While marketing talks about innovation, Africa built it
For decades, marketing has operated at a safe distance from the people it claims to understand. We built an industry around panels, delayed surveys and statistical models. We inferred behaviour. We averaged sentiment. We flattened nuance. We imported global assumptions and applied them locally not because they were right, but because they were available. And for a long time, we told ourselves that was good enough. It isn’t anymore.
16 Jan 2026
Dawn Rowlands, CEO, dentsu sub-Saharan Africa, says Africa is now at the centre of a real shift in how consumer intelligence is created and used (Image supplied)
Africa is now at the centre of a real shift in how consumer intelligence is created and used.
Not a conceptual shift. Not a PowerPoint shift. A structural one.
We are moving away from approximation towards presence. Away from inference towards verification.
And this isn’t hype; it’s infrastructure that already exists.
At dentsu, that infrastructure is Consumer in Your Pocket (COPO): Africa’s first mobile-first AI platform built entirely on authenticated, real-time consumer data.
Not modelled behaviour. Not second-hand insight. Real people, responding in real time.
COPO gives marketers direct access to more than 140 million verified African consumer profiles, connected across thousands of behavioural, media and transactional signals.
It’s always on. No intermediaries. No research lead times. No waiting weeks to understand what people thought once the moment has passed.
Building, building, building
And let me be clear, this didn’t appear overnight.
While much of the industry has been busy talking loudly about tools, dashboards and innovation theatre, we were building.
Since 2007, dentsu has invested in Africa’s consumer data infrastructure market by market. Partnership by partnership. Consent framework by consent framework.
Designed for African consumers, not retrofitted from elsewhere.
Talking about innovation and doing it
There’s a difference between talking about innovation and doing it. One looks good on a stage.
The other takes time, patience, and long-term commitment.
The result is Merkury, our identity platform and the foundation beneath COPO. It connects verified individuals across channels into a single, privacy-compliant view.
Not a segment. Not a persona, but a living, connected consumer.
On top of that foundation, COPO applies generative AI, but with a critical constraint.
Its outputs are grounded in verified consumer signals, not synthetic assumptions.
This matters more than many people want to admit. AI trained on inferred or proxy data simply scales the weaknesses of its inputs.
COPO is constrained by reality. That constraint is its strength.
No more flying blind
For marketing leaders, this changes what insight means.
Instead of commissioning research and hoping it lands in time to be useful, teams can test ideas as they form.
Creative routes, product concepts, brand propositions and launch plans can be shared and evaluated in real time.
Sentiment shifts can be seen as they happen, not reconstructed after the fact.
This doesn’t replace strategy or judgment. It removes the excuse for flying blind.
Africa’s role
Africa’s role in this shift isn’t incidental. The continent’s mobile-first behaviour, high engagement and digital fluency make it uniquely suited to continuous, consent-based interaction.
Yet for years, Africa has been understood through external lenses and broad generalisations.
COPO changes that by putting African consumers directly into the decision-making process.
The platform is already live in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya and Gha,na and it’s scaling fast across the rest of the continent.
These aren’t neat test markets. They’re complex, diverse and fast-moving. That’s exactly why these matter.
Real-time consumer intelligence can’t be reserved for tidy environments.
The implication
The bigger implication isn’t technology. It’s agency.
At this scale, African consumers are no longer represented indirectly.
They are present. Their views shape decisions while those decisions are still being made.
The traditional gatekeepers of insight lose some of their authority. The distance between brands and people collapses.
Pressure
For CMOs, this creates a new kind of pressure.
When access to real-time truth exists, ignorance becomes a choice.
Decisions are no longer constrained by what you couldn’t know, but by what you chose not to listen to.
The organisations that will win won’t be the ones with the loudest innovation rhetoric.
They’ll be the ones willing to stay in constant conversation with their consumers and act accordingly.
A shift in access
Every major shift in business has followed a shift in access: to information, to infrastructure, to scale.
What’s happening now is a shift in access to truth. Not generalised insight. Not averaged opinion. But specific, local, verified human reality.
COPO isn’t a promise of what might be possible in Africa. It’s already operational. Already in use. Already shaping decisions today.
Table stakes
As markets become faster, messier and less forgiving, this kind of intelligence won’t be a competitive advantage for long.
It will be table stakes.
The future of consumer understanding won’t belong to those who talk most confidently about innovation.
It will belong to those who invested early enough and seriously enough to make it real.
About Dawn Rowlands
Dawn Rowlands is the of CEO Dentsu Aegis Network SSA. She has over 20 years of experience in the media industry and has most notably been a shareholder founding partner of Nota Bene, a strategy agency in South Africa, and is also the founder of Posterscope SA. Contact Dawn on dawn.rowlands@aemedia.com.
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