Our Business was Founded on the DNA of Ideation – MD, Ideas House
Mr. Kehinde Salami is the CEO of Ideas House Marketing Communications Limited, an experiential marketing company and marketing consultant to several blue-chip companies in Nigeria. The agency, which opened shop nine years ago, prides itself as a marketing and sales solutions provider that is supremely passionate about marketing promotional ideas, experiential activations and revenue growth. The Lagos based agency has since spread its operational tentacles across the length and breadth of Nigeria such that it now operates six functional regional offices across the Federation. The company’s helmsman is himself a marketing expert, with his experience spanning the European and African landscape, having worked for several reputable blue chip companies such as British Airways LE, Heathrow Express, and Timberlands UK. On Saturday, July 29th, 2017, this experiential marketing egghead emerged the new President of the Experiential Marketers Association of Nigeria (EXMAN), the umbrella body for the experiential sub sector of the Nigerian advertising industry. He had, before then,served the Association as Financial Secretary and, later, General Secretary. He spoke with AMOS OALDELE, ANIETIE UDOH, DANIEL ETEGHE and OGECHI ODIGBO.
What is your assessment of the IMC industry in Nigeria and the experiential marketing sector in particular and your forecasts for the year 2018?
With respect to the IMC industry as a whole, I have seen a lot of changes where the entire ecosystem has moved from the era of exposure to engagement and now to experience.
On Exposure, the advertising guys have done remarkably well; the discipline thrives in an environment where there is constant evolution and introduction of new brands, new product introduction and product innovation
From exposure, marketing then moved rapidly to engagement where brands were no longer asking for just exposure alone, but engagement: how do you get one-on-one, how do we solicit feedback, etc, and now it’s a new era of experience.
It’s not just about engaging with our consumers, it is about determining and defining the experience and that is where experiential marketing comes in.
Experiential marketing is not a new concept; it’s a concept that’s been around for a pretty long time which has now come to stay.
It’s no gain saying that we’ve seen the experiential marketing industry take off and grow leaps and bounds to the point where there’s even an industry association that is trying to midwife and champion the cause of that experience from a regulatory standpoint.
As we go into 2018, a pre-election year, I forecast that there would be a number of activities that would take place from brands’ perspectives between January to October.
By October, my expectation is that most brands would have started to round off whatever it is that they are planning to do as election fever takes grip between October and February, next year.
In sharing this analysis, we’ve got to locate it within the wider context of the economy which thankfully has witnessed a rebound after a period of recession, inflationary fluctuations and FOREX instability, all factors which led to demand planning and forecast issues.
Multinationals are now better able to plan and forecast properly and also have marketing engagement programs that are in line with their brand’s vision. So, things have normalized somewhat. What we haven’t seen in the industry as a whole are new players namely new large corporations with huge investment appetite especially for the FMCG industry
A country with 180 million inhabitants of which over 65% of the population is below the age of 35 years is a young economy. I was expecting that by now, we would have had a lot more multinationals bringing in their expertise and set up factories here, really taking advantage of the huge population’s dynamics that we have as a nation
As we speak, you probably can count the number of multinational companies that exist and unfortunately, all agencies are fishing around those same multinationals; it has not grown beyond the level that we were ten years ago. That is the problem that I see and that is where innovations has to start coming into play. Innovations which require you to develop platforms; platforms that you can have as a weapon, as a tool for engagement to which multinational can plug and play.
Interestingly, a lot of people are being innovative and ingenious in coming up with their own specific brands, products, tools and techniques that multinationals can take advantage of.
I was just wondering about the three evolutionary stages (Exposure, Engagement and Experience) that you identified. Do you consider them as being generational?
I see them as being generational and for the right reasons. Thirty, forty years ago, all we had, technically, was the traditional media and traditional media is geared towards exposure.
Forty years ago, people didn’t have information at their fingertips; today you have about 140 million people that have GSM phone lines. Forty years ago, people were not as knowledgeable as they are today. Today, you see a 6, 7 and 8-year old child that is already learning how to use iPad.
Forty years ago, we didn’t have modern trade; what we had at best were hyper supermarkets, the likes of Leventis, today you have got Shoprite, Spar, Goodies and the rest of them.
