Make no mistake, AFRICAMAT is not an African e-commerce site for materials.
No! The AFRICAMAT study is a new tool for measuring television audiences in sub-Saharan Africa.
CANAL+ADVERTISING and MÉDIAMÉTRIE presented this tool to the market on Wednesday, September 11, in the presence of numerous pan-African advertisers and agencies and remotely on DAILYMOTION for local agencies and advertisers.
This presentation, which can still be viewed here, will be followed in the coming days by several others in person in Cameroon and the DRC.
This major innovation has been made possible thanks to the combination of technology provided by the CANAL+ group and Médiamétrie's expertise in audience measurement.
The principle behind AFRICAMAT is as follows: CANAL+ decoders, like audience meters (hence the suffix MAT in the tool's name), record the status of the television set every second and are able to reproduce the household audience for channels with a high degree of accuracy.
However, this feature, developed over many years by the technical teams at CANAL+ in France, faces one obstacle: what interests advertisers and channel program managers is not the audience of households measured on the television, but the audience of individuals who are actually watching the television.
This is where MEDIAMETRIE's expertise comes into its own and proves indispensable: how can we build a representative panel of African populations, given their enormous diversity? What sample size should we use? How can we extrapolate the audience of each individual from a household audience?
CANAL+ and MEDIAMETRIE answered all these questions and many others in a completely transparent manner during their presentation:
What is the scope of the study?
The study covers nine countries in which Omedia-Ipsos compiled a total sample of 8,500 households. In Senegal, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, and the DRC, information was collected from 1,500 decoders in each country and supplemented by an in-depth survey on the composition of panelist households and the joint television consumption of different household members.
What method was used to measure individual audience?
CANAL+ decoders measure the status of the decoder every second (which channel it is connected to and from when to when) through what are known as "technical logs."
Since decoders do not have a return channel, MEDIAMETRIE has developed a "dongle" (a device that connects to the decoder to provide additional functionality) that stores "technical logs" throughout the day and then transmits them to their computing center.
To transform the household audience provided by technical logs into an individual audience, Médiamétrie has implemented a hybrid method using an in-depth survey of all individuals in households to identify and understand their joint television consumption.
Will this study replace other existing studies?
As AFRICAMAT only covers CANAL+ subscribers and does not provide information on all modes of broadcasting, CANAL+ Advertising will continue to rely on the Africascope study to complement Africamat, which will be used more at this stage as an analytical tool enabling highly detailed analysis and a dynamic view of the audience.
How often are the results published and who will have access to them?
A report is produced each week and sent to CANAL+ ADVERTISING managers and program managers for channels published by the CANAL+ group.
The results will also be integrated into the MediaPilot software to enable more detailed analysis.
Will Africamat be marketed?
No! The results will not be marketed in any way. They will remain reserved for internal use by CANAL+ ADVERTISING and the managers of the channels published by the CANAL+ Group.
CANAL+ ADVERTISING also specifies that it has no access to panelist data. This information is stored by Médiamétrie, which guarantees the impartiality of the results.
Although limited to CANAL+ group services, this initiative should be welcomed, as the African advertising market still suffers from a severe lack of information.
The few photographs currently available provide only a static view of the market at a given moment in time, with a significant delay in the availability of results and low granularity. For example, it is impossible for a sports channel to know which teams are the most popular and most watched.
It is true that the AFRICAMAT results are only an approximation of reality, and the most critical minds will be quick to point out its biases—the study focuses solely on CANAL+ subscribers, and the method used to estimate individual viewership is based on a sophisticated calculation rather than direct observation.
Nevertheless, they offer an even more accurate and dynamic picture of what people watch on television every day. They will complement and enrich existing studies, while foreshadowing what audience measurement could bring to the African market in terms of wealth of information and understanding of viewer behavior.