Digital Advertising revenue in South Africa has grown significantly and has recently reported eclipsing Television advertising. In 2023 the IAB report indicated that digital advertising accounted for 39% of all advertising revenue, up from 36% in 2022.
While there has been a distinct growth in creative use of digital advertising the real impact comes from connecting with the right audiences at the right time.
The power of generative artificial intelligence (AI), retail media and social communities continue to provide opportunities for marketers and business growth alike, but accessing and utilising data correctly is where the potential lies and holds a massive opportunity for marketers.
Business Tech Africa spoke with Daniel Levy, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of commerce media platform Flow, to discuss how the company is helping businesses unlock the power of first-party data.
How Flow Formed
Flow has developed various data driven, sophisticated solutions around using first party data to boost digital advertising campaign results and return on advertising spend as well as providing major retailers with additional revenue streams by monetising their online audiences and data.
Daniel Levy explains how it all began:
“Twenty years ago, I was a practicing lawyer, and my co-founder was a computer engineer. We both left our respective careers to start an ad-tech company at a time when Facebook was just starting to gain traction in 2006/7,” he says.
“Our technology enabled businesses to market themselves across multiple social channels. Facebook was dominant at the time, then Instagram and Twitter emerged, and our platform allowed brands and agencies to manage campaigns across these different channels from a single platform,” Levy adds.
The Partners exited the company to Publicis, the French listed communications group in 2015 and off the back of that, started Flow in a different form and with different functionality, focussing initially on the estate agent market where they enabled multi-channel engagement with potential property buyers.
“We did that relatively successfully both locally and abroad, says Levy, and as time went on, we recognised that we had all this data that was flowing into our world in terms of who is clicking on property listings” he says.
Big Data Big Opportunity
Having a wealth of knowledge in terms of being the largest spenders of social media inventory in Africa at the time, the Flow founders approached many of their previous clients, with a proposition offering them a new way to reach highly intent-driven property audiences that they could retarget.
“That essentially gave them an avenue to get a lot closer to the coal face of high intent and anyone who’s spending money on advertising wants an unfair advantage, and we could enable that”, Levy says.
Recognising a bigger opportunity, Flow expanded its focus to major advertisers such as FMCG brands, but also saw the need for new audience partnerships to scale.
“That’s when we started building a marketplace of data partners, each with their own unique audiences. “We brought together data and media in a way that made targeting more precise and effective.” Comments Levy.
The Death of Cookies – Or Not
Cookies are a little bit of code that sits in your browser that is used by advertisers to recognise what you click on, and it was supposed to be completely done away with last year but has now been put on hold. However, with increasing pressure on major social media companies regarding privacy laws there is no guarantee that they will still remain going forward. For this reason, first party data has become the leading source for effective audience tracking today.
Responding to the cookie conundrum, Daniel reflects that: “Even though third-party cookies, for the longest time, have had potentially a dubious analogy around what they do, in theory, it should be there to actually augment your usability when you’re actually browsing the web” he states.
“One had to pull back on privacy and things of that nature, with GDPR globally, locally, the POPI act, as people were becoming more astute as to how their data was being consumed”.
Google led the charge on this in that they had been, not threatening, but they had been suggesting for many years that they were actually going to remove third-party cookies from their search environment.
First Party Data Partnerships
Flow has created some multi-layered first-party data partnerships, with various companies such as retailers, where the data and audiences they attract are used to sell or promote various other products to.
This has the duel benefit of creating additional revenues and product categories for the retailers without having to expand into other product ranges or open new stores, as well as providing highly targeted audiences for brands now using their data and platforms to target desirable audiences.
“Invariably”, says Levy “they (their Clients) are a B2C brand. They wake up every day and they run their business in different ways, shapes, and forms”. “What we’ve gone and done is essentially enable them the ability to monetise their data, which is their prerogative, with the appropriate compliances that they need have in place”, he says.
Hitting Consumers at the Right Place and Time
Levy cites a classic example of one of flow’s audience partner, Hellopeter, saying “our big brand customers may have a different view of what they stand for in terms of it being a complaining environment, however you can argue it’s a rating and berating website, more importantly, it’s actually a review website,” he says.
“If you just do a simple Google search, 70% of people actually check reviews of a product before they go and buy something”. “Now, in Hellopeter’s instance, we’ve managed to collate their data, compartmentalise it in a way that makes it attractive to brands that would want to re-target a Hello Peter consumer on social” Levy says. “You’re hitting them at the right place at the right time, knowing what they’ve actually done on Hello Peter, which makes it highly relevant” he states.
“That essentially becomes a very symbiotic relationship for everyone involved”. “That’s what Flow has enabled, where the first party data, is coming from our audience partner, retailers and so on that have great audiences that they can market and monetise”. “Most companies don’t know what to do with that data because it’s almost overwhelming”, he concludes.
