At the 4th Annual Advertising Colloquium (AIC) organised by the Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria (ARCON) on August 6, 2026, the keynote speaker, Olumide Akanmu, represented by Professor Rotimi Olatunji, chairman planning committee AIC 0.4 told a gathering of practitioners, regulators and industry stakeholders that the ground beneath marketing communications has shifted so completely that the old assumptions guiding the profession can no longer be trusted to carry it forward.

Speaking on the theme, Platforms, People and Regulation, Akanmu described the subject as a timely and consequential one for the advertising and marcoms industry, noting that it is precisely where platforms, people and regulation meet that the essence of the existential and operational change sweeping the field can be found.

According to him, artificial intelligence, borderless digital media and evolving consumer expectations are recasting the industry entirely.

He built his address around three forces he said are reshaping the industry from the ground up. Platforms, driven by algorithmic disruption and a marketplace with no borders. People, whose behaviour, creator economies and talent demands are shifting the profession’s centre of gravity. And regulation, tasked with charting the digital frontier while still safeguarding the public good.

On platforms, Akanmu painted a picture of an industry being quietly hollowed out and rebuilt by generative AI. He explained that the rapid integration of native AI tools is enabling hyper personalised, dynamic ad creation at scale, and that as digital advertising output expands exponentially, reducing noise and preserving brand safety have become pressing concerns for the industry. He went further to question whether advertising as a discipline still has clear boundaries, describing an industry whose traditional business models are being disrupted from within.

“The ad agency of tomorrow may not even be an ad agency. It may not even know it is an ad or marcoms agency,” he said, a line that drew quiet reflection in the room.

For Nigeria specifically, Akanmu raised what he called hard questions of data sovereignty and localised insight, asking whether the value being generated from Nigerian consumers and Nigerian data is retained at home or simply remitted overseas. He illustrated the scale of what the industry is up against by pointing to the five biggest global media platform owners, led by Alphabet and Meta, whose combined market value now runs into trillions of dollars, a reminder of just how concentrated power has become in the hands of a few global technology companies.

Turning to people, Akanmu argued that trust in advertising has migrated away from polished corporate campaigns towards peer voices, micro influencers and content creators, who now function as a kind of new agency in their own right. He acknowledged that influencer marketing has widened access to advertising, but noted that this has come at the cost of a clear boundary between editorial content and commercial promotion. He was particularly direct about what this means for younger, digital native audiences, whose expectations are built around authenticity, local relevance and purpose driven storytelling. Advertising that strikes them as alien or manipulative, he said, is simply skipped or blocked without hesitation.

That shift, he told the colloquium, has consequences for how the industry trains its people. Competence in creative writing or media buying alone, he said, no longer sustains a practitioner or an agency. He listed data analytics, prompt engineering, platform mechanics and cross border digital compliance as the new baseline skills the industry must build into its training if it hopes to remain relevant in practice rather than in theory.

He described a growing dilemma around artificial intelligence and deepfakes, noting that generative AI has made the synthesis of hyper realistic images, voices and deepfakes almost effortless, and that oversight must mature quickly to protect consumers from sophisticated fraud, misrepresentation and cultural insensitivity. He referenced the European Union’s new AI Act, which came into effect on August 2, 2026 and requires that AI generated content and deepfakes be clearly labelled, with chatbots obligated to disclose to users when they are speaking to a machine rather than a person.

He affirmed that ARCON’s own mandate across digital and social media channels targeting the Nigerian market remains firmly entrenched, pointing to landmark rulings such as Digi Bay versus ARCON as proof of that authority. Even so, he was candid that enforcing pre exposure vetting and local content statutes across decentralised global platforms remains, in his words, a formidable operational burden for any single national regulator to carry alone.

Akanmu’s central argument was that regulation itself has to change character, moving from what he called a policeman to an enabler. He urged ARCON to continue championing local content, intellectual property and indigenous talent development, so that advertising expenditure in Nigeria feeds directly into national development rather than flowing outward. But he insisted that agility, not more rules, is what the next era of regulation demands.

“We cannot use analogue practices and method to regulate digital media. Regulation needs to be agile in tandem with the nature of digital media,” he said.

To make his point concrete, Akanmu drew a comparison with Nigeria’s financial services industry, recalling how the Central Bank of Nigeria created a new Department of Payment Systems out of what had traditionally been the Department of Banking Supervision. That new department, he explained, focused on fintech regulation while working with the industry to develop progressive rules that allowed fintech and new technologies to scale without compromising financial system stability. Crucially, he noted, the CBN recruited people from industry who understood digital technology into the department, blending regulatory experience with technical fluency, and adopted a mindset that saw itself as an enabler of digital payments and fintech rather than simply a policeman guarding the old order. The result, he said, was a system where both banks and fintechs became better for the competition that followed, with innovation driven rather than stifled.

The lesson for ARCON, he said, is not to let analogue advertising leaders alone shape its view of digital regulation.

“Do not let analogue advertising leaders shape your view of digital regulation. Consult more widely including with stakeholders you may be naturally uncomfortable with,” he said.

He proposed that ARCON consider setting up a Digital Advertising and Marketing Advisory Council to formally engage non traditional stakeholders such as content creators and influencers, arguing that such a structure would benefit both regulators and the wider digital marketing industry. He also called for more diversity within the Advertising Standards Panel itself, beyond traditional advertisers and mindsets trained largely in what he described as the gone analogue world, noting that ARCON today answers to a far bigger and wider stakeholder base than the traditional advertising practitioners and agencies it was originally built around.

According to Akanmu creative and technological power, has never been greater, and yet consumer scepticism and regulatory complexity have never been more pronounced either. Platforms, he noted, have granted the industry scale even as they stripped away traditional control. People have offered authenticity even as their attention has splintered in a hundred directions. And regulation affords order and safety, yet must itself evolve simply to remain relevant.

His call to action was that the industry should build a future where regulation anticipates change rather than reacting to it, where platforms behave as accountable partners rather than unchecked gatekeepers, and where people, consumers and practitioners alike, are both protected and empowered in equal measure.