Primedia Outdoor has stepped up its marketing services rollout into the rest of Africa in early 2017. The team, which grew from one to three members over the past year, visited key clients in three of their African markets to demonstrate the tools and research that they have been working on. “Marketing services is a new capability for this division, so we have been introducing ourselves,” says Primedia Outdoor’s Marketing Services Manager for rest of Africa, Johan Haupt.
So far, the marketing services team have visited Namibia, Zimbabwe and Zambia, where Haupt says their efforts have garnered good results.
The marketing services team sets out to make the buying of Primedia Outdoor inventory in African markets a straightforward and accountable process, by using acquired data to design a visual strategy for a given client based on their brief.
“If the client is, for instance, an FMCG advertiser, we would ideally get their distribution network locations across a given city, and then overlay our available inventory, and isolate and optimise the site selection based on proximity to their distribution network,” explains Haupt.
Their research draws on GIS analytics, along with profiler data for each country (population data by region, economic indicators such as GDP figures, inflation rates, interest rates, and various economic indexes). The marketing services team have also worked to derive convergence nodes for their African markets; these nodes identify areas where several specific points of interest (POI) are located close together, guaranteeing a constant high volume of returning consumers. 
Using this and other information, the team is able to tailor a campaign in order to best fulfill a client’s objectives; not only can the team identify where to buy billboards in order to best reach a given market, but they are also able to calculate the optimum number of billboards required to do so.
All of this is processed and visually illustrated for the client using a variety of GIS software tools, making it quick and easy to understand. “We also use Google Earth, which provides another degree of transparency,” says Haupt. “This makes it possible to zoom in on the actual location, without clients having to jump into their cars and drive to the address. The client is then able look at the site selection, before they sign anything – instead of getting a thick stack of nondescript site photos to sift through to decide which sites to take, which takes ages.”
These services are also extremely useful to South African clients who advertise their products in other African markets.
“The new marketing services division basically exists to give our clients peace of mind and to lend a degree of transparency to the whole outdoor planning and buying process,” says Haupt.
About Primedia Outdoor
Primedia Outdoor is one of the leading outdoor advertising media specialists operating within Sub Saharan Africa, with over 2980 billboards in South Africa and 4 373 faces located in 11 other countries across the continent.
Primedia Outdoor offers exposure across a mix of media types, including high end digital signs, airport advertising, freeway and suburban spectaculars and street furniture, as well as static advertising and video walls in malls. Their portfolio dramatically expanded in December 2014 with a major acquisition in Zambia and Zimbabwe. Primedia Outdoor provides flexible coverage across the entire socioeconomic spectrum, targeting cosmopolitan consumers in major urban areas through to those living in rural communities.