Forty years ago, people had more time, there was less traffic on the roads, today there is more traffic on the roads so people shop online, people are looking for convenience and people go to malls, so all these dynamics are what have led us to where we are.
As a marketing consultant and as practitioners we need to understand that as the economy and the country moved and changed, we have also had to change with it.
Going further, OOH exposure that you had, like the flat sheets of those days, is now digital, such that the same structure can run four to six adverts in one minute as opposed to one. This simply means that technology, too, has evolved.
So I hope you can now understand me when I mentioned that we have moved from exposure to engagement and now experience. You will see in malls now, almost every week, one company or the other is activating a sampling program. Also, now, the experience is right there on your phone; People now stream on YouTube and you can watch adverts/live events. Advertising has moved beyond just the TV screen; now musicians launch their albums on YouTube, information is at our fingertips.
For those of us who have children, what they know now, we didn’t know when we were at their age.
In terms of activation, I will describe experience as both offline and online; and for content, you know that to win coupons to attend a show, you have to go and play a game on your phone (to win a concert ticket). That simply takes you on an online experience that now culminates in an offline activity.
That is what has evolved and which is why I am personally clamoring for an opening up of the economy where we can have a lot more multinationals come in and they will come in on the bases of three key fundamentals. First, is investor confidence, the second is political stability and the third one is an exchange rate system that works.
If our government can put those things in place, there is no reason for anybody running to Abuja for contract, If government can be magnanimous enough to just give us the basic infrastructures, let us have light, let our factories have light to operate, we have the labour, and give us good roads, Multinationals will come in and when they come in, we would then have an opening of the system and the economy and, of course, we will start to see the change that we have all been looking for.
But, like I said, from 1998 to 2018, you can only probably count on your two hands, the number of multinationals that have invested in this country.
By now, we should have 20 or 30 Nestle; by now we should have additional 8-10 alcoholic beverage companies, by now we should have more GSM companies but on the contrary this is where we are.
Does it mean that we are likely to see experiential marketing becoming a dominant sub-sector in the IMC industry?
I see experiential marketing becoming a dominant sub-sector in the IMC industry but from two perspectives. The first one is from an offline perspective; that one-on-one engagement. As I am talking to you, we are already discussing with our multinational partners in terms of the programmes that we are running this year. We are talking with them on how their brands and programmes get into the hands of their consumers.
As you know, Experiential allows you to touch the five senses. It allows you to smell, taste, hear, see and feel. There is no other area, especially in the marketing communications industry that gives you those five advantages at the same time. This is precisely why experiential will become a dominant force to reckon with in the marketing communications industry.
You are launching a new brand and you want to sample 500,000 people. Exposure can just help you communicate that I have this new brand; but it cannot give you the opportunity to say take one, taste it, feel it, and let me know what you think. So, as these guys launch new brands and new variants to existing brands, experiential will always have a role to play because you are dealing directly with the end consumers which is the one I call offline experience.
The online experiential is also already happening in the digital space, so many digital companies are springing up because you need to create content and that content needs amplification
Let’s say a multinational spends an X amount on an experiential campaign in about five states and because everybody has a GSM phone of which 20% of all GSM phones are smartphones, technically we have 30 million smartphones, this means that you can reach another 20 or 30 million people.
The experience that you create, say at Teslim Balogun stadium in Lagos can be viewed by another 20 million persons on their phones from Kebbi to Enugu,Cross Rivers to Ondo.That is the online experience.
In the same vein, there are also some activations that start off online culminating in an offline experience.
The Halleluyah Challenge was an online experience and, somewhere along the line, individuals started printing T-shirts to attend an offline finale in Lekki. At first I wasn’t even aware of what was happening until I sat down with some of my staff who then explained the concept and the T-shirts they had all printed. They told me about the pastor, Nathaniel Bassey; I sat down and I said, this is interesting. I was told that millions of people would come to the Grand Finale because they were praying every day at midnight and had been connected via a phone. That was an online experience that now culminated in an offline activity at the end. You can just see how word of mouth supported by technology created a viral movement that’s more powerful than any brand campaign
And guess what? My curiosity made me attend the last day, leaving my house at 11:30pm; when I arrived the venue, I couldn’t find somewhere to park, I parked 20 minutes away from the place! I just wanted to see if people would actually come. They were there, in their thousands. I went back home and said to my wife, the power of technology and relevant word of mouth proposition has gone to another level, you can imagine the power of the handset; what it has galvanized an entire nation to do under one voice.
