by Thinus Ferreira
South Africa's public broadcaster is losing millions of rand per month in ad revenue because of Eskom's electricity blackouts which leads to advertisers not getting the traction from their interrupted marketing and advertising campaigns and as much as a fifth of the entire audience for a TV commercial getting wiped away.
Reggie Nxumalo, SABC head of sales, told parliament this week that linear TV broadcast is built on appointment viewing. "Prime time is when the audience viewership is at its peak between 18:00 and 22:00. Therefore loadshedding adversely impacts the appointment viewing through the reduction in viewership".
"The other challenge from a client perspective is that most advertising campaigns have a specific timeframe. For example, you could have a campaign that runs from a retail perspective from Tursday to Saturday, over a 4-week period."
"What loadshedding does is it erodes that value from a linear TV perspective - upwards of 20%. This year as blackout levels increased, the impact increased as there is a positive correlation [between blackouts and audience loss]."
"Advertising clients' campaigns fail to reach the ARs or audience ratings by as much as 15% to 20%
