Agencies in Nigeria are not structured to solve marketing problems- Experts
By Zion Rufus
Against the backdrop of advertising clients in-housing advertising budgets and shifting spend away from agencies, and its implications on client acquisition and retention going into 2023, some professionals have advised agencies in Nigeria need to restructure and adopt better integrated models.
Lekan Lawal, a marketing campaign director, believes that a lot of companies are now moving marketing operations in-house because agencies in Nigeria are not structured to solve business problems. In his opinion, most agencies are structured to solve marketing leads and marketing briefs.
“First I’ll say the retention model is dying, and acquisition in the second place is an even bigger challenge because structurally, agencies are not agile to help small and mid-sized businesses that can scale up with efficient ways of working. But let’s face it, all the big guys are gone, agencies need to structure themselves to also be able to take in mid-sized businesses,” Lawal told MARKETING EDGE.
“Oftentimes what we see is that these businesses jump from one agency to the other till they finally agree that yes, the agency structures are not so helpful. Hence, they would want to poach a creative director, media lead, or account manager from an agency. And we have seen how agencies are being disrupted because of these moves by startups and mid businesses trying to build their own team, even the likes of freelance platforms. Agencies are hardly focusing on business problems, rather they are rather focusing on marketing briefs, and most times the reason is they want to increase their own revenue, but the sad truth is, solving business problems help to increase revenue long term, because if you are able to move a business by 1%, compound growth after a year will create a bond with the client and you can even pitch a retainer to the client.”
Identiture CEO and renowned strategist, Franklin Ozekhome in a conversation with MARKETING EDGE had revealed that sticking to the traditional agency model is what, amongst other things, prompted brands to start building in-house agencies.
Ozekhome advised agencies to borrow the design thinking mindset of startups that focus on product development, prototyping, testing, iteration and launch to market at speed, and then become better prepared to develop creative marketing solutions that actually resolve mitigating problems beyond brand awareness, perception and conversations.
He advised: “We have to move beyond the way the businesses are currently doing. If you look at the trends in top marketing-centric companies and I’m talking about marketing driven companies, not only focused on marketing communications, they are beginning to have their own brand management and creative communication departments where they hire the best of resources from advertising agencies and equip them to design, develop, launch and market their own products and services. The onus is on us to have a rethink of our agency model by asking: “What business are we really in?”
According to experts, the traditional agency model does not allow for real-time discovery (trends and insights), always-on engagement (communications) across platforms, sales and conversion routes (creative commerce), and monitoring and control (evaluation).
Dania Ebunoluwa, senior advisor on advertising said: “The agency structures need to be addressed. We can say digital evolution and in-housing are the reasons we are seeing a drain in client acquisition and retention, but it’s even bound to get more challenging if agencies don’t move to address the root cause. Most of these brands are evolving, cutting spending, and maximizing costs. Today, most companies are executing their digital deals by themselves, putting up their own billboards, and setting up 360 in-house agencies to handle their media campaigns. So basically, brands have now bought the idea that they could actually build their agencies in-house.”
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