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Mobile Internet Drives Online Marketing in Nigeria- Spalazzi

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Massimiliano Spalazzi is the managing director of Kaymu Nigeria.
Prior to joining Kaymu, Spalazzi was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Zanui.com.au, a Rocket Internet based in Australia and co-founded an online venture in Italy.
He also worked with the Jumia founding team before Kaymu and believes in Nigeria’s online market potentials
Spalazzi spoke to peter ugwu on how Kaymu wants to help other online entreprenuers in Nigeria to to  monetize their ventures.

Why Kaymu.com is Nigeria’s Safest Online Market Place
Kaymu is Nigeria’s safest online market place where buyers and sellers meet to perfect transactions on the Internet.
Everyone can be on the platform to sell his or her product; both new and used products. So, is a business focused platform where everyone has equal opportunity to reach out to the wide range of potential buyers and can be reached too to make purchases.
A student might need to sell, a staff might need to sell or buy products ranging from Fashion, Electronics, Jewelry, Accessories, Books and millions more.
The interesting part of it is that when buying or selling at Kaymu, you deal with people from your City and from all over Nigeria.
To do that is very easy; just register and join thousands of people who successfully sell items on Kaymu.

Kaymu’s Level of Patronage
Number of users across Africa has been growing by the day. The adoption rate is increasing tremendously thanks to internet provisioning in Africa.
It is a proof to us that the business model is such that people appreciate as well. What we are doing is providing tools for people to maximize sells and reduce costs as well.
This platform is such that lure people to the online space.
Virtually, everybody has something to sell or buy.
Presently in Nigeria, we are in Lagos, covering the very important market. We have a plan to start nationwide and cover as many cities as we can.

Unique Selling Point
For clarification purpose, we do not sell products rather provide platform for others to market or sell their products.
It starts with what the seller has to sell and how much he or she puts it. If you have quality product and fair price, of course, Kaymu.com is the right avenue to make your sells.
We are different from others due to the unique services and safety.

Marketing & Safety
When it comes to safety we check everything via email and telephone numbers and confirm that the seller is really the person we are dealing with.
We are always cross-checking to ascertain the authenticity of anything we allow to be put up on the site.
Aside that, our sales team is concerned with inserting the price, images, and other factors, that will aid the seller and the buyer. Everything is managed by our team.

Infrastructural Challenges
It is true that internet penetration in the country is not at the top when it comes to laptop or desktop, but it is a different case when you talk about the mobile.
The mobile internet penetration in Nigeria is very significant and drives e-commerce presently.  In fact, it is growing at a very fast rate.
The question will be: can we cope with the growth level? The answer is yes; that is why we are here, trying to find means of utilizing the growing trend.
Facebook, for instance, has maintained constant growth in the last two years and that is a good measure of, not just the growth in internet penetration but how people have been active on the web.

Mobile Adverting for Online Marketing
Like I advocated during the mobile West Africa conference held recently in Lagos, it is important and given the opportunity we have, especially the telecommunications networks, it is a good and efficient way of doing business by using the channels to reach out to as many customers as possible.
Nigerians have their mobile devices on their hands and we can explore such means to reach them.

Kaymu Referral Scheme
We launched the scheme to enable sellers on the network and individuals earn money without selling a single product. What they do is to refer their friends and family who sell a wide variety of products ranging from household products to fashion items and gadget.
Kaymu provides independent sellers or small to medium scale business owners a platform to market to a large homogeneous client base while providing buyers with a central location to purchase a wide variety of products at competitive prices.
Therefore, as the referred sellers climb the seller pathway, a performance reward rating system that helps sellers improve conversion rate, the referees earn money on Kaymu without making a single sale. The pathway enables sellers to improve performance by increasing the number of successful orders, improve delivery time and ensure all transactions are completed effectively.
Then, the improved performance ensures the seller moves up the ladder from bronze, through silver and gold to become platinum sellers.
For each step of the pathway, sellers get additional benefits including increased visibility on the website, competitor analysis as well as visibility on the facebook ads and newsletters.

Are You Targeting Any Age Bracket?
No, it is for everyone. It is for students in the universities and could serve sellers in the various markets. It is very simple to recommend a seller; get your friends and family to successfully list products on Kaymu and require them to mention your name as referee or comment on the facebook page listing the details of the sellers you are referring and you will be contacted.