If we don’t understand that as marketing practitioners, we have not started, the bus has moved and we need to move with it; so, experiential marketing of tomorrow has to intertwine both online and offline capabilities for you to have meaningful impact.
And, that is the future, whether we like it or not. There is no other form of marketing communications that can give you that kind of scale and buzz and at the same time allow you to touch the five senses.
What are your strategic offerings to your clients as a force behind them this year?
First of all, it’s really about ideation; this business was founded on the DNA of ideation. I have seen experiential agencies and marketing communication agencies in general set up from what I call your typical supplier mentality.
I am a supplier of service, I do advertising, I do events management, I am into sponsorship, I do media planning. So, what happens if the multinational does not need media planning? What if they say that they don’t want to do advertising, does that mean that you cannot add value?
We knew from the word go what we wanted to achieve and we designed our business around the ideation ecosystem. That way, we become true strategic partners
We call our company Ideas House; it’s not by accident because the vision is to be theNumber One Ideas Factory of Reference. You can see some of the awards we’ve won. It’s about creative thinking, innovation pipeline and execution excellence
That is what we offer our clients and, in addition to that, we also offer an efficient structure, positive attitude and financial capacity. These are things plus more that we offer our clients.
Are there things that you are doing to up the ante in your operations and deliverables presently?
Yes, we have decentralized our operational structure into different regions and they are empowered to take decisions, to run activities, guided by the central office but with a decentralized structure.
It is very much unlike the Nigerian structure where everything is at the Federal level; So we have empowered the regional offices. Our own true federalism has actually commenced.
This is one of the few experiential agencies that you can see that have full time dedicated people in certain states of the country. They are not ad hoc, they are permanent staffs who earn a full time wage; they are empowered with vehicles, they have insurance cover, they have medical cover for themselves and up to four children and all the other benefits. We have decentralized our operations.
How many regions do you have at the moment?
We have six regions but ours is structured along 70 to 80% from where our business comes from, so there would be some areas that we cover but they are not perhaps not core; but we concentrate more on the ones from where 70 to 80% of our business comes from.
Let’s talk on the evolution of experiential marketing in Nigeria and the challenges it is facing at the moment, if any?
The challenges are numerous, they are a lot and that is why as the President of EXMAN, I have a lot on my shoulders; there are a lot of challenges right now, the biggest one being financial capacity – the ability of our members, ourselves inclusive to be able to continuously finance projects. Gone are the days when multinationals would give you 30, 40% up front, now they want you to finance project 100% and then you wait 45-60 days after invoicing to get paid.
The banks, too, have not helped because banks are not lending out money and where they do, they seldom do PO financing; they just do invoice discounting, which is a lazy man’s approach to banking as far as I’m concerned.
They minimize their risk because invoice discounting means that you must have had money to do the job; you now want to collect money before the company pays you. Thus, financial capacity is one of the major issues that we have in the experiential space.
The next one that we have is in the area of professionalism and discipline coupled with training. What do I mean? More than 60 to 70% of engagement activities require us to work with third parties.We are not like your typical Advertising, Media or PR agency that less than 20% of its activities require them to deal with third parties. We are dealing with vendors, we deal with photographers, we engage DJs, artistes, venue and promoters.
The biggest of that entire headache is at the promoter’s level where you employ 2,600 and when you employ them to carry out the project, you expect them to be at the highest level of professionalism and integrity; you expect them to be at the work place on time therefore monitoring 600 to 800 people at the same time.
Effectively managing them from the central office, making sure that they do what they are expected to do and ensuring discipline across board has been one of the biggest challenges in this industry.
At the association level, we have now decided that we are kicking off what is called EXMAN Certified Brand Ambassadors Program. That is ECBAP.
What this program is designed to do is to ensure that all promoters that work for all EXMAN certified agencies are registered on a central database, from there if you as an EXMAN agency have an activity, you can go and select promoters from the pool
If any promoter gets himself or herself involved in any wrong doing, or is unruly, they will face a disciplinary panel set up by the ethics and disciplinary committee and on confirmation of the infraction, that individual will be black listed, in which case, they can never work for any EXMAN certified agency (by extension all multinationals) again.
