50+ presentations. 18 months. Board approval for South Africa’s first Netflix competitor.
50+ presentations. 18 months. Board approval for South Africa’s first Netflix competitor.
Presentation Design
Sales Copywriting
Branding
Social Media Design
Showmax Launch
50+ presentations. 18 months. Board approval for South Africa’s first Netflix competitor.
Eighteen months. Fifty-plus presentations. One product launch. This is what it looks like when presentation design sits at the centre of a billion-rand commercial decision.
Showmax Launch
Overview
In the years before Netflix landed in South Africa, the Naspers board faced one of the most consequential strategic decisions in South African media history. DSTv had owned pay-television in this market for decades. The question was whether to defend that position by building something new — a home-grown, on-demand streaming service capable of competing with the world’s most formidable entertainment platform. The decision had not been made. The category was being invented in real time. The business model was unprecedented in the local market. And the only way to get the green light was to build the case, piece by piece, week by week, in rooms full of people whose approval the project could not survive without. A select group of elite professionals within the Multichoice Group were assembled to answer three questions: Could it be done? What would it look like? And was the business case strong enough to take to the Naspers board?
What followed was one of the most unusual and demanding creative engagements of its kind. Not a single pitch. Not a launch campaign. An eighteen-month, iterative, weekly presentation cycle — designed to move a complex, unprecedented commercial initiative through two distinct buyer groups, in sequence, while the product itself was being built from scratch. The first buyer group was internal. Managing directors, department heads, executives — the people who decided, week by week, whether ShowMax lived or died before it ever reached the board. The second buyer group was the Naspers board itself: the ultimate decision-making authority whose approval was the only thing that mattered at the final stage. Two buyers. One commercial argument. Fifty-plus presentations. Eighteen months.
Showmax Launch
The Challenge
The structural challenge was unlike a conventional pitch engagement in almost every dimension. A typical high-stakes pitch is a single presentation, built once, delivered once, and won or lost in the room. This was not that. This was a sustained, multi-month approval campaign in which each weekly presentation had to do two things simultaneously: demonstrate credible progress to an increasingly impatient internal audience, and build toward a board-level commercial argument that would eventually need to stand on its own at the highest level of the organisation. The internal buyer group — the managing directors and department heads who reviewed progress weekly — were not passive observers. They had the power to pause, redirect, or quietly kill the initiative. Their confidence in the project needed to be earned and re-earned every week. The presentations were not updates. They were weekly sales calls. And the standard for those sales calls was high. These were sophisticated executives, operating in a category they understood deeply, evaluating whether an untested business model could actually deliver what the team was promising. Credibility in that room was not assumed. It was built — or lost — one presentation at a time.
The creative challenge compounded the strategic one. At the earliest stages of the ShowMax project, no UI/UX designers had been brought in. The product team was mapping the business model, the content licensing framework, the distribution architecture. What the product would actually look like — how a South African consumer would experience it, navigate it, discover content through it — existed only as concept. For the board to approve the project, they needed to see the product. Not in theory. Visually. Experientially. Board members are not content strategists. They do not evaluate abstract business models in isolation from the experience those models are designed to create. They needed to be able to see ShowMax — to feel what it would be like — before they could believe in it. That meant the presentation design layer had to carry a function that normally belongs to the product design team: making the ShowMax experience visible, intuitive, and credible before the UX team had produced a single wireframe.
Showmax Launch
The Solution
The foundational decision was to treat every weekly presentation as a commercial asset with a specific job — not a progress report, not a summary of activity, but a sales tool designed to produce a specific belief state in the people in the room. Each week, the job was different. In the early weeks, the job was credibility: establishing that the team had the commercial intelligence to build this. As the project developed, the job shifted to momentum: demonstrating that real, measurable progress was being made and that the initiative deserved continued investment of attention and approval. In the final weeks before board presentation, the job was conviction: building the complete commercial argument that would carry the initiative from internal champion to board approval. Working alongside Reel Media and the elite DSTv team, each weekly session became a diagnostic as well as a design challenge. What has changed since last week? What does the room need to believe today? What objections are likely to surface? What proof is available to address them? The answer to those questions shaped the presentation — not the other way around. This is the commercial discipline that makes iterative presentations work: knowing what job the presentation has to do before deciding what goes into it.
