How one text changed video for millions in Africa
How one text changed video for millions in Africa
The story of a publisher revolution that changed video and video ads in Africa forever, and improved news coverage across an entire continent...
I’m sharing this story today as I travel across North America and Canada meeting publishers focused on rebuilding the news industry after the Google and Meta era.
We have a lot to fix but with gumption, energy, new thinking and probably some new leadership, it can be done.
This is how a text led me and some determined publishers to introduce premium video into Africa, transforming news coverage and earnings for tens of millions.
Just before we dive in, please join me in welcoming new subs from Apple in Cupertino, California, from Paramount Pictures and NBC Universal in Hollywood, from UK magazine giant Immediate, the Polish press agency PAP in Warsaw, Exact Ads in Israel, and Nine Entertainment and the Yarrawonga Chronicle in Australia among others. Great to have you all here :)
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OK, let’s get into it. I’m still CEO of my video AI company Oovvuu and sleeping in a San Francisco hotel room when my iPhone dings.
It’s 3.14am on December 1, 2017, and it’s a moment. Do I get up to check, or ignore it as probably spam?
BTW, founders get up and look. Every time.
The message to the Oovvuu website’s contact us page was cryptic. “We’ve tried to do video a few times and failed,” was what it said.
I mailed back: What did you have in mind?
The response spawned a revolution that has improved the lives of tens of millions of people.
The response said: “24.com, situated in South Africa, fully owned by Media24, which in turn is a Naspers company, is the largest digital publisher in Africa. We are interested in your service. Please contact me directly. Have Fun!”
A day and a half later, and after the longest flight of my life - San Francisco to New York to London to Johannesburg to Cape Town, I drew the solution on the CEO’s whiteboard and a deal was struck.
My superpower has always been simplifying news media’s complex tech challenges into simple actions. On the plane(s), I broke it down into four undeniable truths.
Millions of South Africans want video and can’t find it.
They all use your news sites, but you lack the video you need.
Broadcasters have the video, but they lack South African distribution.
Every advertiser wants to buy video ads outside YouTube.
I had designed and built Oovvuu to be a video platform that used AI to match video and articles in real time by relevance. It would fix it all.
Before that meeting of minds, South Africa’s media had no video.
Today, tens of millions watch every month and a vibrant video advertising economy has been spawned. It’s my proudest achievement as Oovvuu’s founder.
The solution was not found in investing millions in studios, hiring videographers, retraining reporters, or buying a broadcast network. That had all been tried.
The answer was in recognising simple truths and acting with speed and without fear.
And it’s a case study for the media more broadly now as we try to repair the damage of the past 20 years in the post-antitrust future.
It all began with a North Star mission. We are going to put a relevant video in every article.
I then used the whiteboard to show how we would deliver the best experience for readers, and extract the best commercial outcome from ads:
If the video is relevant, ensure it is embedded at the top of the article.
If the video is relevant, people will be OK with watching a pre-roll video ad, and
The greatest risk to success is failing to commit. If you’re going to do it, do it.
News24 did what too few publishers seem able to do these days. It committed.
More than that, as soon as they saw the success, they did something entirely unexpected.
They contacted all their competitor publishers across the continent and encouraged them to sign up too, which they all did.
The entire continent came together knowing they needed to build bulwarks against the Big Tech takeover.
Together, a marketplace was created for the benefit of all.
Oovvuu went on to service every major publisher in the country and gave every advertising agency a top-quality alternative to YouTube.
As the news industry faces up to the challenges of AI, and the collapse of Big Tech, this type of industry-wide collaboration becomes even more important.
But it’s not easy. It takes guts and grit.
Many naysayers emerged saying that Africa wasn’t ready for video streaming.
Data was expensive, consumers were slow adopters, there was no established pricing for video ad sales... It went on.
It didn’t take long to slay the first two as myths. As more videos were added to more pages, video views soared into tens of millions. That was soon accepted.
The ad sales challenge was harder and became the priority.
Publisher sales teams had become hooked on easy to sell, interruptive cheap outstream ads. The ones that autoplay in pages and piss off users.
Sales executives were adamant that ad agencies and clients would never pay more than 200 Rand (roughly $2) CPM for video pre-rolls, no matter how good.
That was never true. It was what defensive sales teams say when they face a challenge to the status quo.
Oovvuu had to be determined to win, so we earned nothing for a year while we removed this misconception.
On a return trip, I took all the ad agency heads to dinner.
We agreed over steak that Google’s dominance was hurting them too, and they needed publishing to maintain a plurality of marketing options for their clients.
If they supported the initiative, I promised them I would deliver ad performance that would beat outstream many times over.
And together, bit by bit, and stream by CPM, and to the agencies’ credit, we did it. They paid premium prices with CPMs 8x what publishers had before.
And agencies and advertisers got premium results that smashed outstream, and still do.
Today, South Africa’s major publishers are growing views and selling out of ads and millions of news consumers are getting better reporting.
Mission complete. From a ding to a thing: 2017-2023:
South Africa now has all the video its millions of news consumers demand.
The market has shifted from cheap outstream ads to premium pre-rolls.
A CPM has been established that sustains the entire media market, and
The outcome supports content creators, broadcasters, publishers, ad agencies and advertisers alike.
In Canada and America these past two weeks, I have spoken to mom-and-pop local publishers right up to board members of the largest in the world.
We all have the same challenges. We must build a new world for publishers from the foundations left behind by the Google antitrust case.
Advertising is about to change. The monopoly is being broken. Billions will return to the market in ad supply, higher CPMs, and damages.
We can do it together. South Africa proved it. Where and what shall we do next?