The media consumption landscape is transforming at an exponential rate, yet there is little innovation in media research addressing the impact of technological advances.
Harmonising market research across Africa is the key objective of the Pan African Market Research Organisation (PAMRO) and in line with the theme of this year’s conference held in Zimbabwe in August, ‘Africa Media Research in a Globally Connected World’, Dashboard Marketing Intelligence presented a solution for accurate audience measurement in Africa through mobile tracking and the results of a Zambian pilot study.
Mobile is often described as the second screen, however, in Africa it is often the first or only screen. We addressed two questions: how to measure mobile media consumption accurately; and, how this can be used to augment traditional media data. The objective of our nine month case study was to measure and track mobile behaviour with a specific media focus.
There is a global shift from traditional media consumption to online and there will inevitably be a critical mass tipping point where online will become dominant, it is just a matter of time. According to Price Waterhouse Cooper’s (PWC) ‘Entertainment and media outlook 2015-2019’ the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) on spending on internet will increase by 21.7% in the five years between 2014 and 2019 in South Africa and by 31.6% in Nigeria. In South Africa the projected CAGR in this same period of radio spend is at 5.9% and TV is at 6.2%. Television now gets five times the advertising spend as internet, this will be down to 3.5 times by 2019. Media buyers and advertisers are slowly catching up to market realities of media consumption.
Online media consumption in Africa is on the rise, but has not been properly measured. Most audience measurement methodologies still use diaries, which are notoriously problematic. The media industry must keep pace with consumers and so must research methodologies.
The current research is not necessarily sufficient to give advertisers a clear, holistic perspective and digital measurements are often not comparable to traditional media currency. Digital space in Africa is not understood properly and researchers need to make sure that they accurately reflect the changing media consumption landscape for advertisers, media agencies and media owners.
We set ourselves the challenge at Dashboard to create a research methodology tailor-made for the African market that observes real, rather than reported mobile behaviour. Our aim was to observe and gather data on actual mobile behaviour and then analyse this ‘big data’ using familiar audience measures such as reach and frequency, so that the data could be integrated with traditional media research.
We wanted customer centric rather than website centric research which tracks an individual’s mobile usage through their device, rather than traffic through a specific website. The aim was to gather an accurate, complete permission based record of actual behaviour - not diary, recall, or interview based research. We wanted truly longitudinal data where no surveys are required, just continuous passive data collection.
Our data covers all websites and apps (very close to real-time), not just the large ones. It was important that there were no tags from site owners and that we did not rely on cookies. In order to contribute to the bigger framework of media audience research in Africa it was imperative that the data was scalable and could be seamlessly supplemented with survey data or merged with existing media data (like TV and radio data sets), if required.
For our Zambian pilot study, Dashboard built an app that our sample downloaded onto their mobile devices. Once activated, it tracked all their mobile behaviour continuously for nine months. We opted for an android mobile app, as iOS is not widely used in Africa.
Demographics were established from the sample of 60 respondents, recruited from our existing panel in Zambia. Respondents were incentivised with airtime to download the app and give permission for their device to be tracked. Once activated the app collected data all the time and data was uploaded to our server three times a day in efficient packages. Individuals were not identified to protect privacy and POPI principles were adhered to. The data was then collated, cleaned and analysed.
The key metrics collected about device usage included:
It was critical to clean and code this very complex data. Analysis requires sophisticated protocols to extract the mass of complex data. During the study there were in total over 242 000 website visits and 402 000 app usage occasions. The results are not market representative due to the sample size, but this is simply a matter of scale. The outputs demonstrate what kind of data is available.
Our approach provides data versatility and multiple time scales: by hour, day, week, month (or minute if really needed). It puts the full usage of mobile devices in perspective, websites and apps can be grouped by type or genre for full competitive profiling. A detailed analysis of reach and frequency at a very granular level is readily available for any demographic.
This app research can stand alone or be merged with traditional media research data to get the full picture of media consumption. Dashboard is not trying to steal anyone’s lunch, but provide the gravy. This home-grown African solution is the only research of its type in Africa that provides this level of complexity at the price point that we are able to offer.
