SA Media Company Kena Outdoor Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary
SA Media Company Kena Outdoor Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary. South African media company Kena Outdoor has announced that it is celebrating its 20th anniversary in the media industry and that it has set its sights on an even more exciting 20 years to come.
Founded in Johannesburg in 2003 by industry maverick Tshepo Matsepe, the company formerly known as Kena Media, is a communications gateway that specialises in a host of media activities. The black-owned conglomerate was formally incorporated by Tshepo Matsepe and Lerumo Maisela in 2005 and this would mark the beginning of an inspirational journey of how two men turned an ambitious dream into a remarkable reality.
The unshaken spirit of taking on juggernauts lead to the company’s acquisition of a billboard permit in the highly regulated City of Cape Town in 2004. The company lobbied for the change of the restrictive laws that saw many media owners being kept out of the industry particularly in the Western region of the country. The acquisition of this particular permit was a victory for the entity as it was the first post-1994 media owner to achieve this and marked the beginning of a long journey of breaking barriers to entry for budding enterprises.
However, the company’s most successful effort at creating a fairer environment for OOH media owners would begin in 2009 when it petitioned the world soccer governing body FIFA to include South African media owners and advertisers in the media strategy. This petition was the first of its kind and it called for FIFA to not exclude local media owners in favour of international conglomerates. Its rapid expansion in Soweto was the result of the company successfully petitioning FIFA and subsequently becoming Soweto’s largest local media owner and an integral part of the 2010 FIFA World Cup’s advertising efforts.
The end of 2022 saw the beginning of a countrywide effort of further expanding the corporation’s reach across South Africa through an acquisition drive where it began to absorb smaller entities. Its goal for the near future is to takeover and transform budding entities in the OOH media space and absorb the footprint into Kena’s inventory.
Kena Outdoor’s celebration of twenty years in the industry marks the celebration of a dream turned into a remarkable reality. A dream that is backed by a track record of hard work and innovation that knows no boundaries. The next twenty years and beyond, the company aims to see a sustained and successful expansion of the Kena brand both locally and abroad.