Affiliate Programme
Yes, we looked at online shopping in Nigeria has caught on like wild fire, with proliferation of e-commerce platforms operating different business models. Kaymu is a product of this revolution. 
We launched the affiliate program in line with our mission of empowering Nigerian entrepreneurs. The program allows 3rd parties to place ads on their platforms and get rewarded. We have said it over time, Kaymu is committed to provide a safe and convenient platform for Nigerians to sell and buy products. However those with nothing to sell, have the opportunity to join those smiling to the Bank through the affiliate program.
For instance, bloggers and anyone who is active online are given the opportunity to promote what we are doing and generate traffic. The traffic generated by anyone shall be rewarded, especially as the traffic is productive.

Building Technology Entrepreneurship
 Certificate, usually, should correspond to skills. But skills most times are based on something we focus on often times. That is the reason we should help people discover themselves. In Kaymu, this is very important to us.
The drive for online entrepreneurship spurred a workshop we organized corps members in Lagos with 2000 in attendance.
We are committed to contribute towards the growth of small and medium scale businesses. We made them understand the importance of maintaining an online presence in this age where internet interaction has empowered young entrepreneurs and the global community.
Nigeria, as we know, has emerged one of the fastest growing countries in global information technology access surpassing the United Kingdom in ranking.
A recent report released by digitXplus, the digital unit of Mediareach OMD Nigeria, puts the country has recorded a 200% growth in internet users between 2009 and 2013.

NYSC Empowerment Programme
The statistics has indicated that Nigeria which tied at 55 million internet users with the UK in 2012 took a 14% leap with about 62.4 million users above the United Kingdom’s 57million users in 2013.
With the statistics, it is evident that to capture the online consumers it is imperative for any business that wants to maximize its exposure to maintain an online platform.
Our team specifically, told them that, Nigerian youths are entrepreneurial by nature. So, they need not slack back. Right from the university they have engaged in one trade or the other via BBM, WhatsApp and social media.
We even seek to provide a better and more structured platform for them to make more sales and have a wider reach.
Gone are the days you come looking for white collar jobs; you have to be creative and remove yourself from the queue of job seekers.  So, we saw the National Youth Service Scheme (NYSC), which was originally created in a bid to reconstruct, reconcile and rebuild the country after the Nigerian Civil war through the youths; there are more to it now. The country can leverage the Scheme to build a robust online entrepreneurship NYSC was established to provide the proper encouragement and development of common ties among the youths of Nigeria and the promotion of national unity.

e-Commerce & Digital Divide in Africa
We see e-commerce as very essential in the quest to bridge the existing digital divide between African and rest of the world.
That is why you see a lot of incentives out there to attract peoples’ interests. If I register my presence online and it benefits me, of course, I will share the success story around and others will be willing to join.
Through that means, Africa can grow its contents and the rest of the world will appreciate more the ingenuity of the people here.

Challenges of e-Commerce
Education is very important in the passage of information and assimilating or appreciating it. It is important for people to understand the basic aspects of the internet for them to make up their minds on the way forward; that is to sell or buy. 


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Our 2023 Ads Safety Report

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By Duncan Lennox, VP & GM of Ads Privacy and Safety

Billions of people around the world rely on Google products to provide relevant and trustworthy information, including ads. That’s why we have thousands of people working around the clock to safeguard the digital advertising ecosystem. Today, we are releasing our annual Ads Safety Report to share the progress we’ve made in enforcing our advertiser and publisher policies and to hold ourselves accountable in our work of maintaining a healthy ad-supported internet.

The key trend in 2023 was the impact of generative AI. This new technology introduced significant and exciting changes to the digital advertising industry, from performance optimization to image editing. Of course, generative AI also presents new challenges. We take these challenges seriously and will outline the work we are doing to address them head-on.

Just as importantly, generative AI presents a unique opportunity to improve our enforcement efforts significantly. Our teams are embracing this transformative technology, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), so that we can better keep people safe online.

Gen AI Bolsters Enforcement 

Our safety teams have long used AI-driven machine learning systems to enforce our policies at scale. It’s how, for years, we’ve been able to detect and block billions of bad ads before a person ever sees them. But, while still highly sophisticated, these machine learning models have historically needed to be trained extensively – they often rely on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of examples of violative content.

