Five key takeaways:

  • Many multinational clients don’t appreciate the complexity of the region. Nigeria has over 200 dialects and each dialect has its own “cultural code” and its own media.
  • Many clients still prefer to adopt a hub-and-spoke approach to the continent, selecting a lead agency in one of the larger markets to handle pan-African campaigns.
  • Budgets remain a concern. Many clients “have a budget for South Africa because in their mind it's a more developed market” but allocate insufficient resources for the rest of the continent.
  • The “wonderful wide-open world of social media” has made it difficult for companies to act unethically, even in smaller, more rural areas.
  • African storytelling is getting recognized on the global stage because of the continent’s diversity: “Diversity and texture is human experience and it fuels our stories.”

The maturation of the African public relations market is one of the great untold stories of the past decade. In South Africa for the PRCA’s inaugural regional conference, I sat down with leading practitioners from around the continent to discuss award-winning creative work, the need to connect with people in their own language and culture, and the things multinational clients still don’t understand about the region.

Participating in the conversation were:

  • Aisha Allee, CEO, Blast BCW, Mauritius
  • Sarah Gooding, managing director, WE Communications South Africa
  • Larry Khumalo-MacArthur. executive vice president, client growth, Weber Shandwick Africa
  • Regine le Roux, founder, Reputation Matters
  • Nicola Nel, global managing director, PROI Worldwide
  • Mary Njoki, CEO, Glass House PR, Kenya
  • Lekha Seebaluck, managing director, Blast BCW, Mauritius
  • Claire Williams, practice lead—retail, Accenture Song

Despite the growth of the African public relations profession over the past decade, and the success that the work created by African PR firms has enjoyed on the global stage, the first challenge when multinational clients come calling remains the same.

“We always kick off the client presentation by saying that Africa is a continent not a country,” says Nel. “We have to be quite clear with clients that what works in one market doesn't work in another market.”

Adds Gooding: “It's so broad. Multiple languages, multiple cultures, and all the nuances that exist within them.”

As Khumalo-MacArthur talks about the landscape of Africa, the complexity of the challenge becomes immediately apparent. “Here we've got South Africa,” he says. “It's got 12 different distinct languages. And even in those languages there are nuances.” In Zimbabwe, the country of his birth “there are up to 10 different cultural groups. All of them have their own community media, their own cultural codes.

“So if you run a campaign, say you're doing a public health campaign, you're looking at taking a campaign and localizing it across 10 different cultural codes. And it has to be done in a meaningful way. So it can't be a one size fits all.

“And if you have to do that in a small country like Zimbabwe, think about that in a country like Nigeria, which is much bigger. Nigeria has over 500 dialects and each dialect has its own cultural code and its own behavior, and a lot of them have their own media. And because a lot of these countries are young democracies, their attachments to unique cultural markers are really, really intimate.”

The need to understand those “intimate” differences is greater for public relations than other disciplines, panelists agreed.

“I think in PR specifically, where you are building authenticity and real connections, understanding that difference in culture, language, dialect, is important. Whereas in advertising campaigns, you could be a lot more generic,” says Williams.

Le Roux agrees:  “I think it's all about authenticity. I mean, PR is all about being authentic. And if you're just going to do a blanket campaign across different markets, it's just not going to resonate.”

And Nel points out the difference between PR and advertising in this context. “For me advertising is about the human truth, and the human truth can apply to whatever, where we know about the storytelling. So you tell the story, you need to resonate with your audience and speak in the correct language and find the cultural nuances.”

The need to customize any campaign for different markets and cultures is clearly paramount, but nevertheless, many clients still prefer to adopt a hub-and-spoke approach to the continent, selecting a lead agency in one of the larger markets to handle pan-African campaigns.

Even for agencies that offer a pan-African service “it’s important to pair up with local consultancies in markets that understand what's driving the audiences, what messages will resonate,” says Nel. “So you can't just follow a single approach and put it down on any country in Africa.”

WE has worked with Microsoft for many years in the region, “and whereas we create the base content from South Africa and they get to take advantage of the really solid resources here, but then you get agencies from across the continent who make it relevant to their audience,” says Gooding.

Until recently, the hub market was almost always South Africa, Nel says: “If I look at my experience it’s that for the global clients, it's either South Africa or, increasingly, Kenya.”

Njoki agrees. “Until recently it was only South Africa, but Kenya is coming up more often recently,” she says. And more and more,Kenya is serving as an East Africa hub. “So when we are in Kenya, we are able to run campaigns in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and now Ethiopia as well comes in, the South Sudan.”

