“Data is still a challenge to growth in Nigeria”
Emeka Okeke, Group Managing Director/CEO of MEDIAFUSE Dentsu International, has said that data is still a challenge in Nigeria, averring that there is no single source for people-based marketing data in the sense that platforms that aggregate robust personal data either don’t exist and where they exist, are only scratching the surface of masses of data in the market and constrained by privacy laws to use them for marketing. He said this recently during an exclusive interview with MARKETING EDGE.
The MEDIAFUSE Dentsu boss maintained that data is still in the hands of big media tech companies like Google, Facebook etc. We are still working with proxy data to determine trends as sample numbers represent segments. Compare this to people-based marketing data that targets individuals and follow their behaviour across the various touchpoints using both their digital and offline footprint given the growing convergence nature of communication ecosystem.
According to him, “we have data, yet we don’t have data. Robust data requires a lot of investment and with the potential death of cookie data, investment in platforms and private data networks becomes imperative for marketers. Cookies have been the backbone of the open internet, but with the clock fast ticking on third-party. Cookies, we need to plan for disruption tomorrow by rethinking data strategies today”.
Mr. Okeke added: “Measurability is still an issue. What data are we using today in the market? For instance, media independent agencies use of AMPS (All Media Products Survey), Radio and Linear TV diaries for planning purpose (RAMS and TAMS).
“RAMs and TAMs (Radio Audience Measurements and TV Audience Measurements) parameters are still the industry standard for traditional radio and tv channel planning. The major challenges with these are recently, real time access and coverage. AMPS comes once in a year. I am not sure if anyone would have done anything in 2020 given the disruption caused by Covid-19 pandemic. Good as these data sources are given the market’s level of sophistication, they are essentially passive and don’t yet measure overnight changes in channel consumption. They are unlike real time digital data that are associated with digital media reporting dash boards.”
“Given the difficulty in accessing sales data from most clients and that can be used for econometric modelling to actually unearth the contribution of the different channels in the marketing mix deployed by clients attributable to product sales and revenue, traditional communication agencies will continue to struggle to rationalise investments made by clients through them to manage their campaigns. Econometric modelling is not cheap and therefore requires data stacks from both clients and third parties over a period of time to deploy to make a sense of it all.”
Speaking on insecurity, Mr. Okeke said that insecurity is another challenge impacting the industry in a negative sense, even before the Covid-19 pandemic, especially the Out-of-Home advertising sub-category. “You can’t go to some parts of the country to say you want to build a billboard for any reason due to insecurity. As a result of insecurity compounded by the pandemic, OOH spend was impacted as some advertisers moved budgets to other channels like digital, tv and radio.
“We have heard recently how some multinational companies took their investment to neighbouring countries. Twitter, for example, had no reason to move to Ghana with a population of about 28 million people and very much less in terms of followership compared to Nigeria with hundreds of millions of people. Insecurity is really a problem and is affecting economic growth across the board.”
He stated that inflation is also a challenge confronting the industry. “We’ve seen inflation in 2019 hover between 10.5 and 11%. Today, coming out of Covid-19, we planned based on 15% inflation, but in reality, by May/June we were planning on 17.5%. How are we going to manage this degree of volatility in the economy? Are we going to take 17.5% inflation benchmark to the clients as basis for fee reviews? This means that a lot of things in terms of permutation you do in the boardroom will suffer tremendous setback given the inflationary impact and market volatility. Nothing appears certain in the given circumstance.”
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