(Sample digital ad shown above running on the Mashable Website)

The talk about Kenya’s growth and contribution to the IT world has increased the country’s reputation as one of Africa’s leaders in the technology sector. This is true as far as ICT innovations and the tech-world is concerned, but what about the impact on SMEs and corporates? How effectively are businesses in the region using the digital space to market their services and provide product information? Lets first understand what this is all about. According to Wikipedia; “Digital marketing is the practice of promoting products and services using the interactive digital distribution channels to reach consumers in a timely, relevant, personal and cost effective manner.”

Despite the increase in Internet connectivity and speeds, digital online marketing is still relatively adopted in the country and few people fully understand the possibilities it presents. Google Africa, the (government backed) ICT board, Strathmore University, the iHub and Pamoja Media, among other institutions and IT firms, have taken the initiative to increase awareness about the available online opportunities for businesses. This is through holding events with the business community to highlight on how they can take advantage of Internet advertising and marketing to boost their sales numbers and online presence. So, how soon do we expect to see our Internet browsing experience flooded by ads about regular Kenyan products and services that are common during prime-time television? I say NOT too long. There is no doubt the biggest spenders on advertising and marketing in Kenya are the telecommunications industry guys. Safaricom, Zain and Orange already have some online footprint on the digital advertising world (thanks to the infamous mobile price wars).

And true to the traditional corporate trends, many companies will begin to follow suit and seek to find out more information with regards to online marketing. In essence, the telecommunications companies helped the Kenyan online marketer to overcome one of the biggest hindrance yet: proving that digital marketing is safe, targeted, cost effective, within reach and very do-able. I believe in a few months we will start seeing the local neighborhood hair salon running a highly targeted advertisement online. Yes, I know it does sound a bit far-fetched, but its really not. We already have numerous businesses, signing up on online business directories, setting up pages on Facebook and even running Google Adwords.

As a country, Kenya has invested in the technology sector to promote innovation and infrastructure. Now the next step is for the business and government to use the digital space created to reach more clients, increase sales and provide a better service to the population. This, definitely, is the next frontier in the Kenyan marketing and advertising. The pace in which companies and agencies are adopting online digital marketing is amazing and the momentum is set to be maintained as the solutions and advantages presented by digital marketing become more apparent.

African Collages for VC4Africa used as branding and design inspiration

Pamoja Media worked with a team of different designers and programmers spanning three continents to put together the new VC4Africa website. This was a wonderful collaborative effort that had the whole team pulling together over a period of around 7 months to put together the new refreshing brand, inspirational images, collateral material, website and online strategy.

Ben White of VC4Africa interviewed Joshua Wanyama of Pamoja Media to talk about the project and how it came to fruition. Below is an excerpt of the interview. The new site launches on November 1st, 2010.

What was the draw for you to help VC4Africa launch?

I first encountered the VC4Africa website in 2008 as it started out on the Ning platform. When the opportunity to work on it arose, I took it as we share similar visions for Africa. So hopefully my involvement in the development also translates in a small way to helping the organization achieve its vision.

How did the process work for you, what made it different and how was it working with a design from Rotterdam?
The process was great. I was part of the design team with a wonderful designer Gaudi Hoedaya. It was my first full co-creation project spanning two continents. At first I was tentative on whether success was possible. But once we begun work, I knew we had a great process in hand and a good chance of bringing this site to fruition.

Can you talk a bit about the creative process and exchange with Gaudi?

We divided work along clear lines. Gaudi would work on the logo for VC4Africa and also develop the stationery material for the organization. Gaudi also designed the homepage and two internal pages of the site. I worked on the visual elements that would be considered for the brand including logo, images, colors and word play. This was to be the source of inspiration for Gaudi. I also finalized the site design and flow for each section within the site.

How did you come with those collages of images for example?

I started out by first exploring the words that kept coming up as we talked about the project. From these words, I picked 8 themes to explore. Once they were selected, I then found images and illustrations that would reflect these themes. I then explained the research and some key thoughts that Gaudi should consider while working on the logo. Once I forwarded him the collages, the rest was history.

What are the main ideas behind the design and the new site from your side?

We needed to highlight that a project of this magnitude can produce great results from combining varied geographic regions and experiences to deliver a project that was both dynamic and an embodiment of Africa

An African and European designer can actually work together while never having met and still be able to come up with an appropriate solution.