PowerPoint Adobe Photoshop Adobe Illustrator Copywriting
The UI/UX challenge was resolved through a methodology that would become a recurring FireWerks capability: making the invisible visible through credible visual prototyping within the presentation layer itself. Mock-ups of the ShowMax interface — how content would be curated, surfaced, and accessed across multiple devices — were built directly into the presentation design. Not rough sketches. Credible, professional representations of the product experience that allowed board members to evaluate the ShowMax proposition the way a consumer would: by seeing it. This visual prototyping work served multiple functions simultaneously. It gave the internal team a shared visual reference for what they were building. It gave the board a reason to believe that the product was real, not theoretical. And it gave the commercial argument a surface — a visible, tangible thing to point to when the question was “but what will it actually look like?” When the Naspers board approved the project, a dedicated UX team was brought in to take the product forward. The presentation design layer had done its job: it had carried the vision until the product team was ready to build it properly. After that, the focus shifted — from building ShowMax to marketing it, with presentations mapping proposed campaigns, social media strategies, and go-to-market execution across the South African market.
Showmax Launch
Performance Results
After five months of weekly presentations to internal stakeholders, the ShowMax initiative received the green light to proceed to board-level review. It was the first major milestone — the internal buyer group had been held, week by week, through the full arc of the project’s development, and they had consistently approved the next stage of progress. The board presentation process delivered what it needed to: approval at key milestones, and ultimately, the final authorisation to launch. A new on-demand streaming service — unprecedented in the South African market, competing directly with the global leader in the category — was given the commercial and financial endorsement of one of the most significant media boards on the continent. ShowMax launched officially on 19 August 2015. What had begun as a question — “could it be done?” — had been answered in the only way that matters: by doing it.
Showmax Launch
Final thoughts
ShowMax did not get built because the idea was obvious. Plenty of good ideas never get built. They stall in the first internal review. They lose momentum between meetings. They get quietly deprioritised when the next urgent thing arrives. They run out of internal advocates before they ever reach the room that matters. What kept ShowMax moving — week after week, for eighteen months — was not the strength of the concept alone. It was the commercial infrastructure that made the concept visible, credible, and impossible to set aside. A weekly presentation cycle that held the attention of senior executives. An argument that grew stronger as the product did. A visual representation of something that didn’t exist yet, made real enough to evaluate, approve, and eventually build. This is the thing most organisations underestimate about complex internal initiatives: the selling never stops. The first approval is not the last approval. Internal champions need to be sustained. Progress needs to be demonstrated. Belief needs to be renewed — not once, but every time a new meeting convenes and the question “should we keep going?” is implicitly on the table. The organisations that successfully launch new products, enter new markets, and execute transformational initiatives are not simply those with the best ideas. They are the ones who can sustain the commercial argument — clearly, consistently, and compellingly — across every internal audience, over the full duration of the journey. If you have an initiative that needs to survive a long approval process, a sceptical internal audience, or a board that needs to believe before they will commit — the question is not whether the idea is strong enough. The question is whether your commercial communication infrastructure is built to keep it alive.
Showmax Launch
Credits
Laura Howie
Victor Eckhard
Daryn Basson
CEO Reel Media // Project Lead
ShowMax Lead // Director
Presentation Specialist
Previous Project
Next Project
50+ presentations. 18 months. Board approval for South Africa’s first Netflix competitor.
50+ presentations. 18 months. Board approval for South Africa’s first Netflix competitor.
Presentation Design
Sales Copywriting
Branding
Social Media Design
Showmax Launch
50+ presentations. 18 months. Board approval for South Africa’s first Netflix competitor.
Eighteen months. Fifty-plus presentations. One product launch. This is what it looks like when presentation design sits at the centre of a billion-rand commercial decision.
Showmax Launch
Overview
In the years before Netflix landed in South Africa, the Naspers board faced one of the most consequential strategic decisions in South African media history. DSTv had owned pay-television in this market for decades. The question was whether to defend that position by building something new — a home-grown, on-demand streaming service capable of competing with the world’s most formidable entertainment platform. The decision had not been made. The category was being invented in real time. The business model was unprecedented in the local market. And the only way to get the green light was to build the case, piece by piece, week by week, in rooms full of people whose approval the project could not survive without. A select group of elite professionals within the Multichoice Group were assembled to answer three questions: Could it be done? What would it look like? And was the business case strong enough to take to the Naspers board?
What followed was one of the most unusual and demanding creative engagements of its kind. Not a single pitch. Not a launch campaign. An eighteen-month, iterative, weekly presentation cycle — designed to move a complex, unprecedented commercial initiative through two distinct buyer groups, in sequence, while the product itself was being built from scratch. The first buyer group was internal. Managing directors, department heads, executives — the people who decided, week by week, whether ShowMax lived or died before it ever reached the board. The second buyer group was the Naspers board itself: the ultimate decision-making authority whose approval was the only thing that mattered at the final stage. Two buyers. One commercial argument. Fifty-plus presentations. Eighteen months.
