The theme for this year’s Pan African Market Research Organisation (PAMRO) conference is ‘Africa Media Research in a Globally Connected World’, a response to the growing dominance of mobile and digital usage across the continent and the implications this has for media research across Africa.
Peter Searll, managing partner of Dashboard Marketing Intelligence, tackles the theme with a paper entitled Augmenting Media Data with mobile behaviour. Given the dominance of mobile as an internet platform in Africa, he notes that incorporating accurate and detailed data from this platform into a holistic media perspective makes sense.
The company therefore has developed and deployed a mobile app that tracks all aspects of mobile behaviour, as well as website and app usage. Using its panel in Zambia, it recruited 50 users for a pilot to assess the effectiveness of this tool to generate meaningful data and insights. Drawing in this, the paper aims to show how actual behavioural data from mobile phones can be successfully collected and integrated into an all-inclusive view of media consumption.
Waithera Kabiru, digital manager of integrated, marketing & communication for Coca-Cola Central, East and West Africa, discusses ‘Reaching African Audiences through Online, Mobile and Social Media: Which Measurements Really Matter?’ He notes that advertiser spending still lags behind on online, mobile and social media, when compared to traditional media, even as more African consumers spend increasing amounts of time online - possibly due to the lack of attribution of digital media to transactional value.
Kabiru argues that the marketer’s role is deliver appropriate messaging at every stage of the consumer journey, from awareness, demand, acquisition, transaction and retention; and that consumer behavior needs to be measured throughout, capturing “real business outcomes across the consumer journey, whilst measuring incremental lift and attribution.”
His paper seeks to explore the opportunities for audience measurement and to investigate which measurements really matter, given the emergence of digital media, and the rise of online consumption in Africa. Which measurements not only translate to brand love, but into value?
Hayley Umayam and Natalie Forcier, managing partner of the Forcier Consulting Group, look at the creation of an audience ratings system for radio in the war-torn South Sudan. Forcier Consulting is developing the first audience ratings system (ARS) in this country, with a long-term goal of promoting freer and fairer media for the sector as a whole. Their presentation highlights the process of creating an ARS for radio, including the trials and triumphs of developing a validated and sustainable methodology in a tough research environment, grappling with a fragmented media sector, and establishing credibility and buy-in among stakeholders and end users.
PAMRO’s mission is to create a uniform research infrastructure for African countries, and to use the same measuring and target marketing methods so that results of different countries can be validly compared.
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