How Charles O’tudor’s Adstrat Collapsed
Adstrat boss, Charles O'tudor, is a fighter and a man of many firsts. He believes in his instincts and dares to take the plunge to push back the frontiers of business. Early in his career, the holder of 10 degrees went into an alliance to form an advertising agency. The alliance never worked and so O'tudor moved on to set up his own firm, Adstrat.
He hit the ground running with Adstrat, a breath of fresh air in the advertising industry. His entry was different and a defining moment! The interesting thing Charles O'tudor did as a young advertising agent was to run a four- page advert on driving his own brand image. As a first in the industry, he took up four pages colour adverts in Guardian, THISDAY and two prominent industry magazines, namely Brands and Products and Brand Visit.
As a young advertising agent, he didn’t have the necessary financial war chest. He borrowed the funds from his bank to make an inroad and a statement. When one looks at such an investment, no advertising agency in Nigeria has ever, before and after, done a thing like that.
At that material time, he made a statement, became the go-to brand angel and bride of the advertising industry. As he pulled this stunt, he invested in media and publicity by getting front pages interviews with journalists. He became popular and held in high esteem.
It looked like an unlikely thing to do at the time, but shortly after, bank consolidations started and all the banks were looking for agencies to launch their Initial Public Offer. Having put his best foot forward and positioned his agency, Adstrat, the new bride, cashed in.
There is no gainsaying that O’tudor is a smart and resourceful person. He is also a man about town. He sure has his ways of warming himself to you if he needs you to do anything for him. He could carry money whether hard earned or otherwise, just to wine and dine with the nouveau rich. Again, all these worked for him phenomenally, as he did several Initial Public Offers for banks and made a lot of money.
The height of his career trajectory was when he came up with his Brand Oxygenation mantra, which means absolutely nothing! For those who knew him, his looks and feel for pitches and presentation changed. The new mantra saw him wearing dreadlocks and the black costume. It became a sin not to wear black in Adstrat. He then packaged and positioned himself for what seemed to him a bigger business by relocating to Government Reserved Area in Ikeja. Again, those things worked for him on the road to success.
But why Adstrat collapsed remains a big surprise to many. The entire Adstrat castle was supposedly built on a veiled and soft intellectual layout which was bound to crack. He might not have an 'intellectual' but was building an intellectual brand and because the layer wasn’t safe, he made the wrong decisions.
One of the many wrong moves is being called a brand angel who had the opportunity to make good money and a lasting legacy in the nation’s commercial nerve- centre, but instead, he relocated his entire practise to Cross Rivers State because he was making money from politicians who, unbeknown to him, trade in deceit.
With his change of territory, his identity changed as he had to cut his dreadlocks. Most devastating was the business in Lagos which suffered a huge setback.
For the reason that his mantra was lacked thorough intellectual precepts, all he did was just for the show. And this unfortunately, typifies how Nigerians can be intellectually drowned in façade and emptiness.
After business in cross River began to dry up, he began to struggle. The brand angel, who lived a nouveau rich lifestyle and wasn’t investing an anything, became an alleged notorious debtor and lost many businesses. It is worthy of note, again that most advertising executives whose businesses have collapsed, had followed a similar path of extravagance.
For every Charles O’tudoor, there is a brand genie. His failure is indeed matchless. He belongs to a group of founders of large private advertising companies that showed great promise but were ultimately wrecked by poor decisions, legal problems, and a seeming lack of innovation.
Perhaps, the greatest hallmark of founders who ruin their companies is that they appear to look out mostly for themselves rather than the interests of the company and its shareholders. For starters, they accept excessive compensation.
A more complex measurement of this set of founders' performance is their lack of vision to transform their companies as the markets in which they operate change. One would have thought that the Adstrat boss would drive some comparable revolution and show the foresight to others who are still in business today did. The most often damaging problem with founders is that they cannot be pushed out, especially when they own the controlling interest in their company.
Whatever happened to Charles O’tudor, the advertising industry misses the razzmatazz, great pitches, brand posturing, big grammar, and those defining moments he brought to the game of integrated marketing communications in Nigeria.