Rosabel Advertising Chief Executive Officer, Clement Omemu, reflects on his 20 years’ experience in the industry to speak to Senior Correspondent, GODDIE OFOSE, on several issues about advertising in Nigeria and the African continent.
Assessment of advertising industry
The standard is not as high as I expected it to be. We are not growing at the speed I personally would like because things are evolving and technologies are changing the ways things are done. Brand approach is changing too.
I don’t think we are catching up globally in terms of output, and then again we are also dealing with issues of brand managers that are not well trained, brand managers who do not understand branding.
It is not about going to Lagos Business School to study branding or coming out with a certificate in marketing. It is about trends. There is a fast pace movement of trends and things are so fast that if you are not careful you will be lost.
Consumers are changing; lifestyles are changing, traditions also have changed, so you have to evolve with them.
Factors that drag down Nigerian advertising
Top on the list is exposure in the sense that we are not in touch with both internal and external markets. We cannot say we are local advertising when we are dealing with global brands and we are not exposed to consumer behaviour properly.
There are also best practices. Advertising in 1985 is not advertising in 2015, things have changed. And again we are not training and retraining workers, we just pack a group of people and put them in a place and start working.
I have spoken to many brand managers and I noticed they do not understand the act of brand building; they are still stock in the basics. Most brand managers want to please themselves and not the brand, forgetting that the brand has a life of its own. Today’s business says you become the brand, you speak the language of the brand and not your language.
Brand managers’ impact on creativity
I have discovered in my 20 years in this industry that we create templates and most of these brand managers or brand owners who have these templates should know what an idea should feel like or look like.
It’s just a few who do out of the box; many still live within the box “templates”.
Sometimes most agencies that are not bold enough will flow in that template and please clients but kill the brands.
It is only some few agencies who stand up to say they are going out of the box to do something different. They want to earn their pay so they must do what their clients want.
That has seriously boxed in Nigerian advertising. That is why you find in commercials like noodles that everybody sings. Even banks are doing jingles but do banks need jingles?
Why should a bank do jingles? Must it be jingle because Nigerians like music? No, there are over a hundred techniques in doing ads.
If someone tells me that if I save a certain amount then a certain amount will be added to me and that will mean I will be a little bit richer, I think I will listen to that than to listen to a song.