2025 advertising conference will spark industry growth – Committee chairman

The chairman of the National Advertising Conference Planning Committee, Tunji Adeynka speaks on this year’s conference and the expected impact on the industry. What informed the choice of this year’s theme: “Marketing Communication: Transforming Businesses and creating growth in challenging times? So the conversations around the conference are a continuum so if you want to […]

The chairman of the National Advertising Conference Planning Committee, Tunji Adeynka speaks on this year’s conference and the expected impact on the industry.

What informed the choice of this year’s theme: “Marketing Communication: Transforming Businesses and creating growth in challenging times?

So the conversations around the conference are a continuum so if you want to look at what each conference is addressing. It seeks to address the current issues that are very exciting at the time that the conference is taking place and that is what it has been in the past years. 

So this year, for example, we’ve looked at the economy because marketing and marketing communications operate within that economy and we’ve looked at the existing realities of the economy. 

One of those realities is that the economy is coming from a period of reform and those reforms have been occasioned by certain disruptions within the economy and necessarily those reforms have been a hard capsule to swallow especially for consumers and has also affected a lot of advertisers in different ways. 

It has affected productivity and it has also affected in different ways the operating environment for the businesses that we serve and what we then sought to look at is that with the new administration which is over two years old from an economic point of view they’ve been able to achieve some level of stability, exchange rates, inflation seem to be pulling back a bit and we are seeing stability in pricing and a few other areas of the economy. 

 

So you talked about growth, which is very essential, how has the industry fared during this period under the diverse reforms? 

So, always because the industry is a part of the economy, the industry cannot grow beyond the economy. And if you look at it in the last report, the economy is growing at about 4% GDP but what tends to happen is that, let’s look at what we call the industry. The industry sits on three legs. The first leg is advertisers, brands, owners of brands and advertisers. The second leg comprises the service providers, the agencies that provide services to the advertisers. And the third leg is the media. 

Whether you’re talking about the reform agenda and how it has affected the industry, it has affected the industry in several ways. If you start from the advertiser, for example, a lot of businesses in the past were dealing with volatility in the foreign exchange market because a lot of the inputs that they use for production come from outside Nigeria and they couldn’t predict the price that they would pay for foreign exchange the next moment. 

The second thing was also that you had liquidity issues so they didn’t have access to foreign exchange and therefore it affected their production. I’m talking now from the advertiser perspective. But the second thing for them is that because of rising costs and inflation, it meant that the consumer did not have enough money to buy the products they used to buy. So that was another challenge that hit that pillar. And therefore, for them, it was a major negative. This is the same for the agencies. I dare say for the media as well, the same thing. 

To make it even worse for media is that you had a disruption, a digital disruption, where the kind of funds that used to flow to conventional media have actually been turned around and then more of that money is going to digital and so it’s been a tough time it’s been a tough time and that has informed some of the things that we brought to the fore when we look at it from a conference point of view.

For example last year, one of the messages that we drove especially in the agency sub-sector is that we need to begin to see more consolidation because the market is too fragmented and if you have a lot of players in a market it means that their ability to price appropriately is affected and if you have low entry barriers it also means that you have the tendency towards commoditization and then the price is affected, the value is affected. 

 

So you mentioned that one of the outcomes at last year’s conference was a call for consolidation, has there been a response to that in the market? 

Consolidation is not something that happens quickly like that but the first thing is to begin to have those discussions is to put it out there and the industry is then looking at ways to address that there have been conversations going on and even more conversations are going on in that regard so I think we will be able to you know to bother more on the theme.

 

Among the three legs in the industry, which one was badly affected by the economy? 

All the sectors are badly affected. It’s a domino effect. So the economy is a cycle. Everybody is affected. 

 

Technology is disrupting the industry as well, can you describe it as a friend or a foe?

It’s a friend for the industry. Anywhere that you look at technology and rightly implemented you’re talking either about a reduction in cost, an improvement in productivity certainly, so if it would take me before 10 hours to do a task, it would probably take me three hours to do that, which means I have another seven hours to use up for that task. 

We have seen that specifically in areas like artificial intelligence, where we have tools that are very useful and important in concept creation and creativity, as well as manual creativity and concepts and what those tools do is to offer you immediate ideas, not as finished ideas, but quick turnaround and also quicker time to do the work that you’re doing. 

So, in the media space, for example, there are tools used for media planning and analytics, which can clearly tell what to do or you want to talk about the digital marketing space where again specifically one can tell what is being spent to reduce wastage.

So technology has been a friend and will continue to be a friend and that’s why in the conference we have a specific topic where we want to look at it from the side of the brand, transformation, the technology advantage. We want to look at use cases and examples where technology has transformed a business. 

 

However, there are a lot of discussions that are also going on about governance of technology. When you’re talking specifically about AI, you’re talking about governance issues, ethical issues, about issues that you have to think about twice and say, am I crossing the line or am I still ethically correct? 

And those issues are the issues that are being looked at all over the world to ensure that technology does not become a big problem when it’s supposed to be helping and I guess those are some of the things that we will be speaking about. 

On the other side is also regulation, because it is changing. The way you would regulate a market that is not really involved in technology is different from the way you regulate the markets that we have now, especially within the industry where we operate. And the regulator is also looking at new ways.

 

What are the measures put in place to control digital advertisements? 

The Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria (ARCON), the law, which was passed about three years ago, which is different from the APCON Act, allows it to regulate any form of advertising or marketing communication that exists in the digital space or in the non-digital space. 

In recent times, ARCON has had one or two cases, because sometimes the way you test the law is that someone goes to court to challenge you. Recently, there’s a case taken to court to challenge ARCON’s power in regulating digital advertising and it won that case. 

The Federal High Court clarified ARCON’s power to regulate influencers, content creators, and social media platforms. It was a ruling which reinforced the legislative intentions of the people who wrote the law. That ruling was in the Federal High Court and the landmark decision provided clarification on the powers of outcome to regulate advertising, including the power to oversee advertising on social media platforms. 

But the thing is, regulation will always lie behind technology, but the intent is very clear because an advert could cause chaos, violence or riot if the content is not along certain lines and therefore, it’s important to then have the kind of law so at the end of the day, that is what’s in the play. 

 

What is the projection of growth in the industry you envisage after this conference?

So this conference is not going to automatically create growth, but it will spark growth. It’s one of those things that should spark growth. But if I refer to the PwC report on advertising and in Nigeria, that report was issued in 2023 now it is 2025. So the total size of the market is about N652 billion but the key thing is that it also has a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) which is the annual growth rate through 2029 which is projected at 7.2 percent.

For Nigeria, it has been projected to grow at a remarkable rate of over 18 per cent,  projected to reach 893 billion by 2028.  So growth will continue. The issue is where will growth come from? It’s very clear that the highest growth will come from the digital space and that is what is happening all over the world, that the highest volume of growth will come from the digital space.

 

Does the conference provide capacity building programs for students?

ARCON has different programs. So the industry continues to engage and ensure that the industry continues to collaborate between town and gown. And in the conference in Abuja, we have three different streams on day three. We have four different breakout rooms. 

One of the breakout rooms is dedicated to academics on different topics that are going to be taken by members of the academia, professors and the rest of them in that regard. So, it is dedicated in that manner. 

 

Beyond conferences, what are the other capacity building programs? 

There are a lot of programs that are going on in schools by ARCON, the sectoral groups themselves and other marketing and marketing communications groups. A lot is going on in schools and a lot of collaboration is going on with members of the academy because it’s important to advance in learning in any industry.