‘PR: Finest Strategy for Brand Building’ –BHM boss
Public Relations practice in Nigeria has evolved consistently within the last 10 years, leading to the attainment of unprecedented increase in the industry’s creative output. One of the front runners in this creative revolution is a little PR agency, BHM. Recently described as a bellwether for Nigeria’s PR industry, BHM in its decade of operation has effectively positioned itself as a front-runner. With insights driven by data, the agency consistently set itself apart by providing cutting edge brand building solutions. Fully embracing digital and content marketing strategies, BHM has successfully defied the age-old maxim that PR is just about media relation, by proving that PR arguably is the best platform for consumer engagement and brand awareness.
Its successes, notwithstanding, the agency is not resting on its oars, as it is now set to explore new growth areas in the brand building value chain. Adekunle Ayeni, founder and CEO of the agency, says for its clients, the agency will continue to create the kind of outcome that can directly impact their bottom-line by doing PR work that moves the dial, that demonstrates that there can be meaningful conversations that can build brands, that can add value, that can influence purchase decisions and can influence advocacy as well as do PR work that can build the kind of earned media that PR is known for. “Our plan is to make sure that we continue to demonstrate to those who matter that within that marketing mix, the best strategy to go for is PR and the one element to take the lead is Public Relations”, he said.
The year 2016 was very difficult because the economy suffered cataclysmic disruptions leading to a financial squeeze on government, corporate Nigeria, businesses and the people. Both the clients and the agencies were not spared. But a few clairvoyants, who saw the recession coming and projected into the future before 2016, had answers to the big fall. BHM was one. According to Ayeni, in 2014, BHM did some research that showed how 2015 and 2016 might look like, hence, they prepared very well for 2016. He reveals that the research helped them to invest in tools, resources and automation, which put them in good stead to work together with partners and clients to make the best sense out of that year, in terms of how they do things, in terms of what values to add and more importantly in terms of how creative they can be since it was clear that budget would be cut. He said: “in 2015, we started doing a lot of research. BHM researched on the Public Relations industry in Nigeria and all the insights from there helped us understand the state of the profession, helped us understand what clients actually wanted, helped us to understand what the issues with the brands were across the different sectors of the market. When the report came in 2016, a lot of the elements helped us in terms of taking decisions, i.e. what to do, what to avoid, where to go, where to avoid and also understanding the way the media works across the markets”. Thus, fully armed with these insights, it was not entirely a bad year for BMH because they were able to take proactive steps in the things that they did for their clients in 2016.
Taking advantage of the opportunity the insights gave them, BHM in 2016 invested most in videos and also started experimenting with paid media in its quest to identify the stories to tell and tell them in a very strong way with the platforms that work best. Ayeni says “2016 was the year we experimented most with paid media on Facebook, Instagram and influencer marketing. It was the year we let technology fully take the lead. It costs less, allows for more creativity and scales faster. Whether it was the campaigns that we did in Kenya or in Abuja or in South Africa, we made digital technology to take the lead”.
“It was the year we decided to no longer use Advertising Value Equivalent to measure value. It was a year that we brought in all the indices that can help measure impressions, engagements and sentiments; measure all the things that couldn’t be measured with say print media or radio. It was the year we focused on outcomes and impact. We didn’t care about output as long as the outcome and impact met expectations; it was the year we started setting KPIs to measure the campaigns from the beginning of the activation and we measured all through.
“I enjoyed the kind of work that we did last year and I enjoyed the kind of feedback we got from our clients. I enjoyed the excitement even from the people that work at BHM. We did bespoke Instagram design for a particular client that came in from Italy, it was amazing. I don’t think any PR agency in Nigeria had ever done that before. It was challenging but we did it and the results are clear”, the CEO enthused.
Rightly said BHM was actively behind the Gulder Ultimate Search social media campaign and got a whooping 600 million impressions. That was no fluke. The agency has executed other memorable campaigns. One of them is the Nigerian Twitter Map done by one of its agencies, ID Africa, for the outfit’s 10th-year anniversary campaign. Ayeni is proud to say “We clocked 10 last year and we wanted the whole industry to know that we are this small agency that started from Akute with no money in our pocket, with no investors, with nothing but ambition and God’s hand. So, from the video announcement that we made, to all the features that we did, to all the free media, that was the kind of value that we got. It was amazing for a PR agency and it was near zero investment in terms of financial resources”.
