The Chief Executive Officer/Managing Director of BD Consult, Tola Bademosi, is a respected public relations practitioner. He has experience in leading communications outfits such as The Quadrant Company.
He advocates in this interview with GODDIE OFOSE that regulators should raise the entry requirement in integrated marketing communications industry, as part of efforts to improve delivery standards.
Type of communication model practised in Nigeria
Tola Bademosi,
Let’s start from the way the industry emerged back then, when you had people who wanted to do something different. The majority of people in the early stage in integrated marketing communication (IMC) probably didn’t go through a formal university to study mass communication or advertising and public relations, as it is today.
But by chance they found themselves in the industry and fell in love with it and started to take the passion on. Some of these people are the biggest brains who have turned the industry around in such a tremendous way that you begin to ask what education really means?
Does education mean the four walls of a classroom or how one is able to acquire information, process information and being able to use that information for the good of all?
Coming to the present day IMC, you have thousands of players, professionals and quacks. Clients do not even know how to distinguish between the genuine and the quacks. You hardly find an agency in Nigeria without a link to the entire IMC.
So, you have an advertising company and feel there is a need for PR, brand activation company and media buying, and they all set up these arms in the name of trying to increase billing. This is the kind of model you find now.
And when this begins to happen, the quality of service delivery will drop, and that is what we are seeing today. That is why the kind of advertising we were enjoying in the 1980s and 1990s is not the kind of advertising we are enjoying today. The kind of services we were enjoying in terms of PR in-depth solution and other things are not what we are getting today.
Of course, people are starting to say that social media has come to play a major role; but then traditional media always has it space. If not, nobody will be watching television or even reading a newspaper and listening to radio. Social media is there but target audience differs.
Best option
There is no right or wrong way. We are first and foremost businessmen with one primary objective of profit. If an initiative will help increase profitability most people usually go for it.
Take America for instance. You have agencies which own other aspects of IMC as a group but they have more agencies that are independent, focusing on their area of specialty than combining all IMC elements because there are strict laws to abide with.
If you must become a full IMC company in America there are certain minimum standards to meet, there are those bodies which you have to be registered with and there is a qualification you have.
But in Nigeria, barrier to entry is very minimal. Anybody can wake up tomorrow and become a PR practitioner, nobody is going to question you. Anybody can wake up and become an activation agency operator; who regulates the industry?
Whereas you cannot practise law because you have read the Constitution and think you know what it is.
How we got it wrong
The profession has to be adequately regulated. It has to be like every profession. You don’t wake up one morning and say you want to practise communication and then you don’t have a pedigree and an antecedent.
You don’t have to study it in school like other professions such as medicine, law and so on, because quite a number of communication practitioners do not have a degree in mass communication but they must have antecedents.
You must have worked for a certain period of time for you to say you want to practise. Take the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) for instance; every practising lawyer must be a member of the NBA.
So why is this not applicable to the NIPR?
Is every public relations practitioner a member of the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations (NIPR)? No! That’s why Public Relations Consultants Association of Nigeria (PRCAN) took the initiative to have accredited members and publish the names of accredited members to say the government, agencies, clients and organisations should deal with these accredited members.
They took this initiative because there were a lot of briefcase practitioners, and some of them are still being patronised by the government and multinationals.
How the industry combats the menace
What PRCAN is doing is a good starting point. To really get this off the ground, it is going to be advocacy and the advocacy has to become a law. We then need to look within PRCAN member organisations. There are criteria to be met and are those criteria being followed to the letter?
Who regulates, PRCAN or NIPR?
It’s a controversial question, the NIPR is a parastatal under the Ministry of Information. The question is how well organised is the NIPR? Is it communicating or talking to practitioners? Is it taking advantage of the brains we have in the industry to proffer solutions at the government level? No!
PRCAN is the embodiment of practitioners and consultants. Apart from cross-fertilising ideas, PRCAN was set up also to build the image of the industry, to ensure that knowledge is transferred. There are lots of training programmes PRCAN is doing, there are lots of advocacies PRCAN is coming up with. So it’s changing but it’s not going to be an event, it’s a process before PRCAN will get there.
The majority of practitioners associate more with PRCAN than with the NIPR, so you are not going to say which is bigger but where are the practitioners.
How public relations can redeem Nigeria’s image
I have read a thousand and one articles on how to salvage the image of the country. Speaking as a practitioner from my own point of view, it still has to go to the same process of proffering PR solutions for organisations and clients.
The process of first identifying what really the challenge is. What aspect of the image do we need to work on, because you can’t keep saying a man is bad; the question is why is that man bad – is he a thief, is he a rapist, is he a murderer. There must be something that made that man bad.
