Inspiration for this article came from a serendipitous collision of two different areas of my work, and conversations with some brilliant colleagues Ndirangu Maina, Yolande Coombes, Chris Harrison and Annette Martyres which brought home the realization on why media research in particular has so much opposition in East Africa.

I have been in the advertising industry and specializing in media for 29 years, and in that time I have seen media research go from huge quarterly tomes that were delivered by some hefty chaps, to online dashboards and query engines that can slice and dice the data many different ways, but alas the acceptance and proper usage of this data is still restricted to a handful of companies and media organizations. Something that bothered me for a long time because I also served at the now defunct Kenya Audience Research Foundation as head of the technical committee on a pro-bono basis for 7 years.

A leadership session at Amalgam Leadership Group exploring bias and its role in leadership development sparked my interest in researching this in the context of media and I had a eureka moment explaining this problem.

If you agreed with the headline of this article, you have exhibited the first bias “Blind spot bias” which is the belief that we don’t have any biases, yet as imperfect beings we all have some. This one prevents us from seeing that we do carry biases, and as the wise old saying goes, accepting you have a problem is the most important step in solving it.

The second one I came across very often was “Confirmation Bias” which is the tendency to believe information that confirms our already existing beliefs or thoughts. One that I heard many a time from a media owner stating “Everywhere I go people are listening/watching/reading my medium, your research can’t be right” and on that basis go on the warpath against the research and the body that conducted it. Which then feeds into “Authority Bias” especially when the party railing against the research is seen as an authority in their field and therefore eminently believable, swaying people who haven’t really interacted with the research to dismiss it without verifiable cause.

A bias that interestingly comes from multi-national advertisers is the “Anchoring bias” which causes us to rely heavily on the first piece of information on a given topic. This usually springs from research in the country where the global marketing decision making is resident, confirming that such and such a medium works, and this other medium doesn’t. This is then translated to all parts of the globe, East Africa included, despite research evidence to the contrary. I have had many a titanic debate on radio effects, and lately on digital platforms stemming from this bias, albeit grounded in research in very different realms.

Then there’s the “Semmelweiss reflex” which is an instinctual rejection of new evidence or new knowledge because it goes against established norms, and beliefs. I experienced this when local language radio and TV channels started showing up in the research as garnering sizeable audiences, but were struggling to attract advertising commensurate to their audience size because they were breaking a norm and it made many a decision maker uncomfortable to go against the grain.

Opposite this is the “Bandwagon effect” the tendency for people to adopt certain behaviors, or attitudes simply because others are doing so, As more people come to believe in something, others also “hop on the bandwagon” regardless of the underlying evidence. In the media research context this manifests in broad sweeping statements like “Print is dead” or “digital is the way to go” without checking out the facts that may illustrate a different picture.

I write this article because it is frightening that an industry worth approximately $900M (Conservative estimate because only Radio, TV and print are measured) is running largely on bias, uninformed beliefs and attitudes, has very low levels of ROI tracking, and new, innovative players really struggle to get to commercial success.

It is my hope that as you read this, you’ll be aware of the different biases we all carry, myself included, and check them when presented with research, information, or conclusions that are novel to us to make better decisions, and heighten marketing effectiveness across East Africa.