Media agencies account for 70% ad spend, says Starcom Media Perspectives boss

A digital communications expert, Jude Odia has estimated that about 70 percent of total advertising expenditure in Nigeria which is put at over N120 billion presently is attributable to activities of media specialists agencies in the country.

Odia who is Managing Director/CEO of Starcom Media Perspectives, a frontline media agency is of the view that about 10 to 15 percent of the media agencies performance was driven largely by the ongoing digitalisation process across the industry.

Speaking in an exclusive interview with MARKETING EDGE in Lagos, the agency boss observed that owing to the digital revolution, it had become difficult to track exact percentage spend between traditional media advertising agencies on one hand and digital agencies on the other.

“If you know the business well, they would tell you from the client side that media controls nothing less than 70 % of their marketing budget. So, media is where the money is pumped into. However, it is important to note that if we command that much, recent realities have thrown a lot of things apart.

“Before, it used to be just television, radio and out-of-home, and so you are able to track spend year on year. But today digital is taking between 10 to 15 percent of the spend. However, for digital, there is no aggregator for spend. So, it’s difficult to begin to know how the spend was moving between the traditional media agencies and now the digital agencies,” he said.

According to him, “the best way to look at it is not to begin to look at who is commanding the spend, but rather tp try to move the business to where the value is, and be competitive enough to deliver value and command the spend at the end of the day”.

On what constituted major challenges to the media sector of the industry, the agency boss highlighted among other things, inadequate manpower training and development, transparency challenge from among the agencies, weak regulations and the uncontrolled incursion of foreign agencies into Nigeria’s advertising landscape.

He pointed out that the lingering issues of inter-sectorial debts remained a major challenge of the industry as well the controversial 120 days credit policy currently being introduced by multinational clients.

He lamented the prolonged absence of the Governing Council of the Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria (APCON), stressing that the development was inimical to growth of the industry.

“I think it’s a big issue we need to talk about. We need to talk about it from a sectoral point of view. Sectoral bodies need to come together and talk about it from a point of developing the industry. Once we don’t see it from that point, it will be easy for somebody to do a win-loose kind of negotiation. We bring value to one another so nobody is doing the other person a favour,” he said.