What 2026 Holds for African AdTech: Lessons From Dangote, Gates and Jobs

What 2026 Holds for African AdTech: Lessons From Dangote, Gates and Jobs

By Gabriel Ferrer, Chief Operating Officer, Pisi

Ten years ago, I walked into my first digital gaming operation in East Africa. The betting industry taught me something fundamental: you cannot manage what you cannot measure. Every click, every conversion, every dollar had to be tracked because that is how you survived in high-stakes
environments. That lesson has guided everything I have built since, from e-commerce platforms to the AdTech solutions we are scaling at Pisi today.

2025 gave us clarity on something marketers have debated for decades: businesses that measure better don’t just win faster, they win bigger. Across our client base in Nigeria and beyond, we have watched companies transform from treating marketing as necessary evil to understanding it as their most predictable revenue driver. As we look toward 2026, three fundamental shifts will determine which African businesses lead and which lag behind.

Owning Your Data Stack Isn’t Strategy, It’s Survival

I spent years building digital acquisition systems where third-party platforms controlled the measurement. You would pour money into campaigns and hope their black box attribution told you something useful. That approach worked when competition was thin. Not anymore.

Organizations across Africa are finally moving away from renting someone else’s measurement infrastructure toward building their own data foundations. This is not about technology preferences or vendor relationships, it’s about control. When your customer discovers you on mobile in Lagos, researches you across multiple devices, possibly visits a physical location in Abuja, then converts through a completely different channel in Port Harcourt, traditional attribution models become fiction.

With retail media spending forecast to reach up to $200 billion in 2026 with strong programmatic integration, the businesses that own their measurement stack will control their growth trajectory. The others will keep guessing and hoping their marketing works.

Aliko Dangote understood this principle decades ago when he moved from importing to manufacturing. He recognized that depending on foreign suppliers for essential goods left Nigerian businesses vulnerable. The same logic applies to marketing measurement today. You can not build a sustainable growth engine on someone else’s foundation.

AI Becomes Your Operating System, Not Your Experiment

Ninety-two per cent of business leaders now use AI-driven personalization strategies. Most are barely scratching the surface. They are using AI like a better calculator when they should be treating it like the engine that runs their entire marketing operation.

My years in betting and e-commerce taught me that real competitive advantage comes from predicting what happens next, not just reporting what already happened. AI-powered attribution can finally connect marketing spend to actual business outcomes in real time. That is the difference between knowing your campaign worked yesterday and adjusting your budget in the next hour because the data shows exactly where your money works hardest.

Bill Gates built Microsoft’s dominance not by creating individual products but by building platforms that other developers could build on top of. That same platform thinking applies to AI in marketing. It is not about adding AI features to your campaigns; it is about rebuilding your entire marketing operation with AI as the foundation. Creative production, budget allocation, performance optimisation, all of it need AI baked in from the start.

Bill Gates famously said, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning”. AI gives us that feedback loop at scale. We can now measure not just who converted but why they didn’t, what almost worked, and how to fix it for the next thousand potential customers.

Mobile-Native Is the Only Native That Matters

Over 700 million people across Africa are expected to have mobile connections by the end of 2025. Digital advertising on e-commerce retail platforms continues growing at a 32.1% CAGR in South Africa and 22.4% in Nigeria. But most marketing teams are still designing for desktop and adapting for mobile.

That’s backwards thinking that costs money.

African consumers don’t just prefer mobile; mobile is their entire internet experience. I have watched this evolution firsthand across betting platforms, e-commerce sites, and now advertising technology. The businesses winning right now are not the ones with mobile-responsive websites. They are the ones who assumed mobile from day one and built everything else as an afterthought.

This connects directly with the future Steve Jobs saw, where consumers would move beyond computers to use a range of electronic devices for entertainment and communication. He systematically rolled them out—iPod, iPhone, iPad. That sequencing mattered. Each device built on the last, creating an ecosystem. That’s what mobile-native marketing requires—systematic building of customer journeys that assume small screens, intermittent connectivity, and the specific behaviours of African mobile users.

The Leadership Mindset That Wins

The businesses thriving in 2026 will not be the ones with the fattest marketing budgets. They will be the ones with the sharpest measurement, the deepest data ownership, and the clearest connection between marketing spend and business outcomes.

Dangote’s hands-on leadership style—actively engaging in daily operations rather than delegating everything—proves that great strategists stay close to execution. You can’t optimize what you don’t understand intimately. At Pisi, we insist that our team understands not just how our technology works but how our clients actually use it to run their businesses.

Building What Comes Next

Gates, Jobs, and Dangote all shared one critical trait: they built platforms and ecosystems, not just products. They understood that lasting competitive advantage comes from creating systems that get stronger as more people use them. This is what we’re building at Pisi: proper marketing measurement systems that get smarter with every campaign, every conversion, every data point.

We are helping our clients build measurement frameworks that work for how Africans actually behave, not how Silicon Valley thinks they should behave. That means tracking attribution across mobile money transactions, physical retail visits, social commerce, and traditional e-commerce: all in the same customer journey.

As we move into 2026, the question isn’t whether to invest in marketing. The question is whether you have the measurement infrastructure to invest intelligently. Because unmeasured marketing is not marketing. It is expensive guesswork that your competitors stopped making years ago.

The businesses that will win are already building their data foundations, integrating AI deeply into their operations, and designing every customer touchpoint mobile-first. They are not waiting for perfect conditions or complete certainty. They are measuring, learning, and optimizing faster than everyone else.

That has always been the game. 2026 just raises the stakes.

Gabriel Ferrer is the Chief Operating Officer at Pisi, a Nigerian adtech company dedicated to creating advertising solutions that bridge global technology trends with local market needs.

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