When BHM launched the Nigeria PR report, the whole country talked about it for good and bad reasons; everybody talked about it; some were very critical, some were very generous with their praise. “It provoked the kind of conversation that I was hoping we could have. We wanted to have everybody talking about PR last year. We wanted to draw clients and consumers’ attention to the PR profession in Nigeria. We wanted to provoke stakeholders to have a conversation. I think from ‘PR is Dead’ to Nigeria PR Report, we were able to achieve that, and these were campaigns that were driven by strategy and creativity not by budget”, he said.
In 2017, BHM promised that although a service business, it has the capability to embrace product thinking and would use that mentality to solve problems for the outfit, to solve problems for clients and to solve problems for consumers.
According to Ayeni, “This is the year we want to move from complaining about media agencies getting more than PR agencies, why are creative agencies getting all the money, why is digital coming to snatch our food from our table, why are clients not respecting us enough and why are we not part of the decision making process.
“This is the year that we think that complaining will not fix it. We need to demonstrate what we bring to the table through our service offerings, through the kind of products that we will introduce that will make everybody’s life easier and better, that is our focus. Whether we are launching new tools, new platforms, opening up our studios or bringing new ideas, this is the year PR pros have an opportunity to show the rest of the industry that we are not their mate”.
Corroborating Ayeni’s views, Femi Falodun, digital communication and content marketing expert, who is the Chief Digital Officer of BHM Group, discloses that BHM is set to explore other frontiers that can bring about sustainable future growth and further affirms that PR is more important now than ever. Falodun believes that in the contemporary world, the traditional advertising mentality cannot work anymore, because the audience is now more sophisticated than ever and can always tell when they are being sold to through paid promotions and hard core advertising, which turn off people easily.
“It is more and more difficult for the traditional methods of advertising to be effective, especially in the digital space, as well as even on traditional media like radio and TV. I’m sure you can also see all the empty billboards along the roads when you drive around town. All of these point to the new opportunities that are available for PR and creative communication in today’s world, as they are more believable and audiences consider them more authentic”, he says.
According to Falodun, in the Nigerian marketing communications system through the years, advertising/creative agencies have always played the lead role in strategy development for brands and they usually get the bulk of the budget, along with media buying and maybe experiential next. PR has always been at the bottom of the pole, usually an afterthought – a ‘nice-to-have’. For many executives, PR’s value is basically to provide a ‘press office’ and put stories in the papers. However, by its original definition and purpose, PR is all about effective communication, healthy relationships and engagement. It is about storytelling and it is about authenticity. That is why PR is not cash and carry because PR is meant to be authentic.
“Somewhere along the way, the practice of PR lost that creative edge and that storytelling edge. But PR is so important now, because there is a new opportunity for the people who have mastered the art of PR to take the front burner in facing today’s consumer engagement challenges.
“As a brand manager, if I am looking at the struggles of 2016 such as ad blockers, exchange rates in terms of buying advertising in dollars, a struggling economy and all of that, I will be looking for alternatives and that is where PR should be more important now than ever before”, he states.
The Chief Digital Officer says PR needs to invest more in creative solutions and professionals must sell themselves as creative people, not just in words, but in deeds, adding that PR people in their proposals and responses to clients’ briefs need to show high level of creativity and innovation.
He says “It may be that we need to hire more creative people into the PR agencies to bring those unusual ideas and out-of-the-box flavour. Or it may mean that we need to train our people in applying themselves better, because creativity can actually be ‘learned’ or improved. I think Nigeria’s PR also needs some of its own medicine. PR needs that sprinkle of gold, that sprinkle of razzmatazz”. PR also needs to adopt a better use of digital technology to survive, because many brands still have their social media channels being managed by creative and digital agencies, which ordinarily should be a PR professional’s role – managing conversations between a brand and its audience. That is exactly what PR people are trained to do.
“Unfortunately, PR people, at least, in Nigeria, didn’t wake up early to that social media environment, and that is why we are now playing a little catch up today. In fact, this has always been one of BHM’s key areas of competitive advantage: understanding how social PR, content and user engagement work. Today, I believe Black House Media has the biggest community among Nigerian PR agencies on social, looking at the reach and level of engagement on Twitter, Facebook, Integra and so on. And this happened because the agency saw the rise of social very earlier on, and took it a bit more serious than many others”, Falodun says.
