The phantom behind the results
For nearly a decade, The Digital Phantom ran paid media for blue-chip brands. Banks. Telecoms. FMCG. Africa's largest streaming platform. South Africa's largest private education institute. Our team planned the campaigns, set the budgets and watched the numbers every day, and the brands took the credit. That's how we got the name.
Then AI took the wheel. Meta's Advantage+ and Google's Performance Max started deciding where the money went, and much of what worked for years started costing money instead.
So we rebuilt. We wound down all client work, and The Digital Phantom became an AI-first company. We embed AI into marketing and the business behind it, publish what we learn, and run our own operation on the systems we recommend.
Daniel Vienings, founder
Daniel has worked in digital marketing and paid media for over a decade and has run The Digital Phantom since July 2017.
- Managed more than $20M in paid media for a single brand
- Beat lead targets six years in a row for South Africa's largest private education institute
- Ran campaigns across Meta, Google, LinkedIn, X and Snapchat
- Masters in Business, Auckland University of Technology
- Honours in Marketing, University of South Africa
These days he builds AI systems. The Digital Phantom runs on an AI operating system Daniel built: a data pipeline that pulls sales, ad and traffic numbers every morning, an AI brief that reads them and flags what matters, AI agents he directs from his phone, a multi-agent research system, and an AI audit method that interviews a business and ranks where AI would pay off.
He's based in Auckland.
Follow Daniel on LinkedIn →What we believe
AI should move a number. If nobody can say what it saved, it's a toy.
Keep a person in the loop until the results earn trust.
Publish the mistakes. Our own ad account has cost us $15k (and counting) in lessons, and we share them.
Small and shipped beats big and piloted.