The past several years have seen enormous growth in advertising on the African continent. This has been a natural response to the opening of the market and the flood of brands, both international and local, that have swept across the world’s second largest continent. Outdoor advertising has increasingly become a vital element of the marketing mix, not least because the medium supersedes both literacy and language barriers and offers the ideal platform for brand awareness.
The medium itself, not unlike Africa, is defined by its very own set of challenges and outdoor media owners have learned that to stay ahead of the game, there’s a virtually constant learning curve to be negotiated. Creating world standard material is just one of these challenges and as Mike Thomas, general manager of Primedia Outdoor’s International Division explains, meeting the standards in Africa is no different to anywhere else in the world.
“Although outdoor advertising in Africa may not have made the technological advances the rest of the world has, the standard of outdoor advertising has increased dramatically. The quality of the structures and the locations are certainly comparable to anywhere in the world.”
“One must bear in mind though, that the high cost and maintenance of the more interactive type billboards that can be seen in Europe and now in South Africa, has been a prohibitive factor in taking these formats in to Africa. The ‘tri-vision’ type of billboard, however, is particularly popular in West Africa.”
Sue Rooney, Pan African media director of Universal McCann, says to underestimate this market’s expectations and skimp on quality would be a mistake.
“The regions in which we operate understand marketing communications better than we tend to assume. Rapid changes in Africa’s markets demand ongoing research, technological advancements and media communication standards that are top notch.
“In years gone by an outdoor campaign meant a spattering of traditional sites that were often vandalised and left to fade in the harsh African sun. Nowadays the opportunities include large format gantries down to high frequency street pole ads which are well maintained and constantly monitored. Some markets are beginning to offer sustainable illuminated sites. Yet we find that often the tried and tested approaches work best in some markets, like painting structures with brand messages (bus shelters and shops etc).”
A pressing question that has long been on the agenda for advertising in Africa is how to effectively measure and monitor media. The industry is well aware of this difficulty and businesses are developing in order to provide effective media monitoring in Africa. Organisations such as the Pan Africa Media Research Organisation (Pamro) created a powerful forum for African media researchers and their clients to work towards developing high quality media research within Africa.
“In many African countries, freedom of research is limited,” says Thomas. “Much work is being done by organisations such as Pamro in trying to educate governments as to the benefits of the integrity of data collected from surveys.
“The very recent development of a global electronic outdoor measurement system with pilot projects having been conducted in Gauteng and Chicago is also very encouraging as a tool to increase outdoor accountability. This development, however, is still in its infancy and currently financially prohibitive for the African market generally.”
Rooney suggests that fragmentation of the African market also contributes towards making research difficult and unreliable.
“Countries like Angola and other recently democratised states are especially affected by fragmentation as they are commodity dumping grounds from first world countries, for example Portugal and Brazil.
“What one of our clients did in Angola was to deploy our Brand Precision Targeting tool. Through 600 face-to-face interviews, its products and their competitors were researched, providing both quantifiable and qualifiable results.
“This allowed Universal McCann to deduce who uses the brands, how they use it and what their perceptions of all brands are. The point is, when delving into competitor’s products, the research must be equally in-depth and detailed.”
So how much is in fact being spent on outdoor in Africa and who is grabbing this lucrative market with both hands?
“Outdoor in Africa is on basically every media buying schedule north of South Africa,” comments Bazil Lauryssen, managing director of Clear Channel Independent. “In such an environment, the outdoor advertising medium accounts for an estimated 20-30 percent of the adspend of major marketers across the countries of the sub region.
“One can appreciate why, when considering that an illiterate consumer may not recognise a brand audibly advertised when confronted by the brand on the store shelf unless having been exposed to the brand and an illustration of how it works through a visual medium such as outdoor, whether on a billboard or on the myriad of taxis that provide the major transport network.”
Alliance Media director Greg Benatar agrees: “Although outdoor spend varies from country to country, in Africa it’s growing annually and is moving towards the seven percent of total adspend mark. That’s double what it was some seven years ago and I believe that within the next five years it will easily reach the 10 percent mark.”
With their wide network coverage in Africa, Alliance Media has seen the number and type of advertisers in Africa increase dramatically these past years.
“Traditionally, outdoor advertising spenders in Africa were the tobacco, alcohol and FMCG companies. Today, outdoor advertising has experienced huge growth in Africa as all marketers, both local and multinational, have come to understand the value in outdoor advertising in the African environment.
“I would say that the big outdoor spenders in Africa are cellular network operators, beverages, FMCGs and electronics brands. We are also seeing a large number of service companies advertising, such as banks and insurance companies, who some five to 10 years ago, would not have dreamed of using outdoor as a medium,” says Benatar.
“The last two to three years have seen a plethora of brands extending their distribution into some markets,” says Rooney.
“However, the truly African brands continue to be the cellular providers and soft drink giants. Breweries, retailers, car manufacturers and the likes of Nestlé and Unilever are also very prevalent across the market. The sheer size of the continent and certain markets makes Africa a formidable ‘hunting ground’ and despite a large percentage of consumers living below the poverty line a small conversion ratio can translate into a lot of volume.”
As the communication explosion sweeps across the continent, clever marketers like MTN have invested heavily and successfully in Africa bearing in mind exactly that – the sheer potential to be found within such large volumes of budding consumers.
“So far in Africa the mobile phone market remains largely untapped. Never before has a business case been so compelling for investing in telecommunications in developing countries. Growth in subscriber numbers far exceeds developed nations. In our biggest market in Africa, Nigeria, at last count (June 2006) MTN Nigeria had 9,636,000 subscribers. Certainly brand awareness is top of mind and outdoor media offers a wealth of opportunities for us,” says MTN.
Riding the crest of the mobile telecommunications wave, brands like Nokia have taken advantage of the market and have a strong outdoor presence. Working within countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia and Cameroon, to name but a few, John Turvey of MediaCompete says: “Outdoor presence for Nokia as a whole is good and extremely important in terms of generating awareness and maintaining a solid presence. For us, outdoor is probably second only to television.”
As Africa’s 880-million plus population is drawn rapidly towards the western way of consumerism, it would appear that the market is far from becoming saturated.
Outdoor has become and will remain an important tool within the marketing mix for a number of reasons.
Primedia’s Thomas sums it up thus: “The low levels of literacy and of the footprint of electronic and print media in Africa make outdoor advertising very attractive and cost effective to many multi-national companies.
“Yet the many reasons why this medium is so vital in Africa differ little from those reasons as to why it’s so successful in the rest of the world. Outdoor is a true broadcast medium in an age of fragmentation. It offers broad reach as well as extremely high frequency and the medium is the message – ‘what you see is what you get’.
“Outdoor also has the ability to reach demographic groups that are difficult to reach with other media, particularly in the lower LSM, rural areas, thereby making it an excellent support medium to radio, for example, in terms of providing both audio and visual impact.”
There’s no news here. There’s simply further confirmation that the outdoor medium in Africa fulfils a particularly functional role in the game to reach potential consumers.
The increase in adspend indicates that marketers and advertisers are well aware of this and are clever enough to take full advantage of an advertising medium that has found its rightful place within the market that is Africa.