From 21 to 23 April, the city of Lagos hosted one of Africa’s flagship tech conferences, the Mobile West Africa 2015 which is in its fifth year and attracted industry stakeholders from within and beyond Africa. The conference was heralded by the focus day in which participants discussed the intrigues of mobile marketing in Nigeria.
In his presentation at the Focus Day event, Tomiwa Aladekomo, Senior Digital Manager, Nigerian Breweries shared how the company is deploying mobile marketing strategies to sell more beer. He shared a case study on how the company was able to deploy mobile marketing tools to engage and track viewers of its Gulder Ultimate Show, and increased bottles of beer by 5 million.
When the conference kicked off on Tuesday, a panel that featured various stakeholders discussed the challenges being created by the low broadband penetration in Nigeria; they also discussed how more people could be brought online so that the target of Nigeria’s National Broadband Plan of four-fold increase in access could be achieved before 2017.
Representatives of MTN and Airtel expressed their commitments towards improving internet access in Nigeria through the provision of cheaper internet bundles.
Speaking on what needs to happen to accelerate evolution in Nigeria’s tech space, Emmanouil Revmatas, Director of IT and Mobile, Samsung Electronics West Africa said much could be achieved when more cities and rural areas beyond Lagos, Port Harcourt and Abuja are also recording phenomenal achievements in the tech space.
The third (and last) day of the conference was largely focused on startups with experts sharing tips on how they can strategize and position themselves to maximize opportunities that are available but many of them are not seeing yet.
One of Africa’s highly respected entrepreneurs, Robert Lamptey, ex-chief executive officer of Saya enjoined entrepreneurs on the continent to have a value they represent, and to stand by their principles when it comes to the decision of when, how and who to sell their companies to.
The last panel of the conference focused on mobile games, focusing on the search/discovery, distribution and monetization of mobile gaming.
The conference was wrapped up with an App Developer Competition where 5 leading mobile apps from the West African region battled it out on stage. At the end of the battle, delegates to the conference chose Ghana’s social events app Suba as the overall winner of the app. The developers got prizes from appsafrica, Innjoo and SureGifts.