LLMs, on the other hand, are able to rapidly review and interpret content at a high volume, while also capturing important nuances within that content. These advanced reasoning capabilities have already resulted in larger-scale and more precise enforcement decisions on some of our more complex policies. Take, for example, our policy against Unreliable Financial Claims which includes ads promoting get-rich-quick schemes. The bad actors behind these types of ads have grown more sophisticated. They  adjust their tactics and tailor ads around new financial services or products, such as investment advice or digital currencies, to scam users.

To be sure, traditional machine learning models are trained to detect these policy violations. Yet, the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of financial trends make it, at times, harder to differentiate between legitimate and fake services and quickly scale our automated enforcement systems to combat scams. LLMs are more capable of quickly recognizing new trends in financial services, identifying the patterns of bad actors who are abusing those trends and distinguishing a legitimate business from a get-rich-quick scam. This has helped our teams become even more nimble in confronting emerging threats of all kinds.

We’ve only just begun to leverage the power of LLMs for ads safety. Gemini, launched publicly last year, is Google’s most capable AI modeI. We’re excited to have started bringing its sophisticated reasoning capabilities into our ads safety and enforcement efforts.

Our Work to Prevent Fraud and Scams

In 2023, scams and fraud across all online platforms were on the rise. Bad actors are constantly evolving their tactics to manipulate digital advertising in order to scam people and legitimate businesses alike. To counter these ever-shifting threats, we quickly updated policies, deployed rapid-response enforcement teams and sharpened our detection techniques.

  • In November, we launched our Limited Ads Serving policy, which is designed to protect users by limiting the reach of advertisers with whom we are less familiar. Under this policy, we’ve implemented a “get-to-know-you” period for advertisers who don’t yet have an established track record of good behavior, during which impressions for their ads might be limited in certain circumstances–for example, when there is an unclear relationship between the advertiser and a brand they are referencing. Ultimately, Limited Ads Serving, which is still in its early stages, will help ensure well-intentioned advertisers are able to build up trust with users, while limiting the reach of bad actors and reducing the risk of scams and misleading ads.

  • A critical part of protecting people from online harm hinges on our ability to respond to new abuse trends quickly. Toward the end of 2023 and into 2024, we faced a targeted campaign of ads featuring the likeness of public figures to scam users, often through the use of deepfakes. When we detected this threat, we created a dedicated team to respond immediately. We pinpointed patterns in the bad actors’ behavior, trained our automated enforcement models to detect similar ads and began removing them at scale. We also updated our misrepresentation policy to better enable us to rapidly suspend the accounts of bad actors.

Overall, we blocked or removed 206.5 million advertisements for violating our misrepresentation policy, which includes many scam tactics and 273.4 million advertisements for violating our financial services policy. We also blocked or removed over 1 billion advertisements for violating our policy against abusing the ad network, which includes promoting malware.

The fight against scam ads is an ongoing effort, as we see bad actors operating with more sophistication, at a greater scale, using new tactics such as deepfakes to deceive people. We’ll continue to dedicate extensive resources, making significant investments in detection technology and partnering with organizations like the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and Stop Scams UK to facilitate information sharing and protect consumers worldwide.

Investing in Election Integrity

Political ads are an important part of democratic elections. Candidates and parties use ads to raise awareness, share information and engage potential voters. In a year with several major elections around the world, we want to make sure voters continue to trust the election ads they may see on our platforms. That’s why we have long-standing identity verification and transparency requirements for election advertisers, as well as restrictions on how these advertisers can target their election ads. All election ads must also include a “paid for by” disclosure and are compiled in our publicly available transparency report. In 2023, we verified more than 5,000 new election advertisers and removed more than 7.3M election ads that came from advertisers who did not complete verification.

Last year, we were the first tech company to launch a new disclosure requirement for election ads containing synthetic content. As more advertisers leverage the power and opportunity of AI, we want to make sure we continue to provide people with the greater transparency and the information they need to make informed decisions.

Additionally, we’ve continued to enforce our policies against ads that promote demonstrably false election claims that could undermine trust or participation in democratic processes.

