Mobile Payments - South Africa Style

The way we pay for things in South Africa is rapidly changing ... thanks to some innovative new mobile apps. So says Nicholas Hodge, Country Manager (South Africa) for BuzzCity.

When I go out for lunch, for example, I don’t need to bring my wallet. I regularly use SnapScan instead. I just pull out my phone, open the app, scan a QR code, enter my pin number and the amount. It takes me less time to pay than it took to write that last sentence. For those who can’t be bothered to scan a barcode, SnapScan has introduced a new opt-in bluetooth feature called SnapBeacons, which pops up a ‘Pay Here’ button when consumers are within range of participating merchants like Cramers Coffee in Johannesburg and Woodstock Cycleworks in Cape Town. I’m hardly alone when it comes to using my phone to buy things. More than one-third of South Africans surveyed by BuzzCity – 36% actually – use their phones to pay for daily purchases like magazines and parking coupons. The only form of payment more popular than mobile is cash. While mobile payments are taking off across the globe, as you can see in the bar chart below, South Africa is ahead of the curve. In addition to SnapScan, there’s a wide range of other applications that provide mobile payment services including FlickPay, GustPay (for live events), MTN Wallet and Zapper (a restaurant app that’s also available in Australia, the US and parts of Europe). There have been a number of interesting creative campaigns to publicise mobile payments, but these have relied mainly on television and outdoor advertising, with the occasional radio spot. When it comes down to it, the media agencies which control the biggest ad budgets are stuck with a 1990’s mentality that says 80% of the budget needs to be put into TV, then magazines and print, while digital only gets 5 to 10%. Yet, at the end of the day, digital is the only medium that can have a black & white report documenting a company’s return on investment. Take for example a campaign that MTN, one of the country’s largest telcos, ran with BuzzCity last year to promote the live stream of a Mandela Day concert. The campaign featured standard mobile banners with a simple, strong and direct call to action. BuzzCity delivered the banners across three channels — Entertainment & Lifestyle, Mobile Portals and News & Information – to both smart and feature phones. MTN subscribers who clicked on the ads were taken to a link to watch free streaming content throughout the day. MTN also set clear Key Performance Indicators: 9000 clicks in a 24-hour period and 5000 streaming viewers. On both counts, the campaign over-delivered. Nearly 19,000 mobile users clicked on the ads; 12,000 people watched the concert on their phones. For those of you who think these numbers may be small considered to TV, consider that the average click through rate (CTR) is about half a percent. That means some 4 million people saw the campaign in just one day.South Africa meanwhile has a mobile penetration of nearly 150%. There are far more SIM cards than people. South Africa is also one of BuzzCity’s largest markets: we served 1.4 billion ads here last month, with a near even split between urban and rural/suburban communities. (You’ll find demographic details like this and much more in the BuzzCity Campaign Planner.)Mobile payment and financial service providers, take note. It just makes sense to advertise on mobile.For more information on BuzzCity, visit www.buzzcity.com. Alternatively, connect with them onTwitter.