Marketers bemoan economic impact on ad spend
By Oghale Mafuru
Amid global economic crisis and worsen inflationary pressures in Nigeria, marketing leaders have reiterated determination to continue to explore ways to navigate the economic challenges as well as optimize the limited marketing spend.
Speaking separately to MARKETING EDGE, the marketing experts affirmed that businesses are struggling to survive the devastation caused by rising inflation and dwindling purchasing power of consumers which have necessitated the recent shift in advertising and marketing decisions.
Dotun Babatunde, Head of Digital Marketing (B2C) at Olam Grains Nigeria stated that despite efforts to cushion the impact of the economy by organizations through new operational framework, the rising cost of production exacerbated by consumers’ low disposable income has been major threats to profitability and survival.
“With the global recession, everybody is looking at how to cut their coat according to their size because you can’t pass all the cost to the customer. So, it about what do we need to go up and what do we need to go down. More than ever before, business environment is now dynamic.
“Everybody is trying to adjust to the reality we have found ourselves now. We need to make up for lost time. More clients are going to push more efforts into marketing. Plus, or minus, we will begin to see more marketing in the next couple of months; we will increase activity as long as nothing goes wrong. Everybody is hopeful.
According to him, it has become more expedient for business to be more adaptive and flexible in response to the uncertain and highly volatile business environment.
“You can have a plan now and it can change six weeks down the line. So, it is about flexibility as a business” he said.
Meanwhile, Emmanuel Agu, Group Marketing Director, Jotna Nigeria Limited who decried the economic impact on organizations revealed that brand managers have been forced to make critical decisions on marketing budget with strategic initiatives to maximize scarce resources that effectively deliver on the expected return on investment, ROI.
His words: “Most organizations are struggling. It looks like the economy is in auto pilot. There are not enough activities going on. People are finding a cheaper and better way of communicating their message. You spend close to 80million to shoot a TVC and the rule says if you spend one naira to shoot a commercial, you need 3 times the value that you spent on production to flight your ad otherwise you will not be able to reap the benefits of that cost of production.
“So, if you spent 70 million to shoot an ad and you need like 270million to flight, your cost on that particular ad shoots up to like 280 million. Where will you get that kind of budget? Now you have to be creative and find a way to save cost. That is why you see most of these content creators, do videos. They go and look for people who can look for high quality video and then you are not going to spend more than 5-10 million and then you put a significant sum of money and put in the digital space. If you have money, you can syndicate on your terrestrial. In that way, you still pass the message without breaking the bank” he said.
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