The whole existence of VC4Africa is to be able to give entrepreneurs and wonderful ideas in Africa a chance to grow to become something bigger. This site attempts to make this easier for both people seeking funding, those looking for opportunities to fund and the community to engage and have the best ideas rise to the top. It is my hope that we have achieved this goal.

How do you look at the results?

I think the site is successful from the development standpoint. It is now important the get the community to use it. This will be the final measure to let us know if it is successful or not.

What is for you the strength in this collaborative process?

Different thoughts from different people ensured a wonderful mix of ideas. These ideas in turn gave us a chance to build a good solution that has a really good chance to be great depending on how the community and its use of the different features. Without the various experiences being brought into one melting pot, we might have gotten a more cookie-cutter solution which the new VC4Africa site clearly isn’t.

Anything else you think is interesting to add?

I would love to see more collaborative projects in the future and see how many are successful. Maybe this might encourage technologists within the continent to develop more continental solutions.

One area that is conspicuously absent or lacking is corporate/company blogs, on a company’s website you will find the blog section to be usually out of date and generally ignored.  This is unfortunate because in terms of ease of communication this platform would be the best for the company to offer a regular update of goings on to its clients, customers and to the general internet public.  Wikipedia defines corporate blogging as ‘….. a weblog is published and used by an organization to reach its organizational goals‘, adding that..’ The advantage of blogs is that posts and comments are easy to reach and follow due to centralized hosting and generally structured conversation threads‘.

We would like to offer a few pointers on how to run a successful and relevant company blog:

• Establish guidelines.  This should be done from the outset as they will guide the bloggers on what topics to cover.  These guidelines should also outline the themes that the bloggers will write on on the blog.
• Establish a blogging team.  A team should be put in place to ensure regular updates, the blogging duties should also be part of the tasks and not seen as an additional/side issue.
• Avoid Marketing-speak and PR.  Make your blog a window to the soul of the company, a place where the company’s corporate ethos are shared with the on-line public when doing this avoid it being a marketing talk-shop.
• Establish a commenting policy.  This will guide your blogging team on how respond to comments. Comments will encourage interaction between the company and your readers.  As you blog you will find that comments will come ranging from the constructive ones to insults a commenting policy will make sure your blog does not degenerate into an abuse arena.  One thing to note though is to welcome criticism, this will provide valuable feedback to company.

The above four steps should guide you to starting out you company blog, if you need more help doing so, feel free to contact us on how we can work together to make your corporate blog work for you.

TedxNairobi 2009 Participants

Pamoja Media East Africa is proud to announce the renewal of its sponsorship for this year’s TEDxNairobi. The event which will be held at The Leakey Auditorium on Museum Hill in Nairobi from 1400hrs to 1900hrs is the second event that Pamoja Media will be sponsoring this year after the 140 Conference held earlier this year at the Nailab in Nairobi.

TEDx events are programs that enable local communities such as schools, businesses, neighborhoods or just groups of friends to organize, design and host their own independent, TED-like events, and we at Pamoja Media are proud to be involved in organization of the local event. The main aim of having the TEDx in Nairobi is to enable the local community to enjoy the celebrated TED talks as well as listening to inspiring talks from local change-makers and innovators.

Among the speakers at the event are:

• Laila Macharia
• Caesar Mwangi
• Yvonne Owour
• Julie Gichuru
• James Nyoro
• Su Kahumbu – Stephanou
• Jon Bohmer
• Eric Kigada

The speakers are respected leaders in their fields are we are sure that their talks will indeed be mind-opening and thought provoking.

This year’s event is themed ‘Green City in the Sun’ and aims to spur discussion on green, sustainable development initiatives. From the TEDxNairobi website the event is dedicated to challenges, ideas and innovation for our planet.

Pamoja Media will continue supporting TEDxNairobi and other industry and social enterprise causes and we urge you to do the same.

We look forward to seeing you there.

But the industry matured and people started charging per impression (number of times an ad shows up on any given site). This type of pricing is called cost-per-impression (CPM). This was better than the monthly sponsorship deals. CPM is usually priced at 1,000 impressions. So when a sales person mentions a $1.00 CPM, it means that an advertiser pays $1.00 for 1,000 impressions of an ad regardless of how many clicks are generated within the 1,000 impressions.

This model was later surpassed with the cost-per-click (CPC). Google has built its whole advertising business on CPC. An advertiser only pays once a click has been generated and traffic sent to their site. CPC are valued more than CPM deals and generally are priced per click. Advertisers prefer CPC to CPM deals as they actually purchase for the traffic that arrives on their site.