There’s also a trend toward specialization in different countries. Njoki points to Kenya as a center for innovation and technology—“When Kenya came about with the mobile money innovation, everyone started looking at Kenya”—but it also home to large number of NGOs, which feeds sustainability and purpose-driven work.

Mauritius, says Seebaluck, has become a financial services sector. “But sadly, nobody comes to PR agencies in Mauritius to  manage work on the African continent or to put those briefs together. We're just seen as either a tourist destination or a tax haven, sadly, but not as a place that can lead work in continental Africa.”

Says Khumalo-MacArthur, “So Kenya is social impact, sustainability work. So any client who wants to do multi-market work will be based in Kenya and the rest of us will support. And in Nigeria, we sit a lot with media and entertainment because that market lends itself to that. If it's multi-market, it sits there. And then South Africa loves to do corporate communications and tech.”

Some of the shift to other major markets may be a reflection of the divide between South Africa and the rest of the continent.

“During apartheid, South Africa was systematically excluded from the rest of the continent in terms of trade and engagement,” says Khumalo-MacArthur. “And then come 1994, and there was this shift and a lot of engagement in terms of trade and more, but I think the issue is that I don't think the country did enough work to remind people that they're Africans to the point that you meet people, who’ll say, no, we're not in Africa, we're in South Africa. They really, truly believe that.

“But over the last couple of years, people have travelled to the rest of the continent from here and have seen that there's a lot more out of Africa beyond the stereotypes that have been told. But yes, there is tension, and the tension is historical, it's systemic, but there is also efforts at trying to strengthen the African culture.”

Adds Nel, “I think there is a little bit of that with South Africa being one of the largest economies, so I think we could be perceived as the big old gorilla at the bottom part of the continent. I hope not. But I think we are.” And le Roux acknowledges, ““We can be perceived as arrogant.”

Seebaluck points to some of the controversy around South African nominees to the African Public Relations Association board, and says she has experienced something similar herself. “Coming from small islands, part of Africa but clearly not integrated even if we are bilingual, speak French and English. We could be that bridge between Francophone Africa and Anglophone Africa, but there is still a divide that needs to be bridged.”

One thing is clear, however: no matter where multinationals hub their African work, they continue to expect significant returns for relatively low investment, Says Allee, “The big boys out there think that Africa is cheap in the sense that it's easy. So they have a budget for South Africa because in their mind it's a more developed market and then the peanuts will go to the rest of the continent.”

Gooding emphasizes that the differences between markets can extend to attitudes about major issues: “When it comes to issues like sustainability, what does sustainability actually mean from one market to the next? Obviously you do have a lot more developed countries within that context.”

But at the same times, she says, much of the work she has seen in the region is purpose-driven and authentic. “It’s like Maslov’s hierarchy of needs. Here, people are looking at food security, issues of safety, issues of a roof over the head and I think that's why you are seeing a lot more kind of really solid, authentic purpose campaigns in these markets. You can definitely see a shift and evolution to a lot more authentic campaigns.”

And then there are also major differences in media from one market to the next. Williams explains, “In my experience, the maturity of the media landscape is so different. You've got quite established media hubs that I've found, like Kenya for example. And there are some markets where the media is state-owned, and others where you have more independent media and they're more objective. In general, the more West you move you are dealing with journalists who don’t operate under the same ethical rules.”

The question of ethical standards—of media, of government, and of multinational corporations operating in Africa—has not gone away over the years. Thirty years on from the controversy around Shell and the Nigerian government working together to displace the Ogoni people from their land, Del Monte found itself in the headlines last year after security guards at a pineapple plantation were implicated in the murder of local residents.

Do US and European companies still feel like they can get away with behavior that would land them in court in their domestic markets?

“I think the wonderful wide-open world of social media has shattered that kind of thinking,” says Nel, who recalls: “We got a phone call from a global liquor brand. There was an incident in a very plural area, where there was a drinking competition and it made headlines in the UK and Mexico and it was just very visible. And then there were copycats.

“And I think for the first time they realized—because sometimes you can just brush it off, you know, it's a rural area, no one sees it—that now it's on TikTok and it damages the brand on a global basis.”

Williams agrees: “One of the insights that came up was the cost of hesitation. So I think there's a lot more accountability.”

Still, Njoki says, it is hard to generalize about corporate behavior without talking about the political environment. “We can’t talk about that without thinking about politics. Things change depending on the politics of the day. So if this big company is in favor of the government, and then the government changes, then the situation ca n change quite rapidly.”

