PR must evolve to remain relevant, says Ajene-Ayere
She leads arguably one of Nigeria’s biggest PR agencies, but Uche Ajene-Ayere, Managing Consultant, Quadrant MSL, is already taking her agency beyond PR and launching deep into the consultancy market. In this interview, she tells Joseph Ekeng her plans for Quadrant MSL and why the entire industry must innovate to remain relevant.
What’s your assessment of the marketing communications ecosystem in Nigeria?
The communication industry has many facets and it’s very important for both practitioners and business owners to understand various angles and where to draw the line. For instance, there are agencies and there are journalists; but unfortunately, those who think the major function of public relations is to put stories in the newspaper or broadcast media think that PR, blogging and journalism are the same. PR performs many functions and media is just one of the tools or vehicles that can be used when necessary.
Currently, the issue has taken a different dimension with the digital revolution that allows individual platforms. To this end, some now see bloggers and other influencers as PR practitioners. Unfortunately, the general public sometimes is not aware of what PR really is; they feel that anybody that writes anything online is in the PR space. The fact that there is an art in PR means it needs to be better regulated.
PR practitioners are trained and most of them went to school to study related courses, worked hard, learned writing and most of them are professionally certified. You can then imagine how one will feel when the industry one so much treasures is reduced to the man down the street who decides to write something and put it on a blog. This is where government is important as the authority that can create policies that make it hard for every Dick, Tom and Harry to come forward and present themselves as PR practitioners just because they attract some followers on social media.
What should the practitioners do to compliment government’s effort in the regard?
It behoves us, the real practitioners, to stand by what we say. At every forum and in anything that we handle, stakeholders should be able to see professionalism and ethical approach to our practice. In today’s market, we should not forget that the medium by which we engage customers has evolved. While traditional medium was the way it was 10 years ago or more, online industry has changed the way we report news and the way consumers receive news has also changed.
Today, customers don’t want to read, they just want to watch a video to get information. They don’t usually want to deviate from where they usually get information which means those that put out the news have to be creative and adapt to the way consumers absorb the news. But because a lot of practitioners understand that, they are also changing. It means you have to do a lot more work to evaluate consumers — you can’t just assume that people are reading whatever you put out there. Again, data has become important, if you are putting anything out there, you need to know who is reading it and who you are targeting. What are they getting from it? Is it the right medium?
But there are still those who consider traditional media important; especially those without access to online information either because of infrastructure, money or what have you. They too must be factored in. The bottom line is PR has evolved and the medium of passing information has also evolved. So, there are a couple of things we need to do to reposition the industry. It’s no longer enough to just put out news; consumers are looking out for something more.
What role do you think PR could have played in communicating government policies?
I think that communication has a huge role to play in government, not just from the talking point but from the planning and from the dimension of the stakeholders or audience being able to sit down and say you want to put out something. First of all, understand the impact hence there is no crisis management. If you’re trying to put out something, be it a policy or regulation that is going to impact some stakeholders in a certain way, how do you deliver it? There is also the need for government to put in place measures through which relevant teaching and training will be provided for the people that are even delivering it. PR plays a lot of roles in government because there are a lot of gaps.
So, if the communication is not structured, not only from the presidency but across the board, citizens will find it difficult as to where they can get real information on current happenings. It is the job of the PR practitioner working for the government to help it recognise issues from various areas
How can the industry address the issue of differentiation?
The way you know agencies that are going above and beyond and not just doing a check box or focused on just revenue is agencies that don’t just care about revenue but also invest in themselves. When I look at agencies, what I’m after is, what kind of technology are you using? What kind of training are you giving your personnel, are you impacting the clients? Now when we talk about digital, there is no amount of reading that can make you understand digital like the millennial. So, if you are an agency that has millennial but doesn’t create the good working environment, they won’t stay because they like certain types of environments. So you need to have an agency that has old hands because there is nothing like experience but you also need to have young hands that are fluid and fast. Agencies that want to produce a robust service to clients should understand the needs of the teams that they have, the older ones and the younger ones and the various tools that help them to be creative. The older ones are the ones that usually bring structure but the younger ones bring the innovative thinking and approach to seeking the products and then you can have a nice bouquet.
