Organised in co-operation with Millward Brown and national advertiser associations in Cameroon (CMA), Kenya (MSK), Morocco (GAM), Nigeria (ADVAN), South Africa (MASA) and Zimbabwe (MAZ), the results are based on 82 responses from marketers working for well-known local and global brands at a country or regional level.

The results highlight the key challenges that all brands face in Africa, notably the lack of reliable data, including media consumption and retail performance, as well as the progress that marketers in the region are making in delivering more effective marketing.

They also reveal the gap in consumer understanding that local and regional marketers say exists at a global level. 55% respondents agreed with the statement "global colleagues do not understand consumers in our local markets", and only 20% disagreed.

The local versus global debate also applied to local agency partners, with 58% of respondents agreeing that local agencies have a superior understanding of local business issues than international agency brands.

Nevertheless, there was also a lot of common ground with marketers in other regions with key priorities cited as brand positioning, integration, consumer insights and marketing analytics. This reflects many of the core concerns that WFA members globally have identified in the most-recent survey of marketer priorities, where integrated activity planning and digital marketing are the top priorities.

Key results include:

A lack of basic market level data is hindering attempts to generate insights, with 62% of respondents agreeing with this statement. Separately, 45% of respondents also agreed that a lack of infrastructure is the key barrier to effective market research. One respondent cited the need for "African solutions" to these challenges as likely to be more effective than importing Western approaches.

This lack of basic data is also holding back investment in advertising with 55% of respondents citing this as a barrier to investment and 50% claiming it was stopping them accurately measuring return on marketing investment in their market or region. Nevertheless, some marketers did say they were making strong progress in effectively understanding return on media and marketing investment. Thirty-nine percent of respondents said their home market was "a fair way along the road" while 35% said they had "just begun [their] journey" at a regional level.

Tools used to measure return on investment are still evolving, with 72% using brand tracking, 60% media tracking and 52% applying direct response analysis. Econometric research/media mix modelling is being used by 25% of respondents with attribution modeling applied by 17% of respondents.

Marketers are generally bullish about the resources they have to deliver effective marketing solutions with 34% saying they were a fair way along the road at a regional level and 30% claiming similar progress in their home markets. Twenty-three per cent described themselves as fairly advanced in their home markets and 16% claimed to be making similar progress at a regional level. However 22% said they had not started to make progress yet at regional level.

There is still much to be done to generate actionable consumer insights with 45% of respondents saying they had just begun this journey at a regional level and 33% saying they were at the same stage at a local level. It is not all work in progress for all African marketers with 20% of respondents saying they were a fair way down the road at a regional level and 25% giving this answer for their home market. Sixteen per cent of respondents also claimed to be fairly advanced in their home markets. One reason why some companies may struggle in this regard is a lack of resource with 43% of all respondents saying consumer insight is not sufficiently funded.

Marketing is seen as an attractive career choice according to 61% of respondents, but 41% also said there were not enough young talented people coming into the industry. A further 35% said the best talent was being poached by other countries/regions.

There is exciting entrepreneurialism in Africa with 62% of respondents agreeing that "there are plenty of very exciting new agency start-ups emerging".