On what BHM brings to the table, Falodun asserts that BHM understands the Nigerian audience, especially the urban youth and consumers between 18 and under 40 years old. “We’ve built up these capabilities for several years through experience gained from projects we’ve done for FMCG clients in the youth market, insights from our sister publishing business, thenet.ng, Newsroom.ng and Star.ng, which reach millions of people monthly through social media channels and individual websites.
“Our understanding of consumer behaviour and consumer engagement tactics gives us an incline into the kind of content that works and the kind of messaging that appeals to different demographics. All of these is driven by creative communication skills and innovative thinking. We’ve also been blessed with a team of creative professionals, who can stand toe to toe with the best in the world. That also is a value that we are bringing into play. Also, in communication, our storytelling ability and being able to craft the message that appeals to the heart of the audience we consider to be strength”, he says.
Falodun continues, “BHM started out a little over 10 years ago as an entertainment publicist outfit called All You Ever Need in Entertainment (A.Y.E.N.I), founded by Ayeni Adekunle, a former journalist. Over the years, the business blossomed into a full-fledged corporate and brand PR agency and has worked with clients in various sectors such as media, financial services, FMCGs, telcos, government and so on.
“I joined the agency as team lead of the digital department of Black House Media, and what we were doing then at that little department was content marketing, social PR, creative design, web development and so on. It later blossomed and became big enough for management to create a totally separate entity, ID Africa Ltd. two years ago, as an independent digital marketing and communication agency under the parent company, BHM Group.
“At BHM today, our client service people are more like project managers themselves, being that they are different in the sense that they don’t just collect briefs and drop it for others to work on, as each person is trained to engage the client and interpret the brief. They can craft their own creative messages and can execute the jobs themselves. At BHM each professional staff is a ‘superstar PR commando’ in his/her own rights. The company structure is such that each account manager or clients service personnel is well rounded, capable and has multiple skills to execute the job, as they have incorporated the skills of media monitoring, the skills of media management, stakeholder management, the skills of writing, content creation and even digital communication”.
One of the biggest challenges today, especially on the client’s side of the business is billings and fees. Sometimes, clients don’t think that PR deserves more than five or ten per cent of their communication or marketing budget, even though at the end of the day PR still ends up solving a lot of the problems that could have been avoided in the first place.
For example, ‘Brand A’ doesn’t engage PR early on during strategic planning, and may have gone into the execution phase after briefing the other agencies in the IMC plan. They’ve started planning media buying spend, they have already talked to experiential guys, they have talked about the activation and what they are to do, then they now say, “oh we need PR”. Then they tell the PR agency, “Look, we have all these things that we want to do, help us amplify it”.
To Falodun, the PR agency will then go back and craft some plans based on what has already been developed. And if somewhere along the line, there’s an error such as, maybe, a brand ambassador gets something wrong and says something inappropriate online, ‘Brand A’ now runs back to PR to say “PR, please, there is crisis, help us”. Then PR will now start struggling to put out fires, whereas everyone could have been saved that crisis earlier on if PR, based on knowledge and insight, had been part of the process of selecting who should speak for and what should be said about ‘Brand A’. That is one major challenge. PR needs to be allowed a seat at the table early at the beginning of planning. PR needs to be part of that conversation earlier on during the strategy sessions. PR professionals are saying give us a chance, give us more playing time, give us more opportunities to work on strategy, so we can prove ourselves.
“There’s also the problem of billing and fees. Many people still price PR services way too low and are not yet willing to pay premium. Even though everyone enjoys and can clearly measure the value that PR brings.
“PR agencies have found ways of solving this problem by offering intelligent analysis of work done, using effective measurement and reporting methods by knowing exactly what the client’s ultimate goals and objectives are, whether sales, brand awareness, and so on, and ensure that work for them leads to the achievement of those set goals.
“At the end of the day, reports clearly show, with data, that client’s objectives have been met. With this approach, it is impossible not to appreciate the value added. Surely, the client sees the value, so he calls again the next time”.
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