Africa is not one media market, and buying it as one is expensive
Why a single continental media plan usually underperforms three cheaper local ones, and how to tell which markets can share a buy.
By PRAfrica Limited
There is a slide that appears in almost every continental media plan we are asked to review. It shows a map of Africa, a single budget figure, and a channel split. It is usually wrong, and it is usually wrong in the same way.
The assumption underneath it is that scale buys efficiency. Consolidate the budget, negotiate once, run one creative, and the cost per thousand falls. That logic holds in markets with shared broadcast infrastructure and shared language. It does not hold across territories where the dominant channel changes every few hundred kilometres.
What actually varies
Three things break the single-plan assumption, and they break it independently:
- Language of purchase. The language people are entertained in is often not the language they are sold in. A campaign that tests well in English can underperform badly against the same creative in Hausa, Twi or Wolof, not because of comprehension, but because of who the audience believes is talking to them.
- Channel dominance. Radio reach in one market can exceed television reach in the market next door, at a fraction of the rate. Planning both at the same channel split leaves reach on the table in one and wastes budget in the other.
- Retail structure. Where the purchase actually happens determines what the last touchpoint should be. Modern trade and informal trade need different activation, and the ratio between them is not consistent across borders.
When a shared buy does work
None of this means every market needs a bespoke plan. Markets can share a buy when they share a dominant language, a broadcast footprint and a comparable retail mix. In practice that tends to cluster regionally rather than continentally.
The useful question is not "one plan or many" but "which of these markets can genuinely share a plan, and where does the seam fall". Answering it costs a few weeks of research. Getting it wrong costs a launch.
The practical test
Before consolidating a buy across markets, we ask three questions. If the answer to any is no, the markets get separate plans:
- Would the same creative, in the same language, be understood as speaking to both audiences?
- Do the two markets share a dominant channel at comparable cost per thousand?
- Does the purchase happen through a comparable retail structure?
It is a crude test. It has also saved more budget than any negotiation we have ever run.
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