It’s time to close the media spending gap between digital and television

Marketers have traditionally worked on the assumption that digital reaches a small audience of high-income earners while television serves the mass market. That picture has changed dramatically over the past five years, and the time has come for brands to rethink how and where they allocate their media budgets. Let’s start with a quick look at recent statistics. Though different researchers come up with slightly different figures, the more conservative sources estimate that internet penetration in SA is around 54%. This is driven in part by the mobile revolution, with falling smartphone and data prices making the internet more accessible to a mass market. The “State of IT” report for 2019 by the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) shows that smartphone penetration has doubled in the past two years and now sits at close to 82%. Icasa recorded around 65-million data subscriptions in 2018 – an impressive number for a country of 57-million, even when allowing for people with multiple subscriptions.