The pursuit of excellence in marketing communication
The Nigerian marketing communication industry will not attain professionalism if media-buying decisions by advertising executives are driven by bias and parochialism.
Acomplex relationship exists between advertising agencies and media owners in Nigeria. The engagement among media owners and content suppliers on the one hand; and then media agencies and brand owners who allocate budgets for various campaigns across a range of media channels on the other hand, is supposed to be driven by professionalism and value-delivery. However, the criteria for selection and patronage of media owners and suppliers by advertising agencies is fraught with contradictions.
The experiences of various salesmen and women with whom I have had the privilege of interacting suggest that objective criteria for procurement of a media supplier's services are often ignored for very mundane considerations. Without the application of best practices to help position a brand, advertisers would be shortchanged by media agencies. In this article, I like to discuss some pertinent issues in the Nigerian marketing communications industry that need to be addressed for us to attain professional excellence and for advertisers to be given value for their money.
Subscription and advertising rates
In the course of my career in the electronic media and out-of-home advertising sectors, I have realised that the rates charged by the media owners and suppliers are determined arbitrarily. The relevant pricing metrics – such as reach, coverage, listenership, readership, circulation, traffic count, demographics – are hardly put into consideration in setting advertising rate. Cost of production or the prevailing industry price are usually the determining factors.
In as much as cost inputs must be factored in setting the price for a product or service, for a media business, other valueadded services such as those mentioned above have to be put into perspective. Media owners also have to get their content strategies right. In more developed media markets, broadcasting houses acquire and commission content providers so that they can provide exclusive contents on their television channels and radio stations to their viewers and listeners. Even commercials are usually created by the media outlets, although in conjunction with the brand owners so as to create a content that is fit-for-purpose to achieve the brand campaign objectives.
Unfortunately, most Nigerian media owners even engage in the antediluvian practice of selling airtime to content providers who add value to the broadcasting houses with their programmes. However, there is a new wave of competition in the industry – driven by streaming services available on mobile devices and internetenabled television sets or smart TV – that will enable advertisers to reach their target audiences and get better value for their campaigns. The implication of this development is that media owners will allocate pricing strictly on the basis of their coverage and relevant demographics.
Subscription-based content providers should also brace up for the new wave of competition that is coming. Media organisations who arbitrarily determine subscription fees for users would have to evolve new strategies for providing content. It would no longer be business-as-usual. It would make no sense for subscribers to pay high monthly subscription fees for contents that they are often not at home to watch or too busy to read. They would rather subscribe to on-demand content providers and view/read their contents on mobile phones, tablets, laptops, smart television sets or desktops.
Despite the print media industry's new business model of hybrid publishing, the decline in revenue from offline editions is offsetting opportunities in the online segment. According to GroupM, the world's largest advertising media company in terms of billings, global print advertising revenue is expected to decline by about 8.7 per cent to $52.6 billion in 2016. Much of the projected decline in revenue is attributed to the offline segment.
Free entry and exit
One of the attributes of free markets is the free entry and exit of market players. The structure of the marketing communications industry is such that competition can only be enhanced when the industry operates as a free market. For this reason, it is disturbing to find that certain