Another pricing model is the cost-per-action (CPA) model which has taken off in the last few years. CPA deals are usually set up for affiliates. This system pays a publisher or website once a targeted action such as a sale actually occurs. This model is akin to having a publisher act as sales representative for a company. CPA campaigns work best when they don’t fit the traditional banner ads running on most publisher sites. These campaigns are quite effective whenever ads or links to products are placed within regular site content. Surfers are more skeptical purchasing from an ad than clicking on a product review that directs them to the manufacturer/store website. While a lot of ecommerce stores love this model, publishers shy away from it since an enormous amount of traffic is sent to ecommerce sites without publishers receiving remuneration for it.

In Kenya, leading local websites still price advertising according to sponsorship. Since most advertisers are used to paying advertising on sponsorship deals instead of CPA, CPC or CPM deals; they normally guard campaign targets and information to their detriment. I have been in a number of meetings whereby advertisers will expect a proposal for a campaign they seek to run. Once the proposal it presented, they usually shy away due to the suggested campaign amount as being too high.

At this point, I usually mention that the total amount is not what is important but rather the CPM or CPC rate since the value of the campaign is usually determined by this amount. Some clients comprehend it and are therefore able to move on to the next point in setting up a campaign. On the other hand, others remain skeptical, withhold the target budget amount and mention that this is an entirely new method of pricing advertising and they are not sure they will receive the right value for their money.

For the ones that proceed with placement, we run various optimization tests to ensure that they get the best performing creatives and landing page matched up with the right sites. Constant optimization of a campaign ensures that the goals of a client are met and they in turn want to spend more money with you.

IT training for kids who live in the surrounding farm areas of Stutterheim outside East London in the Eastern Cape. South Africa. Photo: Trevor Samson / World Bank

It has been a famous rallying cry that Africa’s internet growth will continue skyrocketing. Research studies have proved the possibility of a viable market within certain countries in the continent. With the introduction of various fiber optic projects across the continent, faster and cheaper internet will become a major benefit for internet connectivity in Africa.

Internet penetration within the continent sits at 5.6% while the rest of the world enjoys a 26.9% average. Within Africa, the only countries with penetration higher than 20% include: Mauritius (26.7% of 1.275 million people), Reunion (27.4% of 803,209 people), Seychelles (37.0% of 86,595 people) and Tunisia (27.0% of 10.38 million people). Morocco is close to breaking the 20% barrier at 19.2% of 34.3 million people. Penetration within these countries allows the web to play a greater role in the everyday lives of people with access. Other than Tunisia and Morocco, most of these countries have a small population within tiny island nations allowing for greater penetration.

While it is true that the web will become a force in Africa, it won’t be so without a few deliberate decisions on both the part of policy makers and business people. Currently, the web is used to access outside destinations and information in most African countries.

Why is this significant?

Until the internet experience is relevant to day to day operations of a people, it is very hard to make it a must have tool. In the US, the web is used from when one wakes up till the moment they retire to sleep. A single day will have someone checking email, reading the news, catching up on blogs, shopping, interacting with friends, banking, work intranets, learning through research, entertainment, and many more. Within Africa, I have found that the internet is used effectively by a select few. For everyone else, this is a great tool for communicating and meeting people through social networks such as Facebook.

Browsing through the Top Sites per country on Alexa.com is an interesting experience. In the US, the first foreign site ranked that I could identify is BBC at number 55. I think of a foreign site as one where content is created predominantly for a country outside your own. The Google country versions are a special case and I will treat it as such. Outside of the US, whenever you type google.com, the country version shows up instead of the global site. So I treat Google country sites as a similar iteration to the global site. Out of the top 100 sites within the US, I could only identify BBC as a foreign site.

In Japan, China and the UK, I found US sites but also a good amount of local web sites relevant to the country. In China for example, none of the global powerhouses such as Google and Yahoo led the way. These country leading sites cover a wide range of fields from shopping, recreation, local and government services, entertainment, news, resources and many others.

In Africa, this is not the case. The top Nigerian site ranks 16^th among the leading sites. Nigeria though has around 22 sites within its top 100. South Africa’s first site is ranked 8^th with a healthy 42 sites within its top 100. Egypt’s top site is ranked 8^th while Morocco’s is 9^th. Kenya’s top site is 12^th with 25 sites amongst the top 100.