Again, the situation can vary from market to market. Says Alle, “In the Indian Ocean, there are a lot of dark areas depending on the political power of the day. So in Mauritius, for example, there is a change in government. There are firms that are known to be pro-government or those who are pro-former government and the corporate world will be very careful about who they work with.

“And unfortunately, as much as social media sheds light on a lot of things that might be dark and murky, we do happen to know a lot of big brands where the reporting might not be as, you know, transparent as we might like. We have seen brands do a lot of greenwashing and so I don't think there is a black and white answer. It depends on the territory, depends on how things work, the political dynamics at play.

“In some markets, politics is everywhere. So you need to be very mindful of that.”

In the end, Khumalo-MacArthur says, “it comes down to the sort of strength of the judicial system and our investigative media, and the severity of the transgression. I think from a South African perspective, there are a lot of fairly big cases that have been really brought to light by investigative journalists prepared to ask the right questions, often at risk to their lives.

Although he worries that “there's still quite a reluctance for people to pay for, to subscribe to media, and some of our best media are actually needing that investment.”

The limited resources available to independent media organizations has led to a shift in the relationship between earned and paid media in the region, panelists agreed.

Says Nel, “What I've seen in the last few years is that, particularly on African work, because the media is so fragmented and the budgets are so small and quite often there needs to be a paid component, our industry has looked at all the other elements to amplify campaign messaging.”

Adds le Roux, “It's much more difficult to get corporate PR coverage, like the traditional corporate PR article, even if it's linked to NGO projects, if it hasn't got advertising support in some way, being sponsored on social media.”

All the panelists were quick to agree that pay-for-play was not acceptable for either leading agencies or smart clients, an understanding of the media environment is essential.

“We've got a corporate client, the big corporate client, and his view is quite refreshing when you chat to him,” says Gooding. “He won’t pay for an article, I’m not suggesting that. But he understands that the big corporates do need to support the media to some extent. And so his marketing team needs to put money into advertising to support. Definitely not like an advertorial, but to keep the media going.”

And while the media environment is challenging, there’s no doubt that the quality of creative thinking and content creation in Africa has been improving steadily—reflected in the region’s performance on the global awards front.

Says Gooding, “I think our international agencies, they're quite shocked and surprised by the incredible creativity that comes out of this market. I think we’ve become really good at things like digital video content creation” and other formats that do not rely on traditional media relations.

“One of the reasons you're seeing a lot of really interesting African storytelling is because we are a really good at it in Africa,” says Khumalo-MacArthur. “We're the home of storytelling. It's part of the culture. I don't know any other continent that is as diverse, that has this texture, and the diversity and texture is human experience and it fuels our stories.”

Nel points to a Blast campaign that provided fishermen with recycled eye-glasses, giving the gift of sight to them and their families and generating widespread community interest for a public health initiative. “I think if you've got a team who can sniff a news angle,” she says, “it's making the link between what the client wants to say and the kind of story the media will be interested in.

“I used to say that we translators, so the client has a particular view but we know what the audience wants, so we connect in the middle, we translate that and make it relevant so that journalists write about it, so there would be social media coverage, where the influence would be interested. I think that's our skill set.”

Her main concern, she says, is that PR agencies have not become as adept as their advertising counterparts at packaging great work for awards competitions. “When you judge, you can immediately see what comes from an advertising group and what comes from a PR group. We know we have to have measurable results. And the measurable results are there, but it's not necessarily packaged in the right way.”

Seebaluck points to a campaign credited to an advertising agency. “It was a fantastic idea, but an idea is just an idea until you implement it. And the whole implementation came from PR. And they won an award from an advertising point of view based on our measurements and we were not even acknowledged for that. That's frustrating.”

Metrics are another issue, she says. “We are able to measure based not only on AVE, and we have this whole workshop within the office about AVE because we were fed up with that. Our budget was just shrinking because CFOs think that the AVE is going down, which is another result of fragmented media...

Le Roux, whose firm specializes in reputation measurement, says that the region is growing more sophisticated but “not enough. The companies that need the reputation management don't want to do it because they don't want to be told that they are doing anything wrong. Because they know they are doing it wrong. So it is very frustrating to bridge that gap. I think the fact is that there is a slightly more emphasis on research, at least, from where we were 20 years ago to where we are today.”

Says Nel, “I think we sometimes are too harsh on ourselves. I think our industry has evolved immensely in the last 12 years. And not only South Africa, but the whole of the continent. And the type of work we put out, it's really great work. It's measurable, it's got different elements.

“I think we've really equipped going forward, because we do understand the 360 approach completely compared to our competitors.”