If you are earning N30,000 a month and you do ten months of activations in a year, that is N300,000. That simply means the experiential industry has provided you with the opportunity to earn N300,000 salary, if you go and misbehave and you are black listed it means that your source of livelihood from this industry has gone and this will last for a minimum period of three years.
Now, that would bring a lot of discipline and it would also help multinationals know that those that EXMAN agencies are engaging are people of unquestionable character.
Each brand ambassador will register with N4,000 and that N4,000 a year is what can help you to guarantee that N300,000. N1,000 is used for an insurance cover for the ambassador, so that if anything happens to that promoter while on the job the insurance cover will pay them up to a N100,000 for disability; so, there is a stake in it for everybody.
At the EXMAN level, like I said, a communiqué will go out any moment from now and we are going to start that program in the month of March; that is what we are trying to do, to sanitize the industry so that we don’t keep having this process of recycling bad eggs who steal in one agency today, and tomorrow they go to another company.
Is it taking off formally in March?
It has taken off already. We are only re-engineering it for optimal effectiveness. I just signed off the new portal that the program is going to sit on two weeks ago and last week we confirmed that it is finally ready for takeoff.
Is your administration going to consider implementing the rate card?
It is something that I had asked my Financial Secretary to champion and we have developed a template which agencies for now are expected to populate with the different prices that they have of which we will then take an average price and put it on our website so that clients too can go and see what the EXMAN rate is for bus hire, what the EXMAN rate is for logistics, it is something that we are still working on but it will definitely come on stream. There is a committee on it right now.
Will people sincerely buy into it?
Even if multinationals don’t buy into it100% for now, it’s just a matter of time. As with everything in life, what is required is for somebody to put a stick in the ground to start it. That is what we have now done
The democracy that Nigeria is enjoying today is as a result of what some people started 20, 50 years ago; so it might not even be in my own tenure that we will start getting multinationals to buy into it but they will know that we have started something. Generations to follow would be thankful that people like us were able to see ahead and started the revolution in that area, let it be an information center and let them also have an idea of what the true charges should be.
The same way LASAA has its rates on its website and clients can go and check and verify, the same way we would like to have ours, so that clients who are in doubt, procurement services departments can always go to the EXMAN website to check it as opposed to the constant argument that often arise in the past which is a total waste of everybody’s time.
Is experiential marketing all about jamboree?
They think that experiential agencies are all about bringing out tables and chairs with dancers on the bus, at a party. It is far from that.
Experiential agencies first of all ask themselves very pertinent questions, like what is this brand’s vision, what are the key objectives. If the key objective is to launch a brand like we did for Maggi Naija Pot. The objective was to launch and enlist the brand in 18 markets across Nigeria all on the same day.
We needed to create localized awareness in the markets. We were at the central location where people could now come; there was a cook first where people could taste this new innovation from Maggi. There was an opportunity for them to give feedback, there was also an opportunity to create content out of that experience and then blow it up on social media; so it must be active and as a result of that kind of exercise that brand even if you find it to buy now, you are lucky.
While I fully respect the role that advertising plays and will continue to play in shaping communication, there is only so much an advertising campaign can tell you; it can only help you to have positive perception, it does not give you the opportunity to taste the experience and that is what experiential agencies do across the country and that is why they are highly sought after
That is what experiential is all about, it can allow you to be in so many cities at the same time. We have run activations in 59 markets all on the same day across Nigeria. It’s not a big deal to us
In December last year, we ran activation where we had 3,650 people who worked for a month across hotels, bars and restaurants. Which other form of marketing communications can give you that scale, that allows you to taste, smell, feel, see and hear? So, it is not a jamboree; it’s serious business.
Do you see a very bright future for the experiential marketing industry in Nigeria?
I see a very bright future for experiential marketing laced with technology, and digital. I don’t see it as a standalone because experiential marketing, let’s be honest, is expensive. By the time you are renting forty buses in a week and you have area boys challenge to contend with and cost for, logistics costs and you have promoters, DJ, MC etc, it’s an expensive area of marketing communications but laced with digital, it’s justifiable because digital is now what allows you to reach many more millions beyond one central location.
There is a very bright future for experiential and I am extremely excited and that is why the association is there to ensure that we continue with exactly what we set out to do which is to create meaningful experiences for discerning brands.
