The group says that it is a first in Africa; Audience Origin is an audience product, designed to be globally consistent, locally relevant and future-proofed by enabling third-party and first-party data connections.

"The data landscape is constantly shifting and evolving. Consumer behaviour will continue to develop in unpredictable ways. To understand these changes better, we had to completely rethink how we collect audience data," says Delia Condé, head of analytics and insights at Wavemaker.

Condé adds, "Audience Origin was developed to provide a unique way to look at data using the power of identity and data science to connect different data sets. The Audience Origin approach is based on building up different layers of audience data and insight to meet global and local client needs."

The group says that for Audience Origin to be successful, they need to enable local market and client flexibility by moving from a single source to multiple sources of data, creating a global data spine connected to the local panel, digital and client data.

According to the group, there are four levels to the Audience Origin data spine:
  1. Core Survey: this is the globally-consistent foundational layer that focuses only on the data that is hard to ascribe or to fuse but essential for planning. This is the data it must collect by asking people.
  2. Ascription: this is data that can be ascribed or modelled to everyone at the right level of accuracy if it only asks a proportion of the questionnaire to some people in the sample.
  3. Fusion: data that it wants to fuse onto the core survey. This includes data sources that are locally relevant. For example, The Fusion data (South Africa industry survey) or TGI data.
  4. First-Party Data: this enables an enriched view of audiences as it connects client first-party data such as CRM data.
"In total, these layers will create an aggregate learnings database, delivering deeper, richer and more impactful audience planning insights, shared across markets, to create excellence in planning and activation," adds Condé.

According to the group, Audience Origin is available in 74 markets globally. It can tap into a core data set comprising more than a million consumers across 60 different categories. These are segmented into 18 different personality archetypes, covering 22 touchpoints and 48 attitudinal and lifestyle attributes.

As research in Africa is limited and often outdated, the data gap that Audience Origin aims to fill is vital to effective and efficient planning. Audience Origin says that it now has consistent and current data to use to inform regional and local market strategies. These insights highlight the nuances in each market's culture, beliefs and attitudes. This becomes essential to help target and communicate more effectively.

"This audience data becomes the glue that connects strategy with activation. An integral element of this is panel data which lets us connect key components of audience insight at the individual level to link attitudes and demographics to media and category behaviour. In effect, this provides organisations with the ability to use more flexible local targeting solutions that support persona-based targeting or ID-based targeting," concludes Condé.

At launch, Audience Origin is available in 12 African markets. These include:
  • South Africa
  • Nigeria
  • Kenya
  • Ghana
  • Cameroon
  • Ivory Coast
  • Ethiopia
  • Tanzania
  • Uganda
  • Morocco
  • Egypt, and
  • Tunisia.
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