AAAN president scores agencies low on billings, says digital sector is fastest in growth
President of the Association of Advertising Agencies of Nigeria (AAAN), Ikechi Odibgo, has embarked on a critical analysis of economic performances in Nigeria’s Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) sector and observed that though the creative advertising sector fared abysmally low on billings, the digital segment remains the fastest growing in terms of budgeting across the industry.
Odigbo said this during an exclusive interview with MARKETING EDGE on the occasion of the 46th Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the association which held recently in Lagos. He pointed out, however, that the low performance on billings by the creative advertising agencies was due to the fact that advertising and marketing budgets were fast moving away from the creative sector and was moving on to more consumer-centric segments of the market, notably the activations sector.
“In terms of the actual financial performance, contribution to GDP, the share of the advertising pot or the brand building pot, you would see that it is shrinking a bit. The advertising spend is fragmenting, the marketing spend is fragmenting, and what you find is that the biggest budget is into activations.
“In other words, the client wants to be able to convert to details because when you do activations, you are meeting the consumers one on one. Most of the time, these activations happen in the sales field which is different from conventional advertising that is largely media based. And you don’t know how that has directly translated into a sales,” he said.
He added: “So, with more pressing demands to meet P & L targets, what you find is that the client is going to show preference to the sub sectors like activations and, of course, digital sector is the fastest growing in terms of budgets.”
The association’s boss who would rather not disclose in figure terms the industry’s contribution to national GDP, maintained, however, that the industry had recorded significant growth in several other areas of the business.
According to him, “There are different ways to measure growth. You can measure growth in terms of creative performance, you can measure growth in terms of financial performance, and you can measure growth in terms of the creative performance of the member agencies. You can also measure growth in terms of the membership, i.e. the number of agencies that are becoming members of the association. So, in that regard, you could actually say that there has been a significant upsurge in the past couple of years.
“I believe we have exceeded the target, we have 85 or probably close to 90 member agencies made up of full members and associate member agencies. So in that sense, the association or the industry is growing because people are seeing a significant need to have themselves properly registered with the professional association.
He added: “Now with regards to creative performance, we also have quite a lot of traction in the sense that you have most of our agencies winning awards and becoming more and more dominant in terms of award wins at the regional levels. We have Nigerian agencies holding their own at the Lorries, Christals and at the Epical. That goes to show that the creative quality or the creative performance or the quality of creative works is on the upward trajectory and is being recognised internationally.”
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