In the other sub-sectors of the industry, affiliations, buy-ups and the rest of them are going on, is there anything like that on-going in the experiential sector?
In the experiential sector, what we have had, at least over the last fifteen years has been a lot of what I called owner managers. It’s either they were brand managers, marketing managers or they were working in an agency, acquired some skills set and have now decided to set up their own shop; so you have a lot of fragmentation in the experiential space, because the barrier to entry is very low. For most people as long as they believe that if I know two or three brand managers, I can set up shop. They might not even have an office; those are the things that we are trying to stamp out.
We are trying to ensure that henceforth intending practitioners should have a structure, a registered office, they should be paying tax and we do check before we can certify you at the EXMAN level.
There is fragmentation; but I am starting to see that there is a lot more collaboration and conversations around management and it will get even more intense as agencies continue to struggle with financial capacity. Experiential only makes sense at scale. If you don’t have the financial muscle to play big, it’s best you collaborate or go home. Collaborate either through a buy-out or through a shareholder agreement and you create something bigger than yourself; that is what I expect to see happening within the industry.
Where did you meet EXMAN, where is it now and where are you taking EXMAN to?
EXMAN is an association that I have been part of from inception. I was the Financial Secretary for the first two years then I moved on to be the General Secretary for another two years, now the President of the association.
I have seen it evolve. EXMAN started off its journey from infancy with high expectations. The Mr. Kayode Olagesin-led executive gave the association a founding base with respect to a code of conduct, industry constitution and partnership with other sectoral bodies.
Taking over the reins from Kayode, Dr. Rotimi Olaniyan came in and during his own tenure; he took it to the next level by initiating the EXMAN Day, EXMAN Night, EXMAN Awards ceremony and also enhancing industry training capabilities. Dr. Olaniyan also launched the EXMAN Certified Brand Ambassadors Program which I elaborated on earlier.
Now during my own tenure, we have been able to cap what we hope to achieve into specific goal areas.
The first one is about what I will call maintaining standards through the advocacy committee; formerly named Advocacy and External Relations Committee, I have changed its name to reflect the reality of today. Now, it’s call Advocacy and Standards Committee. Standard is very important and my committee knows that, standard in the area of, what do we do in terms of ethics and disciplinary issues, and standard in the area of constitution review as well as tightening the loopholes around what I have seen within the current constitution.
Equally important is Standard with regards to how we relate with ourselves and what are the things that should be done and those that shouldn’t be done. How do we engage clients, what are the dos and the don’ts? The Committee has been busy working in that area and very soon before our first year in office we would see a rapid change in terms of the constitution review, the setting up of the ethics and the disciplinary committee and the full mandate and we will have blue print under which they will operate.
The next thing is training. We have a training and capacity building committee; we ran our first training program, in November last year looking at the economic outlook of 2018with Dr. Doyin Salami; it was well attended. This year, we have several other professionally enhancing programs.
We are trying to see how we can partner with Pan Atlantic University’s School of Media and Communication to see how we can have experiential marketing embedded within the curriculum which our CEO members will be part of.
In terms of finance, one of the problems I discovered at EXMAN and I witnessed it as the Financial Secretary and the same thing also as the General Secretary, is that the association does not have money; we only generate revenues through levies. You definitely cannot run an association like that.
As such, the brand ambassador program, the training programme and other things that we are engaging ourselves in should give us some level of confidence in being able to have some of the resources that we need to invest in whatever we want to do.
There is no reason why EXMAN shouldn’t have its own registered office but these things cost money; there is also no reason why EXMAN shouldn’t have full time staff and a proper secretariat.
On some of the other areas, we have the Entertainment and Welfare Committee; there is what is called the EXMAN Day, EXMAN Night which is the day when we all meet both the members and their staff.
We organize football competition, table tennis and other games with giveaway prizes and at night we all go and lay our heads down somewhere. It is being handled by a committee and that event will take place in April 2018
We have a Publicity Committee that helps us in terms of publicizing some of the things that we plan to do;
Then we have a new committee that I have set up which is christened Special Project. This committee is very dear to my heart and I have tasked them with the responsibility of coming out with what I call an initiative ‘Somewhere in Naija’. The initiative is simply this, as experiential agencies we go up and down the entire country. We are the ones that discover talents first, this person can rap, this one can sing, and so on. Every day, we discover new talents across this country, young boys and girls; there is no platform on which they can be showcased. That portal will allow you to see videos of them; it will allow you to even engage with them when you are in their domain, you can directly engage them. It’s like a CSR initiative. We’ve just started to develop the portal in the month of February and we hope to launch it before our first year in office.
