Nigeria’s IMC industry regulators must move for agency consolidation, says Oyegbola
For the much desired growth to be realised in Nigeria’s Integrated Marketing Communications sector, regulatory bodies in the industry have to put in place proactive measures that would galvanise the consolidation process of marketing companies operating in the sector.
Specifically, the apex regulator in the industry, the Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria (APCON) needs to initiate the move by ensuring the right regulatory frameworks are put in place and also ensure that it works along with all sectorial groups to jump start the consolidation process.
Making these postulations recently was a top industry practitioner, Managing Director/CEO, Boomerang Communications Limited, Lanre Oyegbola, while speaking in an exclusive interview with MARKETING Edge publications in Lagos.
According to him, despite various challenges bedeviling the IMC sector in Nigeria, the industry has the potentials to come out of the woods and contribute meaningfully to the country’s economic development.
But for that to be realised, operating firms in the industry need to think towards coming together to forge a formidable force through consolidating just as it happened in the Nigeria’s banking sector.
He stated that by legislative proclamations, it was expedient on APCON as an apex regulator to initiate the process in a similar way that the CBN galvanised the consolidation of banks in the country.
He added that through legal proclamations, APCON’s council was well vested with the needed powers to give directions on ways to go in the industry but rather what was lacking on the part of the council was the willpower and t courage to enforce compliance to provisions of the advertising laws of the country.
“The regulators should move for consolidation. They have to. It’s the CBN that galvanised the consolidation in the banking industry. Insurance industry is going to happen. Insurance sector is saying, ‘sorry, we are ready; we will do it but it’s just the timing, lets us clear ourselves first.
“Let’s look at it this way: Is there an agency that can manage Nigeria as a client? Until we begin to think in that direction, growth may be far. But it is a process; it can start from encouraging consortiums and collaborations before we get to consolidations,” he said.
Giving further insights on the expectations of the industry, the agency boss observed that there was a bright future ahead, but added that the future would witness birth of a larger number of Small and Medium-scale Enterprises (SME’s) and more of startup businesses that would be owned by the younger generation of Nigerians.
“I believe there is a future and there will always be a future. But the future might not look like where we are coming from; it might not look like anything that we have seen. In that future, there will be a lot more SMEs and startups. It has been predicted that Nigeria has the opportunity to have a lot more startups than the rest of Africa combined simply because we have a lot more youth population and they are very industrious,” he explained.
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