The African Cup of Nations, which kicks off next month, represents a major opportunity for advertisers, despite concerns around the recent Ebola outbreak – and mobile is set to be the primary battleground for consumers’ attention.

That is the view of mobile ad platform Opera Mediaworks’ EMEA managing director Mark Slade and EMEA COO Andy Warren, speaking exclusively to M&M Global.

Slade says that he is confident the African Cup of Nations will continue to be a media success: “We usually see a spike in demand from advertisers during major sporting events so this will be no exception. The fact that the venue is being moved to a different country will have an impact on the whole event, but it shouldn’t impact the consumption of mobile content.”

“The very notion of mobile is that it’s movable. It can move with the event. The fact that it will go with the users, it will go with their handsets, it will go with how they are using the devices and what websites they are looking at,” adds Warren.

Fresh from the acquisition of AdVine earlier this week, a leading mobile ad network in South Africa, Opera Mediaworks is just one of the many companies acknowledging the potential of the developing African mobile market.

Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the fastest growing mobile markets in the world, with over 600 million mobile phone subscriptions that are predicted to increase to over 930 million by the end of 2019, according to the June 2014 Ericsson Mobility Report.

“Our role is to help brands develop their mobile strategies and deliver on their mobile campaigns. Africa is starting to develop into a really influential region for mobile and mobile advertising specifically,” says Slade.

“We hope that AdVine will help to accelerate this in the region,” adds Warren.

AdVine already works with a number of publishers in the region, including the BBC and Shazam, and has a long-standing relationship with Opera Mediaworks, working on its owned and operated mobile-ad inventory in the region.

Opera Mediaworks has tapped into the opportunity in a developing region where “data-play” allows customers to use smartphones in a much more cost-effective way.

“We see Opera as having helped drive mobile usage in the region as the economies develop. What we’re seeing in South Africa, Nigeria and a lot of those developing areas is that you don’t necessarily have a fixed network infrastructure, so mobile becomes the relied upon device,” says Warren.

“It’s being used for personal identification, mobile commerce, and the advertising play within that is a natural partner – we see that as a great potential and something we can really support,” he adds.

They both agree that there is a whole list of big global brands that are starting to take advantage of the certain developing markets in Africa, such as Nigeria and South Africa. “They seem to be the strongest markets for the more developed mobile campaigns and the larger international brands,” Slade notes.