Your production company is in the spotlight. Can you tell us about your activities?
Marodi TV is known to the general public as a production company, since that is its main activity: it produces successful Senegalese series such as Maîtresse d'un homme marié and Pod et Marichou. However, some time ago, we felt the need to broaden the scope of our activities, starting with advertisers.
Advertisers came to Marodi TV through sponsorship but didn't necessarily realize that this wasn't necessarily the best strategy to adopt in order to gain visibility. To address this, we decided to develop a channel capable of meeting the needs of advertisers beyond sponsorship. To do this, we developed a department dedicated to brands, which I manage.
Your production company is in the spotlight. Can you tell us about your activities?
Marodi TV is known to the general public as a production company, since that is its main activity: it produces successful Senegalese series such as Maîtresse d'un homme marié and Pod et Marichou. However, some time ago, we felt the need to broaden the spectrum of our activities, starting with advertisers.
Advertisers came to Marodi TV through sponsorship but didn't necessarily realize that this wasn't necessarily the best strategy to adopt in order to gain visibility. To address this, we decided to develop a channel capable of meeting the needs of advertisers beyond sponsorship. To do this, we developed a department dedicated to brands, which I manage.
In terms of achievements, we produced the Chef Aida commercial, for example, which was the most viewed commercial in West Africa with 10 million views in nine months on YouTube. A huge success! Since then, we have received more and more requests from advertisers.
What is the recipe for the success of this commercial?
The success lies in understanding Senegalese consumer society. Many advertisements have gone unnoticed in Senegal because they did not represent Senegalese society, the aspirations of the population, and its imagination. The strength of Marodi TV, from the point of view of advertisers and TV series, is its ability to match consumer needs and emotions with reality. Before Marodi TV began broadcasting, the big hits on television came from abroad, particularly telenovelas. Today, we are able to produce quality content with well-crafted storylines.
What is your business model? How do you capitalize on digital technology? Why did you choose to start with digital by creating a platform?
Marodi TV's primary mission was to make quality content accessible to all African consumers. That's why we chose to launch our activities digitally, by creating our YouTube channel. Little by little, we were able to buy equipment and start our own production. As a result, we now have no limits in terms of funders and their content requirements. We are free to choose our content. As an anecdote, for the series "Maîtresse d'un homme marié" (
Mistress of a Married Man
), several advertisers refused the name, but we decided to keep it anyway.
Unlike the hit series "Maitresse d'un homme marié," which targeted adults, you also wanted to capture teenagers with the series "Virginie." How was the series received?
Each episode of the series "Virginie" averages more than 1.5 million views on YouTube. This is primarily because there is very little content suitable for teenagers. For this reason, many of them use YouTube to consume content. This explains the success of our series "Virginie." We even want to go further because we want to produce content for young children.
Geographically, how would you characterize your audience?
Today, 60% of our audience is in Senegal, with the remaining 40% representing the diaspora in West Africa and France.
What projects are you currently working on?
We will soon be releasing our new series, "Impact." It's a very different series from what we've produced in the past, both in terms of the plot, which is very original and inspired by real events, and in terms of the actors, as the audience will discover a mixed Ivorian-Senegalese family with the ambition of promoting and integrating other countries in the sub-region. In principle, it will be broadcast soon on YouTube.