Falala says, "Our annual conference is an industry highlight with live events previously hosted around Africa, Mauritius, Lagos in Nigeria, Cape Town in South Africa and Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe were among our past successful events."

"In 2020, we had to let go of our vision to gather as an organisation in Morocco for our annual conference and settled instead on a virtual event. The board decided that for the first time ever, the conference would be offered free of charge to delegates. It was also live-streamed on Facebook which was new for us," adds Falala.

"So, in many ways, 2020 has been a year of many firsts for PAMRO and our 21st annual conference became one of our most memorable. We now know that this virtual format of sharing knowledge and expertise has merits of its own," Falala says.

"While economic indices have being negatively impacted, not everything has gone down," adds Falala. "Some things have grown exponentially in the past eight months."

"A lot of what was presented during the three days was refreshingly new, especially the sessions including COVID-19 media data," Falala says.

Speakers from top global brands including Coca-Cola and Al Jazeera provided content. Some of the highlights included the following case studies:
  • Bot enabled research, presenting a Coca-Cola case study, was presented by Kambe Mwaba, knowledge and insights manager at Coca-Cola Africa South Africa and Bev Tigar Bassett, AVP of business development at Borderless Access South Africa.
  • An Al Jazeera English case study was presented by Sarah Messer, director of Nielsen Media United Arab Emirates. The presentation looked at how driving audience insights should inform a global five-year plan for content, marketing, distribution and digital strategy across TV and multiple digital screens.
  • A panel discussion debated and dissected 'data, data everywhere … but are we any better at answering 'Why?'. James Ingram, CEO of Splashlight and Telmar and founder of LiiV, Joe Otin, CEO of The Collective Digital Ad Agency, as well as Mohammed Paruk, trading operations manager, GroupM South Africa, discussed the increase in the availability of data and the impact that it has on marketers and advertisers.
  • Actionable media insights about Affluent Africans and their fascinating spending habits was presented by Annemarie van Elfrinkhof, senior research executive and Charlie Fox, associate research director both from Ipsos. 
A highlight of the annual PAMRO conference is the announcement of the 'paper of the year', which was awarded to team Kantar for the presentation titled 'Measuring the changing economic landscape of Africa'.

"Congratulations team Kantar for an excellent paper and we look forward to hearing more from you in 2021," concludes Falala.

The free conference sessions were made possible by:
  • Borderless Access
  • DSTV Media Sales
  • Nielsen, and
  • Telmar.
Individuals who are interested in accessing the conference papers or recordings of sessions are encouraged to contact [email protected].

For more information, visit www.PAMRO.org. You can also follow PAMRO on Facebook or on Twitter.