(Ecofin Agency) – While many private audience measurement projects are announced in Africa, some institutional regulators are keen to control the practice to ensure the veracity of the figures and transparency in market competition.
In Ivory Coast, the High Authority for Audiovisual Communication wants to certify all audience measurements. The regulator recently spoke out on the subject, insisting on the need to have its services verify any audience assessment involving the Ivorian territory.
“Any measurement of audiovisual media audiences in Côte d’Ivoire outside the supervision and certification of the HACA is done in violation of the law and is therefore illegal” informs its press release, published in particular after the announcement of Africamat, an audience measurement tool for French-speaking sub-Saharan Africa led by Canal+ and Médiamétrie. The two partners have however specified that at the current stage of things, there is no provision for marketing the tool, which remains for the moment dedicated to the internal use of Canal+ and its partner entities.
“In the event that a legal entity or natural person wishes to carry out audience measurements on a private client base, it is only authorized to do so under certain conditions. These conditions include internal and strictly confidential use limited to employees of said legal entity or natural person, non-individual identification of a media outlet unless expressly authorized by the latter and validation by the HACA of the methodology used.” informs the regulator.
The HACA justifies all these measures by a need to prevent any risk of “destabilization of the audiovisual media ecosystem”A few weeks ago, it announced its own audience measurement for the Ivory Coast, scheduled for “the next few months”.
Servan Ahougnon
