Excitement is back in outdoor advertising
Regulators, advertisers, Ministry of the Environment, and Out-of-Home (OOH) practitioners heaved a sigh of relief when the general election was concluded on April 11.
In the commercial axis of the South West, the Lagos State Signage and Advertisement Agency (LASAA), Oyo State Signage and Advertisement Agency (OYSAA), Ogun State Signage and Advertisement Agency (OGSAA) and their Ministries of the Environment were in chaos during electioneering.
Part of the reason was that the rules on OOH advertisement in all the 36 states and Abuja were disregarded.
In Lagos, which is controlled by the All Progressives Congress (APC), it was a test of federal might deployed by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
Caution to the wind
Outdoor advertising is one of the most regulated industries in the integrated marketing communication (IMC) sector. Clusters have disappeared in Lagos and other states with strong regulatory agencies and laws guiding the practice.
It is always a huge concern for stakeholders during election because city aesthetics would be messed up with illegal pasting of posters, erection of billboards, and hoisting of flags by political actors.
During these times, laws guiding the business are relaxed to ensure political parties and candidates get equal opportunity to reach voters.
Regulators structure this to be done in an appropriate manner but political parties usually disregard the rules, particularly if made by an opposition party in a state.
Posters, billboards, flags, and other forms of OOH communication are put in unauthorised places; most times without payment of fees to government agencies.
In the run up to the election, LASAA was involved in an endless battle with political parties over indiscriminate exposure of campaign materials.
This clean up is expected to return order to the visual environment in Nigeria’s megacity.
Outdoor cries
Clearedge Managing Director, Chijioke Alozie, allegedly cried out when two telecommunication giants, Globacom and Huawei, rescinded their contracts with the company because political posters were competing for space with their ads at places they paid for.
Alozie attributed his loss to the imposition of political posters and flags of the PDP on Clearedge’s space.
Clearedge lost on both sides as the fee it paid to LASAA for both businesses was not returned while the two contracts were revoked by the clients.
Other agencies had similar experiences in Oyo, Ogun, Kano, Abuja, Akwa Ibom, Delta, Rivers, Cross Rivers, Kaduna, and Plateau, among others.
At a point, the Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria (APCON), a federal government agency that regulates advertising, demanded that the posters of President Goodluck Jonathan, sponsored by the Transformation Agent of Nigeria (TAN) around Motorway on the Lagos-Ibadan road, be removed.
APCON said TAN failed to apply for pre-exposure vetting before printing and deploying the posters.
“The unauthorised publishing and deployment of the campaign materials goes against the ethics of outdoor regulatory code. TAN should remove the materials and do the appropriate, otherwise necessary action will be taken,” a source in APCON threatened.
OYSAA, OGSAA, and other government agencies also cried out for help as political parties and candidates threw caution to the wind and littered the environment with everything they felt could help convey their messages.
Different strokes
Agencies and ministries have asked political actors to remove their communication materials, which cost they do not want passed on to government agencies.
OYSAA Director General, Yinka Adepoju, advised “all owners of such illegal and unapproved posters, banners, and billboards to remove them within the next 48 hours, expiring 12 midnight Wednesday April 15, 2015.
“All such electioneering materials not removed by the set time will be removed and confiscated by OYSAA. And the agency will not be liable for any illegal and unapproved posters, banners, and billboards not removed at the set date and time.”
However, LASAA has begun to remove all illegal hoardings without calling on the political parties to take responsibility.
Its Managing Director, George Noah, said: “We have expanded our plan to ensure the clean-up exercise is completed in the next two months .We are also ready to scale up our effort wherever the need arises.
“From our findings, over 1,500,000 posters will be cleaned up in Lagos. We are also removing 358 illegal billboards of various types deployed in the state, with Alimosho and Eti Osa accounting for the highest number.”
LASAA Head of Enforcement, Olamide Oyegoke, added that areas requiring heavy clean up have been mapped out and men and equipment are being mobilised.
Revenue down the drain
Experts have put the total revenue loss from the abuse of the system during the election at over N50 billion.
This sum, according to an outdoor advertising consultant, Moses Ayodele, forms part of the collective revenue loss through evasion of fees, taxes, and other levies.
Sources in LASAA who spoke on condition of anonymity disclosed that Lagos is the biggest casualty because it is the OOH hub in Nigeria.
“Lagos alone must have lost in the region of N20 billion from all the parties because posters, banners, and flags, apart from billboards, are supposed to be paid for,” he said.
The evasion of fees was done by all political parties, another source told TheNiche. Besides missing out on levies and taxes, operators losses were massive as clients kept revoking contracts across Nigeria.
Government challenged
Agencies and government ministries face the enormous challenge of how to raise funds for the clean up exercise, including states where there is no patience to wait for political parties to do it.
But it is not realistic to expect a defeated political party to remove its posters; so, the onus is on the government to do the job.
Lagos, which makes N23 billion monthly from internally generated revenue (IGR), the largest in the country, had prepared for the task beforehand.
Some other states have also set aside huge sums of money for the clean up, despite dwindling allocation from Abuja.
Ayodele argued that Lagos has no alternative but to restore the environment.
“We should always plan for things like this,” he said, and urged stakeholders to devise a guideline that would prevent this situation from happening in the future.