We are doing quite a lot. I naturally don’t talk too much but I am getting things done properly. We were at APCON, I think it was in the month of October, the biggest challenge that we had with APCON is because the council had not been re-constituted. As such, nothing can happen; but we are in partnership and we are hoping to be embedded within the entire ecosystem and framework of APCON for which they have also been very supportive to us. When the council is formed; it then means that we can move our agenda to the next level.
Are there ways your member agencies are keying into the political campaigns, seeing this is a pre-election year?
You know, the unfortunate thing with political campaigns is that they are not like multinationals, so professionalism and discipline are very different from what we experience with from multinationals, so it is more of relationship and for those who have relationships with some of those that are running for offices from the political parties then, they will definitely benefit.
For us, for example; in nine years of running this business, we have never run any political campaign but is it something that we would love to do, absolutely yes; we have the passion for grassroots mobilization, financial capacity, ability to operate across the country at the same time and activation rigs and props all in our warehouse.
Grassroots mobilization programs, sensitization campaigns and even for Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and all these other bodies. This is what we should be using to engage experiential agencies to do.
We have 40 experiential agencies that are registered, give each one a state or something of that nature, let them campaign on behalf of INEC in terms of voter registration, democracy sensitization and at the end of the day, the country wins.
Where does the fate of the SMEs stand in experiential marketing?
That is a very good question; for us, we love SMEs. I even have one as my own; but experiential agencies have not been that supportive of SMEs because SMEs don’t have the financial capacity to engage experiential agencies. Like I told you, experiential agencies are only profitable on a large scale.
However, I think what is required is for government to support and encourage experiential agencies to support SMEs and in return for supporting two or three SMEs, they are able to enjoy either some form of tax concession or tax break or any other incentive or something of that nature. That is what is required. But in the current structure, it is difficult. One SME was with me last week and I love his plan and I said that we would support him.
Many EXMAN agencies do actually support SMEs but within the limited capacity of what they can afford. Sometimes, they do it for free but I think there needs to be a more holistic approach from the top encouraging businesses like ours to support them and in addition to doing that, there is some form of incentive attached to it.
How effective are your boxing gloves initiative?
Very effective indeed; I’ve been to multinational companies that the Marketing Directors have hung it on their walls.
There was even one, that the day I got to his office he had it in his hands and he was punching (albeit lightly) the marketing manager asking him where are my sales figures, you have not hit your target sales this week blah blah blah so I laughed and the man said to me, Kenny, you can see that your glove is working now. I use it to harass them if they don’t bring figures in.
As that incident clearly indicates the boxing glove is a great conversation starter and it is also an iconic piece that each Marketing Director and MDs want to have in his or her office; from a business standpoint, it has helped us win a lot of businesses. Honestly, it’s a fantastic reminder medium. Each time you see it, you are just thinking of that idea that can be a knock out.
Are there other innovations of this magnitude?
Of course, there are. Seven years ago, we went to China and developed two products, one is called Roli, and the other one is called Dabi. They are two merchandizing products and they are shelf talkers, simply speaking.
When you go into, let’s say a supermarket, the best you ever have is that they will put a shelf strip communicating this is Orijin Bitters, this is Milo, and then sometimes, they put information that people don’t have the time to read. We then came up with these innovative shelf talkers which allow you to record your radio commercial or promotional campaign. If you walk within thirty centimeters of the item, it will start to talk to you and by the time you move away, it stops talking.
The other one is for refrigerators and freezers because we know that there are some brands like Coca-Cola, Milk, Yogurt, that we normally keep in the fridge; when you open the fridge, it talks to you. It may say, for instance, Oh, today we are running a promotion on our yogurt buy one get one free (as opposed to having a promoter talk) and when you close the fridge it stops talking.
Thus, when I say that our agency is an ideas agency you should understand where I am coming from. So, Roli is the one that talks on the shelf and Dabi is the one that talks in the fridge. Both innovations are patented both locally and internationally.
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