With more than 400 newspapers and magazines fighting over the print sector’s R4,7-billion annual advertising pot, according to AC Nielsen’s AdEx, many South African publishers see Africa as a source of growth.
The traditional barriers to entry on the continent — few advertisers and limited printing and distribution options — have been exacerbated by the emergent view of South Africans as unwelcome “neo-colonialists”, but some local companies are claiming success.
Supa Strikas, a serialised soccer comic launched as a supplement to City Press in April 2001 and moved to the Sunday Times last September, is shortly due to expand into Zambia, its seventh African market. Outside South Africa the comic is distributed across Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Botswana and Namibia, and, at around one million copies a month, its total circulation is larger than that of any magazine in Africa.
The bulk of this circulation has been built by using carrier newspapers, such as Kenya’s Saturday Nation and Uganda’s New Vision. The revenue model, based on the sale of sponsorships embedded within the comic strip (including team jerseys and banners surrounding the pitch), has attracted the likes of Coca-Cola, Guinness, Caltex and Nike.
“Supa Strikas sold all available sponsorship spots in the new Zambian issue before launching the product,” says Strika Entertainment’s CEO Oliver Power. “This is despite the fact that it will be sold in Zambia and not distributed by a newspaper.”
Although Supa Strikas also sells around 150 000 stand-alone copies a month in Nigeria, Power acknowledges the undercurrent of anti-South African sentiment in the comic’s markets. “The backlash is growing by the day in terms of neo-colonialism. People seem to be buying local again.”
He argues, however, that Supa Strikas has been able to bypass the negativity by employing local staff. “To a Ugandan, we’re a Ugandan product. The comics are localised in the sense that players’ names are changed and the skylines switched from Johannesburg to Kampala.”
Following a more conventional business model, Touchline Media, part Naspers-owned publishers of titles such as Men’s Health, Sports Illustrated and Shape, launched its own soccer publication into the African market last year — a Nigerian version of the thriving local title Kick-Off.
Introduced as a test issue before the Fifa World Cup, the first Nigerian edition sold 33 000 copies. Today Kick-Off Nigeria is selling between 20 000 and 30 000 copies a month at a cover price of 300 naira (about R16). According to publisher Mike Allen, the magazine is attracting total monthly advertising revenue of about eight million naira (R425 000).
So, with the advertisers biting, the challenge for Touchline Media and Strika Entertainment remains printing and distribution. At the moment both companies print in South Africa and freight their copies to the target market.
“There’s a massive opportunity for a media mogul to set up printing operations in Africa,” says Power.
As for distribution, Allen says: “You have to do it yourself. It’s not as if there’s an NND24 [the distribution arm of Media24] ready to do it for you.” But the opportunities have been identified, and with Johnnic Publishing also exploring the Nigerian market through Struik Christian Books and medical publishers MIMS, others are likely to follow.
Kevin Bloom is editor of The Media magazine. His Media Weekly column provides regular analysis of the media industry