Showmax Launch
The Challenge
The structural challenge was unlike a conventional pitch engagement in almost every dimension. A typical high-stakes pitch is a single presentation, built once, delivered once, and won or lost in the room. This was not that. This was a sustained, multi-month approval campaign in which each weekly presentation had to do two things simultaneously: demonstrate credible progress to an increasingly impatient internal audience, and build toward a board-level commercial argument that would eventually need to stand on its own at the highest level of the organisation. The internal buyer group — the managing directors and department heads who reviewed progress weekly — were not passive observers. They had the power to pause, redirect, or quietly kill the initiative. Their confidence in the project needed to be earned and re-earned every week. The presentations were not updates. They were weekly sales calls. And the standard for those sales calls was high. These were sophisticated executives, operating in a category they understood deeply, evaluating whether an untested business model could actually deliver what the team was promising. Credibility in that room was not assumed. It was built — or lost — one presentation at a time.
The creative challenge compounded the strategic one. At the earliest stages of the ShowMax project, no UI/UX designers had been brought in. The product team was mapping the business model, the content licensing framework, the distribution architecture. What the product would actually look like — how a South African consumer would experience it, navigate it, discover content through it — existed only as concept. For the board to approve the project, they needed to see the product. Not in theory. Visually. Experientially. Board members are not content strategists. They do not evaluate abstract business models in isolation from the experience those models are designed to create. They needed to be able to see ShowMax — to feel what it would be like — before they could believe in it. That meant the presentation design layer had to carry a function that normally belongs to the product design team: making the ShowMax experience visible, intuitive, and credible before the UX team had produced a single wireframe.
Showmax Launch
The Solution
The foundational decision was to treat every weekly presentation as a commercial asset with a specific job — not a progress report, not a summary of activity, but a sales tool designed to produce a specific belief state in the people in the room. Each week, the job was different. In the early weeks, the job was credibility: establishing that the team had the commercial intelligence to build this. As the project developed, the job shifted to momentum: demonstrating that real, measurable progress was being made and that the initiative deserved continued investment of attention and approval. In the final weeks before board presentation, the job was conviction: building the complete commercial argument that would carry the initiative from internal champion to board approval. Working alongside Reel Media and the elite DSTv team, each weekly session became a diagnostic as well as a design challenge. What has changed since last week? What does the room need to believe today? What objections are likely to surface? What proof is available to address them? The answer to those questions shaped the presentation — not the other way around. This is the commercial discipline that makes iterative presentations work: knowing what job the presentation has to do before deciding what goes into it.
PowerPoint Adobe Photoshop Adobe Illustrator Copywriting
The UI/UX challenge was resolved through a methodology that would become a recurring FireWerks capability: making the invisible visible through credible visual prototyping within the presentation layer itself. Mock-ups of the ShowMax interface — how content would be curated, surfaced, and accessed across multiple devices — were built directly into the presentation design. Not rough sketches. Credible, professional representations of the product experience that allowed board members to evaluate the ShowMax proposition the way a consumer would: by seeing it. This visual prototyping work served multiple functions simultaneously. It gave the internal team a shared visual reference for what they were building. It gave the board a reason to believe that the product was real, not theoretical. And it gave the commercial argument a surface — a visible, tangible thing to point to when the question was “but what will it actually look like?” When the Naspers board approved the project, a dedicated UX team was brought in to take the product forward. The presentation design layer had done its job: it had carried the vision until the product team was ready to build it properly. After that, the focus shifted — from building ShowMax to marketing it, with presentations mapping proposed campaigns, social media strategies, and go-to-market execution across the South African market.
Showmax Launch
Performance Results
After five months of weekly presentations to internal stakeholders, the ShowMax initiative received the green light to proceed to board-level review. It was the first major milestone — the internal buyer group had been held, week by week, through the full arc of the project’s development, and they had consistently approved the next stage of progress. The board presentation process delivered what it needed to: approval at key milestones, and ultimately, the final authorisation to launch. A new on-demand streaming service — unprecedented in the South African market, competing directly with the global leader in the category — was given the commercial and financial endorsement of one of the most significant media boards on the continent. ShowMax launched officially on 19 August 2015. What had begun as a question — “could it be done?” — had been answered in the only way that matters: by doing it.
