Ad intelligence in Africa – what it is and how it works

Consumers have more content available to them across more platforms than ever before in today’s complex and crowded media landscape. Businesses must rely on reliable ad intelligence to develop effective media strategies and distinguish themselves from competitors. But how can you evaluate rival brand advertising activities across platforms without complicating a straightforward yet strategic process?

There is no denying that advertisements are intended to persuade the intended audience to take the desired action (buy, register, contact, etc). This explains the enormous resources and effort invested in communicating with members of the public via channels such as radio and television.

As a result, media practitioners, advertisers, and brands have relied on audience measurement data to assess radio and television audience share, gauge ad spending for better ROI, and plan future campaigns.

What then connects and differentiates Audience measurement and Ad intelligence? Read along to find out.

What is Audience measurement?

Audience measurement is the estimation of the size of a media audience. It quantifies an audience’s personalities and attributes in relation to the media sources and devices they use to consume media content and advertisements.

Media stakeholders recognize the significance of audience measurement because the more they know about their target audience, the better equipped they are to create content that resonates with them. They will also be able to assess the effectiveness of their content and advertising by analyzing data on who views it and how they react to it. This will allow them to identify gaps in their strategy and make necessary adjustments.

Audience measurement, among other metrics, measures audience size, age, gender, impressions, and focus time to deliver more relevant content to a particular audience, increasing engagement and ROI.

The audience measurement solution is one-of-a-kind and especially pertinent to African marketers, advertisers, and media owners. This is due to the popularity of television and radio as acceptable modes of communication across the continent despite the popularity of social media. Another reason is the steady growth (albeit slow) of relevant advertisements in Africa. This is despite the Covid pandemic that hampered traditional advertising globally.

The best audience measurement tools (also called trackers) are those that allow users to view insights in real-time with no third-party interference and that reduce errors as well.

What is Ad Intelligence?

Ad intelligence (Ad Intel) is a tracking technique in audience measurement.

Ad Intelligence helps you to learn about the market share of various brands in a category, the competitors’ media plans, the individual and incremental contribution that each channel makes to reach, to obtain GRPs to contrast with offline media, and to verify that campaigns appeared in a channel.

It provides marketing managers, merchandise managers, ad agencies, and others with multidimensional granular-level views of their and their competitors’ ad quality, competitive rates, promotions, and product content across all advertising platforms in real-time.

The advertising landscape is constantly changing. To keep up, Ad Intel provides detailed competitive insights into your competitors’ advertising activities and performance across marketplaces. Knowing what your competitors are doing across marketplaces allows you to make the best strategic decisions to improve your overall ad performance.

Gain competitive intelligence advantages

Spying on your competition is entertaining, but how useful is ad intelligence? Let’s count the ways…

For starters, ad intelligence provides valuable benchmarking for your own campaigns. You have a clear measuring stick for your own efforts when you realize how much your competitors are investing, how much of a share they have on certain channels, or what type of ROI they get from their campaigns.

If your competitors all appear to be doing fantastic work at first, it may be disheartening. That shouldn’t be the case.

When you examine the metrics closely, you will frequently find underutilized advertising opportunities. For example, if your competitors are focusing all of their resources on radio advertising while ignoring the TV, you could gain significant brand recognition or market share by targeting a platform they are ignoring.

Of course, if your competition is investing in a marketing channel you wish to target, you’ll have the information you need to target that channel more aggressively without blowing your budget completely. Understanding how other aspects of your campaign may need to be adjusted will ensure that each platform receives the appropriate level of attention.

Sure, your competitors will most likely use ad intelligence tools too. They may try to counteract your moves by making changes to their campaigns. While you may end up in some ad-buying warfare, at the very least you will always be aware of what is going on and will not be disadvantaged by ignorance.

Perfect your marketing strategies

Ad intelligence techniques aren’t just for spying on competitors. They can also provide valuable insights into your own campaigns, allowing you to improve your optimization efforts.

This is because these tools do more than just tell you what happened. They provide granular insights into exactly HOW it happened, which can make or break buying placements across multiple channels or segmentation decisions.

Do you want to know how much ROI you’re getting from your campaigns? Ad intelligence can provide you with a comprehensive understanding of the costs and outcomes of each ad purchase. You can look at your campaign as a whole or break it down to look at individual ads.

This allows you to directly compare the various channels you may be using for your campaigns. For example, you may believe that radio is your best advertising channel because of its range. But what if your ad intelligence software reveals that TV placements are generating significantly more conversions?

Ad intelligence ensures that these kinds of insights don’t slip through the cracks by adequately attributing sales, leads, and other performance indicators to the right source.

In addition to benchmarks for your industry and competitors, Ad intel can help you set benchmarks for yourself. You can, for example, compare the results of your most recent ad campaign to the results of a similar campaign last month — or even the previous year. You won’t have to wonder whether changing your brand voice for your latest campaign was a smart option or not — the data will tell you.

Speed up your Ad-intel strategies with Artificial Intelligence (AI)

As in so many other industries, the use of data and AI is rapidly transforming global advertising. With Survey54, media companies in Africa can now enjoy world-class Ad-intel services powered by sophisticated artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence (AI) in advertising refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines designated to think like humans and replicate their actions based on information fed to them. They use historical data to learn from past mistakes and make better decisions in the future. AI can help advertisers create more personalized experiences, target the right audience, and make faster decisions.

All you have to do is send your jingle/song to the Survey54 team, sit back, relax, and watch the magic happen!

We use artificial intelligence to determine how long the jingle was played and analyze its impact. This strategy aids in determining the performance and effectiveness of the campaign.

If you also want to measure the sentimental analysis of a specific topic, such as “should romantic partners split the bill?” Survey54’s AI-enabled Ad intel can help you do so and put you in control of the conversation across channels.

With the AI, you can see how many times your submitted jingle has been played and what your audience thinks of it.

Conclusion

Ad Intel is a type of audience measurement that provides media stakeholders with actionable insights to identify prospects, analyze brand strategies, and learn from previous advertising campaigns to plan for the next.

You can gain access to tried-and-true strategies, tactics, and capabilities, as well as use the critical insights provided by Ad Intelligence data to make decisive strategically advantageous actions to beat your competition. Ad intelligence helps you maximize your ad impact and improves the performance of your advertising campaigns, which increases ROI.

Survey54’s audience measurement and ad intel product reaches across Africa. So, if you are looking to obtain smart insights into the African Ads ecosystem, look no further. Survey54 provides transparency to the African advertising market with solutions that facilitate control and decision-making.

You can’t afford to ignore ad intelligence if you’re truly ready to go all-in with your ad campaigns. It makes no difference whether your next campaign will be focused on radio or television or both. Our advertising intelligence will assist you in making better ad-buying decisions by providing competitive insights from a variety of data sources.

When you know what your competitors are up to, you won’t be merely trying to keep up. You’ll understand exactly what you need to do to get ahead and deliver better results from your advertising campaigns.

Increasing sales while spending less money than ever before is every ad buyer’s dream.

Survey54 can assist you in making better use of your advertising budget so that you can extract even more value from your intelligence data. Contact us to learn how.