Building on its qualitative study conducted with 45 communication, marketing and media professionals across several African countries, Comms & Marketing Africa looks at new ways of producing content. The responses collected point to a shift in practices: as audiences face an increasingly crowded information environment, brands are turning to formats that are more direct, more personal and more closely aligned with digital habits.
This article is part of a series based on a study conducted by Comms & Marketing Africa with 45 professionals and stakeholders from the communication, marketing and media industries. Most respondents are from West Africa, including 34 participants from Burkina Faso, alongside contributions from Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Togo, Guinea, Congo, Cameroon and Algeria.
The consultation seeks to understand how digital transformation is changing professional practices, the content organizations produce and the relationship between organizations and their audiences. Following the questions of mobile usage and competition for attention, another issue stands out: the transformation of the formats and narratives used to communicate.
Content Now Has to Capture Attention Quickly
In an environment where audiences are exposed to a constant flow of content, the first few seconds have become particularly important. Short-form content responds to this shift in media consumption. It makes it possible to quickly present an idea, piece of information, product or story.
For communication professionals, this constraint means paying greater attention to the opening of a piece of content: a sentence, image, situation or question must quickly give audiences a reason to keep watching or reading. But being short does not necessarily mean oversimplifying. The challenge is rather to get to the point quickly without losing the meaning of the message.
Video Is Becoming Central to Content Strategies
Video plays an increasingly important role in this evolution. It makes it possible to show rather than simply explain, give a message a human face and create a stronger sense of proximity with audiences. Someone sharing their experience, a professional presenting their work or a customer giving a testimonial can bring a more concrete dimension to brand communication.
Short-form video can also allow the same subject to be adapted for different purposes: excerpts, testimonials, demonstrations, interviews, behind-the-scenes content or educational material. Video is therefore becoming less of a complementary format and more of a communication language in its own right.
Storytelling to Give Meaning
As the volume of content continues to grow, storytelling can also help messages stand out. Storytelling is not simply about telling a compelling story. It can provide context for a brand, introduce a person, explain an approach or demonstrate the concrete impact of an action.
For audiences, a message built around real people and experiences can be easier to understand and remember than a succession of institutional statements. The narrative therefore becomes a way of moving from “what we do” to “why it matters to you.”
UGC Brings Brands Closer to Their Audiences
User-generated content, or UGC, is also contributing to this transformation. Customer testimonials, user videos, personal experiences and spontaneous posts can give brand communication another dimension. One of the main features of this approach is that it involves people from outside the organization.
For the professionals surveyed, this reflects a broader shift: brands are no longer the only ones producing the narratives associated with them. Consumers, creators and communities also contribute to their visibility and public image.
Creators Are Playing a Growing Role
This evolution is also bringing brands closer to content creators. Creators often have their own communities, editorial codes and direct relationships with their audiences. A collaboration can therefore allow a brand to present its message in an environment that is already familiar to its target audience.
But such collaborations require consistency between the creator, their audience and the brand message. Visibility alone is not enough: content must remain credible and consistent with the environment in which it is shared.
Authenticity Is Becoming an Expectation
The growing volume of advertising and promotional content is also making audiences more attentive to how brands communicate. Content that feels overly scripted or disconnected from real-life usage can quickly lose its effectiveness.
The responses collected through the study therefore highlight the importance of content that feels more human, closer to the field and more connected to the realities of audiences. Authenticity does not mean the absence of strategy. Rather, it requires the message, tone, narrative and people featured to remain consistent.
Producing Content Is No Longer Enough
This shift in formats is also changing the work of communication professionals. The task is no longer simply to publish content on a regular basis. Professionals must consider the role each piece of content plays within a broader strategy: attracting, explaining, reassuring, engaging or converting audiences.
The same subject can therefore be adapted into several formats depending on the objective. An article can become a short video. An interview can be turned into several clips. A testimonial can feed into a social media post. A study can generate a series of educational pieces. The logic is increasingly one of smart content repurposing rather than constantly producing entirely new topics.
Towards More Human-Centred Communication
The findings from this part of the Comms & Marketing Africa study point to a shift towards content that is increasingly adapted to digital habits. Short-form video, storytelling, UGC, creators and people-centred content are not simply format trends. They reflect a deeper transformation in the relationship between brands and their audiences.
In an environment where almost anyone can create and distribute content, the question is becoming less “How much content can we publish?” and more “What content is genuinely worth our audiences’ attention?” For African communication professionals, this shift calls for a combination of format expertise, audience understanding and the ability to tell stories that resonate with local realities.