Showmax Launch
Final thoughts
ShowMax did not get built because the idea was obvious. Plenty of good ideas never get built. They stall in the first internal review. They lose momentum between meetings. They get quietly deprioritised when the next urgent thing arrives. They run out of internal advocates before they ever reach the room that matters. What kept ShowMax moving — week after week, for eighteen months — was not the strength of the concept alone. It was the commercial infrastructure that made the concept visible, credible, and impossible to set aside. A weekly presentation cycle that held the attention of senior executives. An argument that grew stronger as the product did. A visual representation of something that didn’t exist yet, made real enough to evaluate, approve, and eventually build. This is the thing most organisations underestimate about complex internal initiatives: the selling never stops. The first approval is not the last approval. Internal champions need to be sustained. Progress needs to be demonstrated. Belief needs to be renewed — not once, but every time a new meeting convenes and the question “should we keep going?” is implicitly on the table. The organisations that successfully launch new products, enter new markets, and execute transformational initiatives are not simply those with the best ideas. They are the ones who can sustain the commercial argument — clearly, consistently, and compellingly — across every internal audience, over the full duration of the journey. If you have an initiative that needs to survive a long approval process, a sceptical internal audience, or a board that needs to believe before they will commit — the question is not whether the idea is strong enough. The question is whether your commercial communication infrastructure is built to keep it alive.
Showmax Launch
Laura Howie
Victor Eckhard
Daryn Basson
CEO Reel Media // Project Lead
ShowMax Lead // Director
Presentation Specialist
Previous Project
Next Project
50+ presentations. 18 months. Board approval for South Africa’s first Netflix competitor.
50+ presentations. 18 months. Board approval for South Africa’s first Netflix competitor.
Presentation Design
Sales Copywriting
Branding
Social Media Design
Showmax Launch
50+ presentations. 18 months. Board approval for South Africa’s first Netflix competitor.
Eighteen months. Fifty-plus presentations. One product launch. This is what it looks like when presentation design sits at the centre of a billion-rand commercial decision.
Showmax Launch
Overview
In the years before Netflix landed in South Africa, the Naspers board faced one of the most consequential strategic decisions in South African media history. DSTv had owned pay-television in this market for decades. The question was whether to defend that position by building something new — a home-grown, on-demand streaming service capable of competing with the world’s most formidable entertainment platform. The decision had not been made. The category was being invented in real time. The business model was unprecedented in the local market. And the only way to get the green light was to build the case, piece by piece, week by week, in rooms full of people whose approval the project could not survive without. A select group of elite professionals within the Multichoice Group were assembled to answer three questions: Could it be done? What would it look like? And was the business case strong enough to take to the Naspers board?
What followed was one of the most unusual and demanding creative engagements of its kind. Not a single pitch. Not a launch campaign. An eighteen-month, iterative, weekly presentation cycle — designed to move a complex, unprecedented commercial initiative through two distinct buyer groups, in sequence, while the product itself was being built from scratch. The first buyer group was internal. Managing directors, department heads, executives — the people who decided, week by week, whether ShowMax lived or died before it ever reached the board. The second buyer group was the Naspers board itself: the ultimate decision-making authority whose approval was the only thing that mattered at the final stage. Two buyers. One commercial argument. Fifty-plus presentations. Eighteen months.
Showmax Launch
The Challenge
The structural challenge was unlike a conventional pitch engagement in almost every dimension. A typical high-stakes pitch is a single presentation, built once, delivered once, and won or lost in the room. This was not that. This was a sustained, multi-month approval campaign in which each weekly presentation had to do two things simultaneously: demonstrate credible progress to an increasingly impatient internal audience, and build toward a board-level commercial argument that would eventually need to stand on its own at the highest level of the organisation. The internal buyer group — the managing directors and department heads who reviewed progress weekly — were not passive observers. They had the power to pause, redirect, or quietly kill the initiative. Their confidence in the project needed to be earned and re-earned every week. The presentations were not updates. They were weekly sales calls. And the standard for those sales calls was high. These were sophisticated executives, operating in a category they understood deeply, evaluating whether an untested business model could actually deliver what the team was promising. Credibility in that room was not assumed. It was built — or lost — one presentation at a time.