Overall 2023 Numbers

Our goal is to catch bad ads and suspend fraudulent accounts before they make it onto our platforms or remove them immediately once detected. AI is improving our enforcement on all these fronts. In 2023, we blocked or removed over 5.5 billion ads, slightly up from the prior year, and 12.7 million advertiser accounts, nearly double from the previous year. Similarly, we work to protect advertisers and people by removing our ads from publisher pages and sites that violate our policies, such as sexually explicit content or dangerous products. In 2023, we blocked or restricted ads from serving on more than 2.1 billion publisher pages, up slightly from 2022. We are also getting better at tackling pervasive or egregious violations. We took broader site-level enforcement action on more than 395,000 publisher sites, up markedly from 2022.

To put the impact of AI on this work into perspective: last year more than 90% of our publisher page level enforcement started with the use of machine learning models, including our latest LLMs. Of course, any advertiser or publisher can still appeal an enforcement action if they think we got it wrong. Our teams will review it and, in the cases where we find errors, use it to improve our systems.

Staying Nimble and Looking Ahead

When it comes to ads safety, a lot can change over the course of a year: the introduction of new technology such as generative AI to novel abuse trends and global conflicts. And the digital advertising space has to be nimble and ready to react. That’s why we are continuously developing new policies, strengthening our enforcement systems, deepening cross-industry collaboration and offering more control to people, publishers and advertisers.

In 2023, for example, we launched the Ads Transparency Center, a searchable hub of all ads from verified advertisers, which helps people quickly and easily learn more about the ads they see on Search, YouTube and Display. We also updated our suitability controls to make it simpler and quicker for advertisers to exclude topics that they wish to avoid across YouTube and Display inventory. Overall, we made 31 updates to our Ads and Publisher policies.

Though we don’t yet know what the rest of 2024 has in store for us, we are confident that our investments in policy, detection and enforcement will prepare us for any challenges ahead.


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InDrive Upgrades App, Announces New Safety Details

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InDrive, an e-hailing firm, announced app upgrades as well as new safety details for riders and drivers.

InDrive’s updated Safety Centre now allows its support team to contact a user’s trusted contacts in emergencies and the number of trusted contacts has been increased from one to five. InDrive says that it is also easier for its support team to share information with emergency services, among other things.

Also, the company said by clicking on the app’s SOS-button, users can see all the information needed when requesting help or reporting an incident – along with a button to call police or ambulance services.

InDrive’s app design has also been updated to improve user experience, making the Safety Centre more visible, it said.

Further, the company said: “inDrive is also testing photo sharing and automatic translation of chat messages, which have been added to the in-app chat function. These make it easier for the driver and rider to clarify the pickup point, and communicate in the same language while traveling.

“Passengers and drivers stay within the application when using these features, so there’s no need to use across other platforms, thereby protecting personal information. For now the feature is currently being tested by a limited number of users to improve its functionality before it is rolled out to everyone.”

The announcement today comes after the company recently revealed it had expanded its financing arrangement with General Catalyst to $146 million, allowing the company to engage in product upgrades, extend its service offerings, and enter new markets in Africa.


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NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

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Telecommunications operators in the country are gearing up for another round of disconnections of phone lines for subscribers who have failed to link their National Identification Numbers (NIN) with their SIM cards.

NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

The disconnection which will happen Friday, March 29, following a directive from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) requiring all registered SIMs lacking proper NIN linkage to be either corrected or completely disconnected from networks.

The ongoing process, which commenced on February 28, 2024, is part of the government’s efforts to curb criminal activities like banditry and kidnapping, contributing to enhancing national security.

There are indications of a potential third phase in April 2024.

Operators have reportedly cooperated with the NCC in executing the directive, affirming their commitment to national security objectives and assuring full compliance by the specified deadlines.

The second phase will target subscribers with five or more SIMs from a single operator lacking verified NIN-SIM linkages.

The third phase, set to commence on April 15, will focus on subscribers with four SIMs or fewer and unverified NINs.

While telecom companies seek a review and extension of the April deadline for the third phase, indications from the NCC suggest a steadfast adherence to the established timelines.

The first phase saw the barring of 40 million lines, comprising around 17 million active SIMs without NIN submissions and 23 million inactive SIMs lacking NINs over the past year.

 

 

 

 


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