Every ambitious number eventually meets the industry expected to deliver it. In Nigeria’s case, that number is $100 billion, and the industry standing closest to the machinery meant to produce it is the one that has spent decades quietly insisting it belongs in the conversation at all: integrated marketing communications.

Five years ago, before government had put a figure on any of this, Rotimi Bankole, Chief Executive Officer of SBI Media, said something that at the time sounded more like an aspiration than a fact.

“Aside from being a core element of business, advertising and marketing is also a key contributor to the creative economy,” he said, adding that the sector’s fingerprints could be found “in all areas of business, from manufacturing to healthcare, from transportation to hospitality, from fintech to agriculture, and, of course, media and the creative economy.” It was 2022, an election year, and Bankole’s optimism was tied to something as ordinary as the return of political advertising spend. Nobody was yet talking in billions.

That changed in 2024. Speaking at the Ojude-Oba festival in Ijebu Ode, Hannatu Musa Musawa, Minister of Art, Culture, Tourism and the Creative Economy, gave Nigeria’s creative ambition a number it had never had before: $100 billion, to be added to GDP by 2030 or 2031. At the time, the sector contributed just 1.2 percent to GDP and roughly 1.0 percent to government revenue, figures Musawa herself cited as the honest starting point for an eight-point agenda built around fourteen initiatives grouped under four pillars: technology, infrastructure and funding, international culture promotion, and intellectual property monetisation.

Where the money is actually showing up

Two years on, the receipts are starting to come in, and they are genuinely striking. Nigeria’s streaming economy alone is now estimated at $1.2 billion, with the video streaming segment projected to grow from roughly $0.37 billion in 2024 to $0.88 billion by 2033. Nigerian artists collectively earned more than ₦60 billion from Spotify streams in 2025, a 140 percent jump in two years, while music from international tours and performances generated close to $395 million in 2025 alone. Layer onto that the events industry, projected to grow from $10.67 billion in 2025 to $27.5 billion by 2034, an 11.13 percent annual growth rate that outpaces the global average. Continentally, UNESCO puts Africa’s creative economy on track for $20 billion a year by 2030.

These are not small numbers. But they raise the question this piece is really asking: how much of this opportunity is Nigeria’s own IMC industry, the agencies, the practitioners, the associations, actually positioned to capture, rather than simply narrate from the sidelines?

The industry talking to itself, and the one moment it stopped

For most of 2026, the honest answer has been that Nigeria’s marketing communications industry has been busiest talking to itself. The Association of Advertising Agencies of Nigeria’s 53rd Annual General Meeting, themed “AdVolution: The End of Advertising as We Know It,” produced a partnership with South Africa’s Red & Yellow Creative School of Business aimed at future-proofing local talent. President Lanre Adisa offered a genuinely ambitious frame for the industry: “Our ambition should extend beyond being the biggest advertising market in Africa. We should aspire to become its most respected creative economy.” It is a strong line. It was also delivered, like most of the industry’s biggest statements this year, inside a room full of its own members.

The National Institute of Marketing of Nigeria has been making a similar case in its own register. Under Dr Bolajoko Bayo-Ajayi, the institute’s 2026 Annual Marketing Conference in Port Harcourt, themed “Community, Culture and Connection: Reimagining the New Market,” noted that Nigerian brands can no longer treat culture as decoration on top of a sales pitch.

The exception, and arguably the most important data point in this entire story, is what happened when Peter Osarimen Ukhurebor, Founder and CEO of Black At, was appointed to the newly inaugurated Council for Creative Technology Futures, a federal body set up under Musawa’s ministry to chart policy for AI, AR/VR, Web3 and blockchain across more than 49 segments of the creative economy, a sector projected by the council’s own remit to top $25 billion. What makes this appointment worth dwelling on is not the individual honour, it is that it represents an IMC-adjacent practitioner sitting inside the room where the $100 billion target’s actual policy architecture is being built, rather than commenting on it afterward from a conference stage. That is currently the exception. It should be the rule.

Building the infrastructure nobody photographs

Where the industry is genuinely moving the needle is in the unglamorous work of building infrastructure rather than simply hosting panels about it. Black At’s Through Her Lens initiative, launched in Lagos with AAAN’s Lanre Adisa and X3M Ideas’ Steve Babaeko physically in the room, paired its advocacy with something concrete: a live digital platform at blkat.org designed to connect creatives, executives and investors.

