Such an idea has attracted rejoinders and counter claims for the superiority of context, promotion, or viewer impressions. Nevertheless, when it comes to media measurement, content’s royal status arguably holds sway.

The importance of engagement

Advertising was previously primarily measured through reach and GRP. However, engagement has become a key factor. In other words, media research is moving from a focus on 'what' to looking at 'how'. The 'what' approach measured how many people a campaign reached, how many times, and how one could sustain a campaign over time.

Now, the focus is shifting to the qualitative, asking 'how is my campaign engaging our target audience?' This approach considers factors such as how long people spend with given content and what they do with it once they’ve seen it; do they share it or discard it? Are they spending more, or less, time with it? Are they becoming advocates of the brand and its content?

Engagement generally comes out of having good content. So, to get great results from your advertising and communications projects, you have to focus on the developing memorable and shareable content.

What makes for good content?

First of all, it is focused on the customer; the target audience. We need to put the target audience at the front and centre of all business and communications strategies.

Once you understand who the customer is and what their needs are, you can create content that will be aligned to their aspirations, their needs at a given time, and their psychological framework.

Local versus international

A lot of the content that is coming to us in Africa is international. This didn’t start with the Internet; television, radio, and even newspapers have always featured a great deal of material coming from other parts of the world, especially the west.

Local content engages audiences much more than international content because it addresses things happening around the audience – things that are current, things that have true emotional meaning for them.

Just as this holds for traditional media, so it is with digital. While the vast majority of content is international, local content is increasingly coming to the fore. The king is not somebody who comes from distant lands but is someone who has risen to the pinnacle from our midst.

Media measurement

What we’re seeing coming up now is a lot more conversation around technology and passive approaches. Unlike declared measurement, where people essentially fill out questionnaires to indicate what they’ve been watching or what kind of content they’ve been consuming, passive measurement is conducted without the intervention of a respondent.

It’s likely that the 2017 edition of PAMRO will feature a lot more conversation around passive measurement to truly understand how people are engaging with content, as well as what kind of content and genres are truly engaging audiences and how that content is being distributed – what kind of platforms it’s being consumed from.

We’re seeing a great convergence of the needs of media houses, advertising agencies, media research companies, and clients, with regard to considering things from the same perspective and understanding one another's needs.

So, talking about 'content being king' means that we all understand that this is what it’s all about, and begin to focus time, energy, and resources on developing really good content that is going to have an impact on the different audiences throughout the continent.

For more information, visit www.pamro.org.