’s relationship with premium content needed to be unambiguous. Working with Reel Media, we built the pitch around the emotional reality of the audience the channel was designed for. Not a demographic segment. Not a viewership projection. A feeling — the specific feeling of being a film lover in a content landscape that had never quite curated its offering for you. The sense of arriving somewhere that finally understood what you were looking for. This was the emotional targeting framework applied at its most deliberate. Before a single financial slide was reached, the audience in the room needed to have felt something. They needed to have been reminded — in their own professional and personal experience of content — why this mattered. Why an audience would be grateful for it. Why the DSTv platform would be diminished without it. Once that emotional foundation was established, the commercial framing landed differently. Not “here is the business case for a new channel.” But “here is why the audience we both believe in deserves this — and here is the commercial logic that makes it defensible.”
PowerPoint Adobe Photoshop Adobe Illustrator Sales Copywriting
Design carried an extraordinary proportion of the persuasive weight in this engagement. With the financial case unable to lead, and the emotional case requiring visceral rather than intellectual engagement, every slide had to function as a piece of visual storytelling rather than a vehicle for data. The brief we held ourselves to was uncompromising: every slide had to sell the dream. Every visual had to evoke something. Every sequence had to build belief in the idea rather than merely describe it. The deck was designed to feel like the channel — premium, curated, emotionally intelligent, and impossible to dismiss as ordinary. This required a different creative discipline than most pitch decks demand. The instinct in corporate presentations is to reach for data when confidence is low. Here, the discipline was to resist that instinct — to trust the story, trust the visual execution, trust the emotional architecture — and let the commercial framing serve as the justification for a conviction the room would arrive at through a different route. Over eight weeks, the presentation was refined through the iterative process that high-stakes multi-stakeholder pitches require. Each internal conversation revealed what was landing and what needed sharpening. By the time the pitch reached the level of the Naspers board, it had been tested, refined, and built to a standard that Jan himself had complete confidence in. That confidence was not a small thing. Jan is a media professional of rare calibre. When he believed the presentation was excellent — when the person who cared most about this vision felt that the presentation was doing it justice — that was the signal that the argument was ready.
M-Net Edge Channel
Performance Results
After eight weeks of internal stakeholder engagement, the presentation had achieved what it was designed to achieve: belief. The managing directors, department heads, and directors within the Multichoice Group had been moved from initial evaluation to active endorsement. Not reluctant approval — genuine conviction that the channel was worth backing and worth taking to the board. By the twelfth week, Jan had secured the approval he needed. M-Net Edge was greenlit. The Naspers board, presented with the commercial case embedded in the emotional architecture that had been refined through eight weeks of internal pitching, committed to the content investment required to launch. What the numbers alone could not justify, the story delivered.
M-Net Edge Channel
Final thoughts
There is a particular kind of pitch that no spreadsheet can save. The numbers are real but not decisive. The market data is supportive but not conclusive. The ROI projections are credible but not overwhelming. And the person in the room — the one who built this idea, who has lived inside it for months, who knows in their bones that it is worth doing — cannot transfer that certainty to the audience through logic alone. Most people in that situation reach for more data. More slides. More financial modelling. More analysis in the hope that one more number will close the gap between interest and conviction. It rarely does. Because the gap is not analytical. It is emotional. The decision to back an unproven idea — to stake professional credibility on a first-of-its-kind concept, to authorise significant spend on something that cannot yet be fully justified on paper — is not made through spreadsheets. It is made through feeling. Through the visceral sense that this is worth doing. That the audience it serves deserves it. That the brand behind it will be stronger for having had the courage to build it. Logic justifies that decision afterwards. But emotion makes it first. The M-Net Edge pitch succeeded because it was built around that truth rather than against it. Every slide was designed to create a feeling before it made an argument. Every visual was chosen to evoke rather than explain. The entire commercial narrative was sequenced to bring the audience to conviction through the same door that Jan himself had walked through — the door marked passion, creative belief, and genuine love of the craft. If you are sitting on an idea that you know is worth backing — but whose numbers do not yet make the full case — the question is not how to make the data stronger. The question is whether you are brave enough to lead with the story, and skilled enough to build the argument that earns the yes from the heart before the head has finished evaluating.
M-Net Edge Channel
Laura Howie
Jan du Plessis
Daryn Basson
Project Lead
Director
Presentation Specialist
Previous Project
One conversation to find
out if we are the right fit
for YOU
Tell us what you're selling. Who needs to say yes. What's at stake if they don't. We'll tell you exactly what we'd build — and whether we're the right studio to build it.
No obligation. No vague creative brief. A direct conversation about the commercial job your presentation or sales assets needs to do.
One conversation to find
out if we are the right fit
for YOU
Tell us what you're selling. Who needs to say yes. What's at stake if they don't. We'll tell you exactly what we'd build — and whether we're the right studio to build it.
No obligation. No vague creative brief. A direct conversation about the commercial job your presentation or sales assets needs to do.
One conversation to find
out if we are the right fit
for YOU
Tell us what you're selling. Who needs to say yes. What's at stake if they don't. We'll tell you exactly what we'd build — and whether we're the right studio to build it.
No obligation. No vague creative brief. A direct conversation about the commercial job your presentation or sales assets needs to do.