The creative challenge compounded the strategic one. At the earliest stages of the ShowMax project, no UI/UX designers had been brought in. The product team was mapping the business model, the content licensing framework, the distribution architecture. What the product would actually look like — how a South African consumer would experience it, navigate it, discover content through it — existed only as concept. For the board to approve the project, they needed to see the product. Not in theory. Visually. Experientially. Board members are not content strategists. They do not evaluate abstract business models in isolation from the experience those models are designed to create. They needed to be able to see ShowMax — to feel what it would be like — before they could believe in it. That meant the presentation design layer had to carry a function that normally belongs to the product design team: making the ShowMax experience visible, intuitive, and credible before the UX team had produced a single wireframe.
Showmax Launch
The Solution
The foundational decision was to treat every weekly presentation as a commercial asset with a specific job — not a progress report, not a summary of activity, but a sales tool designed to produce a specific belief state in the people in the room. Each week, the job was different. In the early weeks, the job was credibility: establishing that the team had the commercial intelligence to build this. As the project developed, the job shifted to momentum: demonstrating that real, measurable progress was being made and that the initiative deserved continued investment of attention and approval. In the final weeks before board presentation, the job was conviction: building the complete commercial argument that would carry the initiative from internal champion to board approval. Working alongside Reel Media and the elite DSTv team, each weekly session became a diagnostic as well as a design challenge. What has changed since last week? What does the room need to believe today? What objections are likely to surface? What proof is available to address them? The answer to those questions shaped the presentation — not the other way around. This is the commercial discipline that makes iterative presentations work: knowing what job the presentation has to do before deciding what goes into it.
PowerPoint Adobe Photoshop Adobe Illustrator Copywriting
The UI/UX challenge was resolved through a methodology that would become a recurring FireWerks capability: making the invisible visible through credible visual prototyping within the presentation layer itself. Mock-ups of the ShowMax interface — how content would be curated, surfaced, and accessed across multiple devices — were built directly into the presentation design. Not rough sketches. Credible, professional representations of the product experience that allowed board members to evaluate the ShowMax proposition the way a consumer would: by seeing it. This visual prototyping work served multiple functions simultaneously. It gave the internal team a shared visual reference for what they were building. It gave the board a reason to believe that the product was real, not theoretical. And it gave the commercial argument a surface — a visible, tangible thing to point to when the question was “but what will it actually look like?” When the Naspers board approved the project, a dedicated UX team was brought in to take the product forward. The presentation design layer had done its job: it had carried the vision until the product team was ready to build it properly. After that, the focus shifted — from building ShowMax to marketing it, with presentations mapping proposed campaigns, social media strategies, and go-to-market execution across the South African market.
Showmax Launch
Performance Results
After five months of weekly presentations to internal stakeholders, the ShowMax initiative received the green light to proceed to board-level review. It was the first major milestone — the internal buyer group had been held, week by week, through the full arc of the project’s development, and they had consistently approved the next stage of progress. The board presentation process delivered what it needed to: approval at key milestones, and ultimately, the final authorisation to launch. A new on-demand streaming service — unprecedented in the South African market, competing directly with the global leader in the category — was given the commercial and financial endorsement of one of the most significant media boards on the continent. ShowMax launched officially on 19 August 2015. What had begun as a question — “could it be done?” — had been answered in the only way that matters: by doing it.
Showmax Launch
Final thoughts
ShowMax did not get built because the idea was obvious. Plenty of good ideas never get built. They stall in the first internal review. They lose momentum between meetings. They get quietly deprioritised when the next urgent thing arrives. They run out of internal advocates before they ever reach the room that matters. What kept ShowMax moving — week after week, for eighteen months — was not the strength of the concept alone. It was the commercial infrastructure that made the concept visible, credible, and impossible to set aside. A weekly presentation cycle that held the attention of senior executives. An argument that grew stronger as the product did. A visual representation of something that didn’t exist yet, made real enough to evaluate, approve, and eventually build. This is the thing most organisations underestimate about complex internal initiatives: the selling never stops. The first approval is not the last approval. Internal champions need to be sustained. Progress needs to be demonstrated. Belief needs to be renewed — not once, but every time a new meeting convenes and the question “should we keep going?” is implicitly on the table. The organisations that successfully launch new products, enter new markets, and execute transformational initiatives are not simply those with the best ideas. They are the ones who can sustain the commercial argument — clearly, consistently, and compellingly — across every internal audience, over the full duration of the journey. If you have an initiative that needs to survive a long approval process, a sceptical internal audience, or a board that needs to believe before they will commit — the question is not whether the idea is strong enough. The question is whether your commercial communication infrastructure is built to keep it alive.
Showmax Launch
Laura Howie
Victor Eckhard
Daryn Basson
CEO Reel Media // Project Lead
ShowMax Lead // Director
Presentation Specialist
Previous Project
Next 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.