Showmax: Increasing Sales by 97% in Six Months With Brand Building

What did we have to do?

• Analyze the target audience and market specifics in detail
• Design a functional marketing strategy and a media mix built on top of it
• Continuously optimize, evaluate and report the results of the newly designed activities

The results did not take long to arrive

Just six months after changing the media communication strategy from purely performance-oriented to a balanced combination of brand building and performance, Showmax's digital sales grew by 97% year over year and the cost per acquisition dropped by 67%.

A quick tour of Showmax

The Showmax streaming platform is used primarily in Africa, yet it has Czech roots: it was created in 2015 by a team of Prague developers. It works on a subscription basis and its library includes local productions as well as international series, children's programs and live sports broadcasts.

It is no surprise that its main competitors are international platforms such as Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video.

Different country, different customs

First we looked at the specifics of the African market as a whole.

Although the African market is developing very quickly, there are still major economic, cultural and value differences between countries. To design the strategy correctly, we needed to understand the culture of individual countries and their specific barriers that could limit our progress, for example the fact that women in some areas may have only minority access to the internet.

At the same time, it is necessary to account for unexpected events that marketers based in Europe are definitely not used to yet. Examples include a power outage lasting several days across a large territory or a ban on an entire social platform. And the specifics naturally do not end there.

There is still considerable distrust of the digital world in Africa, and quite logically we work with a correlation between income level and trust in digital solutions.

Most payments are therefore still made in cash or with phones. Africa is specific for its so-called Mobile Money (a mobile wallet), an alternative to a bank account.

And then we had to thoroughly map the individual countries for which we would design the strategy and launch campaigns.

South Africa, the gateway to the continent

With its 60.14 million inhabitants (36.6% aged 0-19), South Africa is the most developed digital market, not unlike the European one. No wonder that for most international players it is the logical gateway to Africa.

DOOH is even more developed there than in our region; on the other hand, South Africa holds an unenviable position in blocking digital advertising: it is 4th in the world in the use of ad blockers.

Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa

With 221.4 million inhabitants, Nigeria is the largest economy and the most populous country in Africa. Although English is the official language, the country and its leadership are characterized by a certain degree of fundamentalism, which creates barriers for marketing.

Ghana, an interesting market

Of the three countries we managed, Ghana, with the 10th highest GDP in Africa, is by far the smallest, but definitely not uninteresting.

We had the information... but which strategy to choose?

We had the market and the individual countries mapped out, so we knew that reaching the relevant target audience and raising brand awareness would be, to put it mildly, not easy. Unsurprisingly, the market differs from the European one.

Next came the strategy design.

Our target audience were people who can afford to pay for a streaming service subscription and might be interested in it.

What we had to take into account:

• Population size
• Internet penetration
• Economic indicators
• Audience sizes in individual platforms
• Brand awareness
• Brand consideration

And what about targeting?

In the countries we managed, targeting by income does not work, and targeting by location barely works either.

We worked with the hypothesis that users of more expensive devices would be affluent enough to afford the subscription. We therefore decided to make the most of connected TVs and desktops.

The tricky part was mobile phones, which practically everyone in these countries owns, even people living on the edge of poverty. So we limited them to the most expensive models only.

We also took affinity into account, which is why we chose the LinkedIn and Twitter platforms, where we could expect to reach a more educated population.

In terms of affinity targeting, we focused on so-called custom audiences, built from the websites and apps people use or the keywords they type into search engines.

4 ads for one funeral

What consistently works best in the campaigns is promoting content, i.e. telenovelas and series. The content is always adapted to the given country and to a topic that resonates there and ideally originates there.

How we set up our campaigns

• We divide campaigns into a teaser and a launch phase.
• We use different creatives for each phase.
• The budget ratio is roughly 30-40:70-60.
• We always launch the teaser about 2 to 3 weeks before the show premieres on Showmax.
• The launch starts on the day the show goes live on the platform. The first week is crucial and decides the success.
• For brand campaigns we focus on frequency and reach. We monitor the affinity of individual platforms.

...and how we approached the creatives

Given the high rate of mobile device usage, all formats had to be optimized precisely for them. A matter of course was thorough localization using the local language, ideally in its simplified form.

The same applies to videos, which need to be localized and supplied with English subtitles.

When creating the creatives, we also had to keep in mind other specifics of the markets we operate in: banner ads had to be more contrasting with higher brightness because African users keep their phone brightness low to save battery.

Platforms used: results, obstacles & points of interest

Programmatic buying in DV360

In DV360 we ran

• banners, which we optimized for the highest possible viewability
• video, where after testing we found the best approach to be optimizing for viewability together with completed views.

Since we also paid attention to brand safety, during the first launch we worked with the client to build a blacklist of domains where we did not want the ads to appear.

We did not forget about affinity either: for domains with a higher rate of post-view conversions, we tried to negotiate direct deals. Thanks to this, we managed to reduce CPM by up to 50%.

YouTube

We also ran YouTube campaigns in DV360. This allowed us to better manage frequency across campaigns and keep an overview of the overlap.

Among the formats we chose non-skip, which suits TV creatives perfectly: we used it for short teasers for specific series.

Since the client was also very good at producing audio, we ran it alongside the video. Not only did this combination work better for lift, but audio CPM was up to 50% cheaper.

We managed to display the ads on very high-quality channels, achieving a complete absence of channels with children's content and channels for teenagers.

Facebook and Instagram

Advertising on Facebook and Instagram was also a clear choice.

We were nevertheless surprised by the “size” of desktop audiences. In Nigeria's huge population we worked with 372 to 473 thousand users, and in South Africa the numbers were very similar. Combined with very high CPMs, we exhausted the potential here very quickly.

So we continued to focus primarily on mobile phones, which we limited by price, education and relevant interests.

Interestingly, Instagram had a low CTR, but once a user clicked through, 50% of them also created a subscription.

TikTok

Advertising on TikTok is currently only possible in South Africa. In Nigeria and Ghana the network is available, but it is not possible to advertise on it.

LinkedIn

We ran into the problem that not all promoted content was rated positively. Nevertheless, this network clearly had the highest CTR (0.7% to 1.2%), just like in our region, but it was among the most expensive (CPM up to 5× higher than Twitter).

Twitter

It also performed very well for us in terms of CTR (> 0.5%).

And what does the client say?

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