Bunmi Oke, Lead Consultant at Ladybird Advertising, made a sharper point about where storytelling power now actually sits, arguing that mobile technology has turned ordinary users into “scriptwriters, editors and broadcasters simultaneously.”

Tony Effik’s Nsibidi Fables is building something more specific than a production shortcut: Nsibidi Academy, a technology-enabled tutoring marketplace designed to strengthen learning outcomes across Africa, alongside an expanding suite of proprietary AI-assisted creative tools meant to put professional-grade production capability directly into the hands of African storytellers who could never previously afford it. As Effik put it, “If nobody knows the future, why can’t we make the future ourselves? Why not us?” The pairing of an education platform with a production tool is deliberate: one builds the pipeline of talent, the other removes the cost barrier that has historically kept that talent from actually shipping work.

Livespot360’s expansion follows the same instinct toward infrastructure over spectacle. Its built structure makes the intent concrete rather than aspirational: a Deal Room built specifically to broker financing conversations, a Creative Job Fair aimed at converting festival energy into actual employment, and year-round initiatives like Labspot Creative Skills & Enterprise Development designed to keep equipping young Africans and MSMEs with skills and networks long after the festival lights go down.

The gap nobody has closed yet

Not everyone is convinced the industry, or government, is moving fast enough. Dr Bada Akintunde-Johnson, Country Manager of Paramount Africa, told a summit that “there are opportunities back home that we have not been able to monetise,” pointing to Nigeria’s near-total dependence on a few weeks of December activity. “December is a great opportunity that we can touch, feel, and expand on. But what happens with the remaining eleven months of the year?” His prescription, year-round venues, dubbing content into multiple languages, and building African-owned digital platforms rather than renting attention on foreign ones, remains, a year later, mostly unbuilt.

Musawa herself has not pretended otherwise. At the Ministry’s 2025 Sectoral Retreat, she named the obstacles plainly: limited funding access, poor infrastructure, piracy, security concerns, and a troubling lack of reliable data on job creation. “To address these challenges,” she told the gathering, “the Ministry will focus on infrastructure development, policy enhancement, skills development, tourism infrastructure, and data-driven decision-making.” It is, almost word for word, the same diagnosis the industry’s own stakeholders had already delivered a year earlier, this time arriving from inside government rather than from the agencies asking to be let in.

Steve Babaeko, speaking at Craft Addis 2026, diagnosed the same problem from a continental altitude. “The difference between Africa’s creative output and global benchmarks is not talent, but infrastructure across production, distribution, payments, and intellectual property protection,” he said, before adding the line that probably belongs on a wall somewhere in every agency in Lagos: “We have had enough conversations about potential. The time now is to build. Structure. Scale. And most importantly, believe enough in our own stories to take them to the world.”

Where this leaves the industry

Global capital, notably, is not waiting for Nigeria to finish this argument with itself. Google and Idris Elba’s Elba Hope Foundation have already committed roughly $1 million in AI tooling to 100,000 creators across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Sierra Leone and South Africa, with Elba diagnosing the continent’s real constraint in a single line: “The barrier is not a lack of vision. It’s a lack of access. Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not.”

That is, in the end, the honest state of Nigeria’s creative economy story as it stands today. The numbers are real and rising. The government has, for the first time, attached an actual framework, named committees, and its own admission of what is broken, to its ambition. And Nigeria’s IMC industry, through Ukhurebor’s council seat, Black At’s platform, Nsibidi’s production tools, Livespot360’s continental stage, and other industry stakeholders’ insistence that culture itself is the product, has already shown, repeatedly and convincingly, that it knows how to build.

That is precisely why government should not have to be asked twice. Nigeria does not lack an industry capable of delivering a $100 billion creative economy, it already has one, tested, resourceful, and fluent in exactly the kind of storytelling, technology and cultural translation the target requires. What Ukhurebor’s appointment proves is not that the industry earned a rare exception, but that the model works whenever government reaches for it. The task now is simple: government should bring the practitioners who have spent decades learning exactly how culture moves in this country into the room as standing partners, not occasional guests. Nigeria will not build a $100 billion creative economy by accident, but it will not need to, either. The industry capable of building it is already here, already working, and already asking to be let in. All that is left is for government to open the door.