Charity, they say begins at home, has TQC keyed into this?
That is what Quadrant went through from when I came on board. The way we even engage journalist for instance changed. Before, there was no structure and you could get away with it, but now there is more demand, not just from customers, but even all our partner are looking at you and saying ‘you need to have a better structure because I have a lot more options’. So the idea of Quadrant today is to sit down and dimension all our stakeholders in terms of staff, the owners of the business, but more importantly, my partners, influencers and media houses. All of those people are very important to us. So engaging with them and how we engage with them is important.
Based on how PR has evolved and what I am trying to put out there, I need to make sure I have staff with the required skills. So in hiring, it’s important to have people with a very diverse background. It’s important that I have in my team, different components of people. I need creative people; I need content people that write well, I need my media guy to write well. My business director needs to understand business and finance; my strategy people need to be well rounded. Together we can deliver value. The way we were before was that we were all communications people. So, when we are driving solutions, it’s not as deep as it should be. That is why I said consumers and clients are asking for a lot more. The way it was before, the client will call you and say, I need a press release. So the client has already decided what they need. You then agree just like a runner to deliver the information as instructed without any input or impactful advice.
Does it mean today’s practitioners should not adhere to the brief specification of the client?
Not at all, what I’m saying is that as a professional, you should be able to see ahead and add more value to your client’s business by widening the scope of the brief to enhance better result. In the past, let’s say five to ten years ago, if you told me you have a press release, all that I would do is to put it in the newspapers. That is why I said PR is dying, it’s not that it’s dying; I meant to say it has evolved.
So, what makes me different from the next PR guy is that I can come up with new ideas for a client. And that will be value added. That is how we have changed and how we have evolved. We no longer think from a revenue stand-point. We do a lot more to help the client’s business. At the end of the day, value to the client is more, but values to us also grow.
How do you commoditise all the values that you are now bringing to the table?
The way we commoditise it is to have what we call strategy. That is why I said Quadrant has also evolved from being a PR agency to a strategy communication consultancy. So within the strategic communication consultancy, there are certain products that we have defined within us. For instance, if you want us to launch something in Maiduguri around women, I will suggest we carry out a brand audit before the launch. We will try to know the perception, so that we know how to communicate to those women. I may need to do a segment audit, so as to direct my communication to the right target. It’s not just that I am running with the client’s ideas, it now customised. And guess what, the clients can now hold me accountable as an agency to say based on what the objectives are. The objectives can be in terms of awareness, conversion or hard sales. The way we did things in the past, the clients couldn’t hold the agency to anything.
What informed your agency’s recently published intelligence report on the financial sector?
We do media monitoring and get different analysis. So, I am always asking what else we can do in terms of data analysis. Therefore, in evaluating all of that I realised we have a huge database on our hands. We have been doing it for the past 30 years; you can imagine that we have enough data. But data is one thing, the way you mine it is another. So based on some of the questions I was asking, we realised that we can actually do a quick analysis and come up with deeper insight on how different industries operate and how they spend money and the different campaigns they do that can actually help to position their brands in a better light. We started with the banking sector because the banks cut across every segment. Being a maiden edition, it was important that we get the attention of clients across the board. We have some brand owners that are already our clients so it was easy to engage them. Like anything else, the first one was a little bit more challenging but by the time we do the subsequent ones, we expect them to be a little bit easier. The good thing for us is that based on what we have learnt from doing this report, the guys in the media monitoring have already started mining data in a way that makes sense.
The report is in the public domain, how has the feedbacks been?
It’s actually been fantastic. A lot of people have given us a lot of kudos for embarking on something different, given them insights that they haven’t even thought about. Some of those I spoke with said it’s good for them to see what other people are doing, in order to know areas they need to improve on in terms of spend and strategy. Another bank said they didn’t realise that all the other banks are doing mentions according to products.
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