A Digital Marketing Consultancy Built on Scoping What You Actually Need
Duly Noted is a digital marketing consultancy based in Johannesburg, South Africa. We work with mid-size to enterprise businesses locally and internationally, and with agencies that need specialist capability without the overhead of a full-time hire.
Scoped before anything is sold.
Most agencies are structured around a fixed team they need to bill against. The services they sell are determined by the people they employ. When a client's needs change, the agency pushes back — because the change threatens their revenue model.
We are not structured that way. Every engagement starts with an audit of what exists and an honest assessment of what is needed. We bring in the right specialists for the specific brief. If your current supplier is performing well on one channel, we will tell you. If the problem is tracking rather than media spend, we will tell you that before you commit a rand to new campaigns.
Media budget increases do not automatically increase our fees. Services you did not ask for do not appear in your scope. This is how the relationship stays honest over time.
Revenue is the destination. Everything else is navigation.
Most agencies measure success in the metrics that are easiest to report — impressions, clicks, engagement rates. These tell you something about what is happening in a campaign. But they are indicators, not outcomes.
This orientation changes how we approach every brief. We audit the full ecosystem before we spend anything. We are interested in what happens after the lead is generated — the CRM it flows into, the sales process that handles it. We look at the full chain.
AI is a tool. Expertise is what makes it work.
AI tools are genuinely useful. We use them. They accelerate research, assist with content production, support analysis, and surface patterns in data. But AI operates on the inputs it is given — if the tracking is broken, AI optimises toward the wrong signals, faster and at greater scale than a human would.
What AI cannot do is understand the full brief. It cannot read business context, identify that a conversion event is tracking complaints rather than leads, or know that a specific market behaves differently from the global average the model was trained on.
We test, we check, and we validate. We do not hand off decisions to tools that cannot be held accountable for outcomes. The AI accelerates the work. The expertise determines whether the work performs.
Neil Duly
Neil's entry point into marketing was not through an agency or a creative department — it was through sales. He started his career running businesses, owned and operated franchise stores, managed sales teams, and worked as a sales and marketing manager selling logistics solutions to consumers, large corporations and government.
His career spans owning franchise businesses, sales and marketing management in logistics, brand consulting at Interbrand, senior data and programmatic strategy work within a division of WPP, programmatic and DMP work at Oracle Marketing Cloud, influencer marketing, global brand launches across multiple markets, and senior digital leadership at Joe Public — where he built the agency's first in-house paid media operation and led Assupol's first large-scale digital transformation.
He has managed media budgets from R4,000 to over $1 million across South Africa, the UAE, UK, Europe, Australia and North America. He founded Duly Noted in 2017.
Mid-size to enterprise
Established businesses with real budgets and real performance requirements. Typically spending R20,000 to several million rand per month across digital activity.
Agencies
We work with agencies of all sizes as a white-label specialist resource. Fully confidential. Your client relationship stays yours. We make your offering stronger.
International businesses
Global brands entering South Africa and SA businesses expanding into the UAE, UK, US and beyond. Local market knowledge, international capability.
Duly Noted can arrange BBBEE Level 1 compliance for your campaign via a certified partner. Get in touch to discuss requirements.
Start with a conversation.
Tell us what you are trying to achieve or what is not working. We will have an honest look at it — including whether we are the right fit.