Every planning conversation with a new advertiser starts the same way: "what can we actually target?" The honest answer is more nuanced than either the optimistic pitch deck or the skeptical "Africa is unmeasurable" take suggests.
What works well today
- Language and dialect. Because most of our inventory is broadcast, language targeting is native to the medium — a Yoruba-language station is Yoruba-language targeting, no cookie required.
- Daypart and format. Drive-time, weekend sport, late-night talk — these hold up as reliable proxies for listener context, the same way they do anywhere else.
- Geography, down to the city and often the corridor. Station coverage maps and, increasingly, streaming IP data give genuinely tight geographic targeting in major metros.
Where the data gets softer
Device-level identity resolution — the kind of granular, cross-app targeting brands are used to from Western programmatic — is weaker here, mostly because of shared devices, prepaid data patterns, and lower app-tracking penetration. We don't pretend otherwise to clients. Anyone promising Western-grade device graphs on the continent today is usually overselling.
The practical takeaway
Brief us on audience behavior and context — who listens to what, when, and in which language — rather than insisting on device-level precision the underlying data can't yet support. That's not a limitation unique to us; it's the honest state of the market. Campaigns planned around what the data can actually do consistently outperform campaigns planned around what a slide deck promised it could do.