In my opinion, until African governments start investing in better websites to assist its citizenry, until corporations both large and small start delivering services or improve workflows online; we will always trail the rest of the world. While connection speeds and the drop in prices are major factors in the growth of web penetration, so will the delivery of every day services that consumers and citizens expect from their corporations and governments respectively.

Cheaper internet will mean more people will have a chance to go online. But how sustainable will the web be in Africa without great local content? We can all visit Facebook and BBC and laugh at YouTube videos, but we need local content outside of news to make the internet a truly living and breathing organism. Services such as job and real estate searches, car buying, shopping, local entertainment and the like will be important.

This brings me to the final missing piece that I think is as relevant as a conscious shift in strategy by both governments and corporations. Online Payment Services. Discussion on payment services will require a separate post, but until a payment system is established in Africa that is respected and accepted by both locals and the world at large, ecommerce in Africa will be a dud. Fraud has rocked so many banks and online payment services. For every new payment product made available, a hundred hackers try to figure out a way to steal from them. This has become a major pain for most companies and international ones have learnt to avoid Africa like the plague. We need a stable, robust and scalable solution that work in most African countries. Once that is established, I think we will be on our way to realizing the potential of the web and the smart phones in Africa.

Granted, only 5.6% of the African continent is online. Africa is the second fastest growing market in terms of connectivity at 1,100%. When most African corporations think of the web, they don’t see the potential markets this space holds for them. There are two very important aspects of online marketing that I point out to any potential customer looking at the reach an online market:

1. The web allows a company to reach Africans in the Diaspora effectively
2. Within Africa, the greatest concentration of online traffic is based on specific cities within a country and amongst the middle and upper class

Diaspora Africans
I once talked to an entrepreneur who wanted to reach Africans in the Diaspora. I told her that the biggest connection an African has with the continent whenever they are living in Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, Asia or Oceania is online. This is the ready access we all have when we think of Africa. We can read the news, find out which broadcasters have new content, connect with family and friends and keep abreast with conversation regarding Africa or our specific countries.

The Diaspora is a ready market for any product that can be sold or delivered online. Key hurdles often times are based on logistics or payment systems. Most African companies are either restricted within their corporate processes or international procedures and laws that place hurdles in their way of quickly utilizing available opportunities.

As is the case with most business models, success online depends on having the right strategy, knowing where and how to get your audience and figuring out a way to efficiently deliver on your brand promise. The web provides most corporations with an impressive reach into new markets either locally or globally. Africans in the Diaspora are already used to online shopping and have proven to be a constant source of remittances to their respective countries. Companies that utilize the opportunities a Diaspora market offers will be in a good position to reap great benefits.

An Urban Online Audience in Africa
So far, the web is an extremely urban affair within Africa. For instance, In Kenya 80% an internet study by the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) in 2006 found that the capital city Nairobi had 80% of all internet customers followed by Coast province with 9%. Kenya has 3 million internet subscribers as of 2008.

Kenya Internet Subscribers by Province

Source: CCK (Internet Market Study)

Nairobi Province’s population is estimated at around 3 million unique machines by Wikipedia. 80% of 3 million internet subscribers equal 2.4 million people*.

This is an extremely high reach for any company looking to sell its products within the urban areas of Nairobi and Mombasa which is within the Coast Province. When a company looks at its marketing targets and the audience they seek to reach, online marketing provides the right reach for them within key specific sectors. While the web is not the right platform for marketing to a rural or lower class audience, it is very effective in selling goods and services to middle and upper classes within any African country.

*The last study done by CCK was in 2006 when Kenya had around 1 million internet subscribers. The number of internet penetration within other parts of Kenya has grown but Nairobi still accounts for the lion’s share.

The Kenyan media landscape is no longer what it was in the 1990s; holding a television screen in your palm is now a reality; the Internet continuously keeps online readers updated with breaking news at every turn. The digital era has led to renewed competition, as consumers look for comfort and speed.

Business Daily Africa reported that after many years of trailblazing modern media, television globally seems threatened; especially the free-to-air that heavily relies on advertising to survive.

In a bid to stay ahead of the curve, more than 200 African broadcasters and filmmakers met in Nairobi last month to ponder their fate in the imminent digital shift and particularly to discuss ad-spend in the digital era.

Even though David Campbell, the producer of television drama Makutano/Junction is convinced that TV advertising makes more sense— in comparison to other Kenyan media— global statistics show that the big money is shifting to online media.