So if you say Nigeria’s image is bad then why is our image bad outside? Has anybody conducted a research to know why; has there been a perception audit to show that this is the way Nigerians are perceived for XYZ reasons? You can’t proffer solution when you have not identified the problem.
For every strategic PR campaign the starting point is research. You must first identify what really is the problem and when you identify the problem then you begin to look at the kind of solution we can proffer to solve this problem.
Stakeholders’ contribution to solution
These are practitioners, these are business owners. If you want to proffer solution to an entity, you must be approached; the Ministry of Information indirectly supervises the NIPR. Is the ministry engaging practitioners? Has there been a session where core practitioners have been invited to diagnose the problem?
A practitioner is not just going to wake up and say he has a solution for you, because engagement must take place first. So, if the Ministry of Information is not engaging practitioners how will they just wake up and proffer solution to a problem they have not spent time to identify? That’s where the challenge is.
How PR practitioners’ image as errand boys has changed
I want to believe by my personal experience that it has changed. I don’t think any of my client sees me as an errand boy and neither do I look like an errand boy or behave like one.
Where I see the challenge is that there is a lack of depth in proffering solution, there is a lack of depth in trying to ensure that value is brought to the table for clients. If that value is not seen, PR is not appreciated.
Some people do not understand the role PR can play in brand building. There is also a lack of knowledge on the side of brand owners. A brand owner who deals with a quack would say PR does not work for him.
Advertising delivers on awareness and PR builds credibility and perception. That a brand is well known does not automatically mean it is credible or will be bought.
Industry position on PR pitch fee
I have worked in the industry for quite some time and I can tell you that even the pitch fee is still a battle. PRCAN really has the primary responsibility in ensuring that those people who play in the industry abide by the rules.
But then you find a situation where 20 people are trying to fight for a slice of bread and conditions are attached to it. Some will try to follow the conditions but a man who is hungry will just want to go for the slice of bread.
That is where the challenge is, because how does PRCAN know there is a pitch for it to regulate except it’s really a major brand and you can identify that. Those are some of the challenges we face. PR fee is still a far cry compared to advertising.
Have you ever insisted on pitch fee?
I have not, because most times when we get briefs, we look at it in totality of what the brief is and the opportunities in it. Every pitching process is a learning curve and that is why this industry is very dynamic. We work with diverse clients. Every client you work with is a different experience completely.
I have not seen a policy from PRCAN that states that when a pitch is rejected you should request for pitch fee.
The rule is well circulated in the advertising industry and the awareness is there. If we have that policy and it is not properly circulated then maybe we will look at it.
How client payment structure affects PR
Sometimes some multinationals have a no-advance policy to pay suppliers and you are aware of that and it shouldn’t come as a surprise. There are some companies that, before you work for them, they let you know they do not make advance payment. When we go for pitches, one of the criteria is that you must have a particular amount of money to do business, sometime it is as high as between N20 million and N50 million.
Which is why, for some pitches, they want to see what your turnover is like, and if you are able to handle some of those businesses.
Who restructures payment policy?
There is no regulation in terms of that in this country. Trade laws in South Africa are very stiff that even the government of South Africa does not owe contractors for some period of time as we have here. In fact, the government of South Africa is one of the best clients you can have, because it pays promptly.
While we have some clients pay on time we also have some paying after 90 days, but it is not a blanket approach. I have some clients who pay regularly, and I also have those who wait until after 90 days.
But there is no regulation in terms of how Nigerian companies and service providers are to be paid. If you want to sue, how do you do that, and on what grounds are you going to sue.
It is a very big challenge in this country and that’s why Nigeria is one of the best places for a lot of these foreign companies to do business.
Global angle to PR practice
The PR industry in Nigeria is growing and PR is most times localised. However, because I practise PR effectively in Nigeria does not mean I can go to South Africa and practise PR effectively without working with local people who understand the idiosyncrasies of the people.
PR is about perception management of a particular group of people. So, I need to understand the group of people to manage their perception.
Growth started a bit later here compared to the developed markets. We are moving gradually and getting to that space where PR is becoming a force to reckon with. Therefore, I will rate Nigeria as “good” because it is growing, but we need a bit of regulation to improve professionalism and service delivery.
How BD Consult ranks in the industry
In as much as we try to run our business without trying to compete with other players in the industry, the reality about it also is that they are competitors. We try to ensure that any client we work for owns the conversation in their industry.
That is one edge we think we have, and which we are striving to maintain.
Meaning of ‘victory without battle’ tagline
That is our operating philosophy. You will achieve victory without battle when you acquire knowledge; because when you have knowledge and apply that knowledge to proffer solution, you don’t have to fight.
We say “victory without battle and strength in knowledge” because we believe strongly in knowledge, and when you have knowledge, it limits your battle.
