The World: Parallel worlds inspire an advertising passion.(Nunu Ntshingila of Ogilvy & Mather South Africa)

Ogilvy & Mather South Africa's new chief executive is deeply committed to the country of her birth.

When the new Ogilvy UK Group chairman, Gary Leih, upped sticks from his native South Africa after four years at the helm of Ogilvy & Mather there, his chief executive, Robyn Putter, sent out a heartfelt e-mail praising his former managing director. In what was almost buried as an aside, he also announced his own move to take on the twin responsibilities of executive chairman and chief executive for the entire continent, at least until September, when he predicted he'd either be put out to pasture or turned into glue, whichever was more profitable.

O&M South Africa will now be run by Nunu Ntshingila, a South African-born, dyed-in-the-wool Ogilvyite whom Putter describes as 'unquestionably advertising's first lady'.

Faultlessly modest, Ntshingila is keen to play down any stateswomanly leanings; she is, she says, just the chief executive for O&M South Africa and shouldn't be depicted as a flag bearer for a continent, let alone an industry.

But South Africa dominates advertising and marketing on the continent, and she concedes that the country's influence has a huge bearing on the commercial message as it travels north.

'Most of the work is driven from South Africa because most of the clients - what I call our 'Afrinationals' - are based here,' she says. But does advertising created for a developed market translate to the rest of the continent?

'That's always a huge dilemma, and we experience a bit of both,' she says. 'There's a lot of work that comes out of South Africa that's adapted to suit the market conditions in the rest of the continent, but there's another school of thought that says the ideas need to be generated in the market where the advertiser is operating.'