The New Generation Social & Digital Media Awards welcomes Templar Wales to this year's panel.

Templar's career has always been centred around creating engaging experiences for marketing, communications and systems through design, creative thinking and strategy. 

As chief marketing officer and head of Client Experience for Airborne, a fintech start-up, Templar was responsible for the brand and identity development, marketing strategy and the full client experience. For two years prior to this, as head of Digital for Investec Group Marketing, Templar led the development and execution of the brand’s digital marketing strategy. Before that Templar was a new media designer/developer at TBWA Tool Communications (South Africa's first integrated marketing agency), founder/ECD at Blink New Media (a fiercely independent digital agency) and MD/head of Strategy at Gloo (digital agency of the year for seven years running). 

Templar has collaborated with most of the major agencies in South Africa, and worked on most of the top brands in financial services and insurance, vehicle manufacturing, medical, tourism and hospitality, apparel, FMCG and management and training. 

With a fairly full shelf of his own Loerie, Bookmark, Midas and Assegai awards, Templar has been on various judging panels, including the Loeries, for 12 years – once as chairman. 

He has spoken at numerous conferences and lectured at Wits, Vega, AAA, UJ and MediaTech, and sat on steering committees for the Wits and UJ New Media departments. Having scraped into MENSA, Templar uses his membership just to access the free monthly geek talks.