In Q4 2001 Amazon posted its first profit. In November of the same year Deep Current founder Mark Pape decided to shift career paths from Civil Engineering to the far more innovative Information Technology space, more accurately he chose the art of marketing on the internet. This also gave him more time to surf in his hometown, Durban.
From 2001 to 2017, Deep Current grew from a pure web design agency to a full spectrum of in house agency services including digital marketing strategy, website & domain hosting, website development (Drupal 5+), UX/UI design, mobile app development, mobile responsive (& adaptive
) design, social media marketing & management, email marketing, sms marketing, USSD mobile interactions, eCommerce and QR Code solutions. This was thanks to many great team members along the way, with particular mention of Richard O’Brien, Gareth Davies and Sam Proudfoot (Sam started with us in 2008).
In 2003, the idea of tracking print media spend using SMS was born. The mobile digital product iSend was developed by Thusa and brand designed by Mark Hansel. iSend was launched in 2006 in its first campaign with TBWA & TOPS SPAR. Today clients such as EDUCOR depend on the service, over 13 years later.
In 2017, Mark choose to look at new ways of offering value to clients and this meant a change in business model to a product focused agency… leveraging data to effect digital ecosystem performance. To effect this change Mark has formed a distributed team of trusted specialists to collaborate with for complementary skill-sets, knowledge and services.
In 2019, Mark certified as a Digital Product Manager (Boston University) and he is currently working towards a Data Science & Statistics certification from MIT to be completed in 2021.