Leo Burnett Lagos: Ad Agency with Unique Winning Edge
At a time stakeholders in the marketing communication industry thought the business environment was too tough for anybody to venture into, Leo Burnet Lagos was established with the promise to change the marketing communications landscape.
However, in just abouttwo years of operation in the highly competitive advertising business in the country, Leo Burnett Lagos has proven to become an iconic creative brand, with the array of local and international awards and accolades it has carted in the industry.
On the list of her landmarks in the industry is the 1st international award which Leo Burnett Lagos won at the just-concluded African Cristal awards in Morocco. Leo Burnett Lagos won 2 Awards in the Radio category.
Also at the 2016 LAIF awards, the Sam Osunsokoled marketing communication agency was a glaring star of the night when it won three Gold, five Silver and five Bronze medals, hitting age old agencies in the competitive industry.
Beyond the conventional creativity, Leo Burnett Lagos is an agency that prides itself as a solution provider to brands challenges in the marketplace by looking into their business problems and strategic way of solving them.
Leo Burnett Lagos prides itself as an external student of Human Behaviour, which gives an unparalleled ability to better understand people and what drives them.
The 360 degree marketing communication agency has made huge and impactful contributions to brands such as Konga, Heritage Bank, Nestle, Crusader Sterling Pensions, Phizer and Philip Morris.
Considering the group of multi-disciplinary and multi-skilled talents that are available at Leo Burnett Lagos, the agency is poised to deliver excellent innovation in the industry in the year 2017 and ahead.
Leo Burnett Lagos, which is an affiliate of Leo Burnett Inc., is not resting on its oars and is poised to become a market leader a market leader in the business of advertising Africa.
In a recent interview with THISDAY, the Chief Executive Officer of the agency, Sam Osunsoko, described the two years operation of the agency as a watershed. He spoke about the factors that have helped the agency’s growth and how it clinched 13 medals at the 2016 edition of the Lagos Advertising & Ideas Festival (LAIF) held in Lagos.
“From inception, we’ve been very clear in our minds as to how we’d defy the odds of the industry – maintain an obsessive focus on our clients’ brands with a strong intent to growing them. It is for this reason that our objectives of business and creative leadership in this country seems to be taking shorter time for us to achieve than we initially projected. To give an example, the Heritage Bank’s Kings and Queens campaigns we developed was deeply insights-driven. It celebrates the enterprise spirit of Nigerians and Africans at large. This has further reinforced perception of Heritage Bank as one with a very strong SME focus. In terms of how almost every major campaign we developed has not only step-changed the brands we developed them for but has also won one creative award or the other, you could be forgiven if you likened Leo Burnett Lagos to the artiste that spoke about all his songs being hits back-to-back (…laughs). One reason why this is so is because of how we have created work environment that fosters creativity in all we do. The results are just now becoming apparent.”
He related the factors that shaped the agency’s growth to the parable of the gazelle and the lion. According to him, every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed.
‘’Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up, it knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t therefore matter whether you‘re the lion or the gazelle –when the sun comes up, you’d better be running. So, when we started operation in 2015, we knew we must not just have a challenger mentality but we must sustain it, otherwise we would find it tough achieving our long-term objectives in the market. Having done this fairly successfully, our focus is on the future. One brand at a time, how do we create a bandwagon of brands that have gone through the HumanKind thinking and have come out tops in their respective categories? How do we turn the brands we work for into Power-brands in the marketplace?
“A few set out goals made it possible for us to make some of the impacts that you’re seeing today. One; our creative philosophy – we believe that because creativity is the most potent force in life and therefore has the power to transform human behaviour, then we must the best at what we do to consistently be relevant to the brands we work for. Number two, which I think is perhaps the most important is our HumanKind approach to eliciting the deepest of human insights, which ensures more spot-on creative solutions. At Leo Burnett, we pride ourselves in being Eternal Students of Human Behavior. We seek to understand human beings – who you know as consumers, better than our peers.
‘In understanding people, we understand their fears and motivations, we understand what their wants are and because we understand them better, we are able to elicit deep rooted insights which helps us come up with competitively better creative solutions. We ask ourselves, what do people really want? What do consumers want? We then seek to match that with what the brand can competitively do and we develop our brand promise around that. By doing this, Leo Burnett Lagos has been consistently rewarded by the consumers, who buy the brands and we have also been rewarded by the industry that recognizes our work and the solutions we provide,” Osunsoko said.