Hosted by David Blyth of eatbigfish Africa (represented by Delta Victor Bravo), in partnership with the Association for Communication & Advertising (ACA) and the Marketing Association of South Africa (MASA), the fourth session of Season 3 of the Daily Maverick Marketing Masterclass put that question to a regulator and a marketer: Gail Schimmel, CEO of the Advertising Regulatory Board of South Africa (ARB), and Shaadia Vawda, CMO and founder of The Archery.
Persuasion is manipulation
Schimmel opened by stating that persuasion is manipulation. “I don’t think the line is between persuasion and manipulation. Persuasion is a type of manipulation.” In the week before the session, the ARB had received a complaint that fast food ads during the soccer World Cup make the viewer want fast food. “Well, yes – that is what advertising is trying to do. The line that the ARB is interested in is the line between manipulation and misleading.”
Manipulation uses behavioural science to move someone towards a purchase. Misleading involves lying about the product. Between the two sit dark patterns, where familiar behavioural techniques turn darker – online gambling, Temu’s urgency-inducing timers and addictive gamification are good examples. The countdown clock on a shopping site is her test case: if the offer really is about to expire, that is manipulation; if the clock is a fiction, it has crossed into misleading. And sometimes awareness offers thin protection – for example, the delivery fee that appears only once you have invested time and attention in a purchase, so that you don’t walk away, is misleading. Schimmel admitted: “I’m 100% aware of it, but I fall for it every time.”
Two days of gambling and R350 down
Vawda prepared for the session by opening an online gambling account and playing the slots, starting with R50 and ending R350 down over two days. The environment was engineered to feel like anything but risk: fruit spilling across the screen, bright colours, free offers pulling her back in. “You feel like you’re a kid again in an arcade. It’s really tricking the mind into believing that this is okay.” Even with this limited exposure, she found it addictive and difficult to stop. The self-ban function was buried deep in the website, and she asked why the platform doesn’t pick up unhealthy behaviour, like rising spend or log-ins in the early hours, and step in.
For Schimmel, this is a product problem, not an advertising problem, and it sits in dark-pattern territory – an ethical question, but not misleading. “You’re getting what you signed up for. Shaadia signed up to lose her money, and then she signed up to lose some more.”
What South Africans actually complain about
For all the airtime the big ethical debates get, they are not what lands on the ARB’s desk. The vast majority of complaints are about misleading advertising – the promise not matching the experience – and the pattern is consistent: South African consumers are worried about their money. The two-for-one that wasn’t honoured. The 20% discount that never materialised. The hamburger that didn’t match the picture.
The same holds in gambling. “The bulk of complaints we get are not that this ad is particularly manipulative,” Schimmel said. Rather it’s: “They said I get five free spins and I only got four.” Consumers who are stretching too few rand across too much life are not preoccupied with the ethics of gambling, sugar or greenwashing; they want to know whether an ad misled them about where their money went. Ads featuring sex or religion, and claims of company-on-company imitation, also land on the ARB’s desk.
Poverty makes it harder
The context sharpens everything. Daily Maverick reported earlier this year that around 40% of gamblers say they gamble specifically to cover household expenses or manage debt. It is much harder to tell people who cannot get through the month not to gamble, because they are desperate to win – even if they use the money that should feed their children. Her conclusion is uncomfortable for the industry’s critics: “I do not think this is a marketing issue. Very few people with an existing gambling problem gamble more because they saw an ad. This is a socio-economic issue.”
Banning isn’t the answer either. Drawing on systems theory – pull one string of an entangled problem and you create new ones – she pointed to Canada, which banned online gambling outright. The business moved offshore, taking the tax revenue and jobs with it, and people with gambling problems were no better off. Vawda agreed: “We’re not a nanny state. We should never do that, because you push things underground and then you cannot monitor.” People have the right to self-determine. The ARB describes itself as anti-banning: “We pull ads in order to preserve freedom of speech – if you pull the bad ones, the good ones can keep being aired.”
The granny test
If regulation cannot carry the ethical load alone, the weight shifts to the marketer. Well-governed corporates have guardrails, Vawda noted – stringent ethics policies, continuous training, legal playbooks governing what a campaign can and cannot do – but not every marketer works inside those structures. So her litmus tests are deliberately simple: Who am I targeting? Am I happy to tell my granny about the job I do at the dinner table? Can I sleep at night with the decisions I make?
Skill in marketing raises the stakes. “With knowledge comes responsibility, and with expertise comes more responsibility. The better you are at your trade, the more careful you have to be.” The pressure is real: asking a boss to soften a growth target because an audience decision feels wrong is not a conversation most marketers relish. The responsible route makes the job harder. You have to look for growth elsewhere, innovate into white space, even move out of the category, or into an adjacent one, to find new growth rather than squeezing more revenue from the most vulnerable customers because they are easiest to reach.
The good that advertising can do
Neither guest wanted the conversation to end as an indictment. Categories can own their responsibilities: the alcohol industry already funds education on the dangers of drinking, and MASA and the ARB have called on the sugar industry to do the same. When Schimmel realised there was no law in South Africa against marketing nicotine vapes to children, she approached the vaping industry body, which joined the ARB and introduced an advertising code, revised every year, to protect minors. The same persuasive power drives HIV awareness and financial literacy, and sponsorships keep much of South African sport funded.
Advertising carries a quieter social power too. Campaigns have moved away from the woman doing the dishes while the man watches TV, and Schimmel pointed to research showing that positive portrayals of older people lead viewers into a healthier, happier old age. “Advertising has this enormous ability to do good while selling, in really subtle ways.” Vawda agreed: marketing plays into lifestyle, aspiration and dreams, and that is okay. “Marketing is a beautiful discipline. Advertising has a massive role to play in making people smile and feel happy, but how do we do it more responsibly, more consciously?”
Collaboration, not boxing gloves
The parting shots pointed the same way. You cannot remove marketing from the categories in question – even limiting social media for under-18s, which both guests supported in principle, would be dodged in practice. However, you can change the conversation: “We shouldn’t be putting boxing gloves on with the industry; rather, we should be having more round-table conversations,” Vawda said.
Schimmel closed on the asset that outlasts any campaign: trust. “The most important thing a marketer can have, particularly going into this new AI world, is the trust of their consumers. The marketer who behaves with the highest degree of ethics and the highest degree of transparency is the marketer who is going to win – maybe not the battle, but the war.” DM
About the series
This was the fourth session of “We’re Picking Fights”, Season 3 of the Daily Maverick Marketing Masterclass, hosted by eatbigfish Africa (represented by Delta Victor Bravo) in partnership with the Association for Communication & Advertising (ACA) and the Marketing Association of South Africa (MASA). Six fault lines, one platform for tough debate. The series runs as a one-hour webinar every second Thursday from 11 June to 20 August 2026. The next episode asks which agency model is best for our times – The Great Restructure – and takes place on 6 August. To view the series, visit Daily Maverick Events.
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