Enahoro: Media Awards is Promasidor’s Contribution to Encouraging Professionalism
Head, Legal and Public Relations, Promasidor Nigeria Limited, Mr. Andrew Enahoro, spoke to Raheem Akingbolu about the competition in the fastmoving consumer goods sector and the company’s forthcoming awards. Excerpts:
As a player in the Fast-moving consumer goods sector of the economy, how are products from promasidor faring in the market? It is obvious that the FMCG sector is one of the most competitive sectors in the manufacturing industry but for us it is an interesting terrain. I say this because if one can boasts of quality products that meet international standard, meet the standard of the regulators and appeal to consumers, then the rest is history.
The competition in the industry notwithstanding, we are doing very well because we know what Nigerians want and we are always striving to respond to their yearning. Why did Promasidor Nigeria Limited institute the Quill Awards? I will take you back briefly to 2011 during the tenure of our immediate past Managing Director, Chief Keith Richards, who is now the Chairman. We sat down to agree on what that we could do to actually support our community as part of our CSR portfolio and strategy.
In partnership with our PR Agency, we were able to get to the position where we decided to support the media. Since commencing our business in Nigeria years ago, we have maintained a fantastic relationship with the media. Reporters and media organizations have helped us to penetrate every part of the country, as we strive to make our products available to millions of Nigerians.
While we toil to build an enduring brand through hard work and dedication to our customers, so also the media complement us with their reportage and promotional messages of our products. To the extent that the media is important, more important however are the journalists and reporters who bring the issues and happenings around us to light.
As you and I know, the job of the journalist, though painstaking, is often thankless and when we consider the intellectual exertion, the research effort and the skill that goes into producing a good copy, there is no reward that can adequately compensate these acts. We then realised that if we could start something to encourage them; it will make a difference.
We looked at the market place to determine how many awards were available for the media at the time and saw very few. It was in recognition of this that we launched the Quill Awards in 2012 as a platform for assessing, recognizing and rewarding excellence for outstanding journalistic work. The Awards seek to remind journalists of the importance of their role in society and to society, the need to encourage professionalism and appreciate outstanding work. What are the expectations of Promasidor Nigeria towards this year’s edition of the Quill Awards? Well, we want more participants and good entries. There are so many good write-ups that appear in the newspapers everyday and we want those people to enter for the awards. This is crucial because when you try to set up something especially for a group of persons that are not well appreciated in the society for the work that they do, you are actually encouraged when you see them participating.
Part of the feedback we got from the last two editions came from journalists who informed us that the venue of the awards influenced their fun for the day. So this year we are using Sheraton Hotels, Ikeja, Lagos, which is more central and easily accessible. Secondly, we also realized we had alienated some sections of the media by holding the awards on a Saturday.
Based on the feedback from some journalists that Saturday is not really suitable for events of such magnitude because it falls on their production days, we decided that it should be brought to Friday.
Just like previous years, we have also maintained the existing seven categories. We thought about increasing the categories but we later said let us maintain the status quo but devise ways through which we can make it more engaging. Also, the winner of winners, as was the case last year, will still attend the Thomson Foundation training. That has not changed irrespective of what happens in the foreign exchange market. Contestants are expected to upload their entries online to participate in the awards. However, there are complaints from contestants that uploading their entries is rebuffed usually by Internet connectivity. What effort is Promasidor making to ease prospective contestants of this challenge? The challenge on this was noticed in the first year. It made us quite unhappy because from our back end our operations are robust enough to receive the entries even when we do our dummy runs we do not have any problems. But bandwidth and internet issues of some contestants were identified.
Let me take you back, the reason for having e-platform is to take care of media men/journalists who are outside Lagos and South West. We don’t want a situation when the scope will be limited to any specific geographical location.
Our products are sold pan-Nigeria. But, in the unlikely event that you cannot upload your entries, you can send also your entries to our PR Agency, TPT. What we want is the word format, and a scanned copy of the published work. What we present to the judges are coded numbers of the word version having removed the names of the contestants. This makes for unbiased assessment by the judges. With the e-platform, there is an instant acknowledgement of entry. The website also has helplines and email addresses where any issues are promptly attended to. The Awards categories were last year increased to seven from five the previous year. We noticed that this year you are not offering the School of Media & Communications training. Will this act not culminate in backtracking on the high feat already attained for the awards? It is natural for recipients of awards or potential beneficiaries to assume that we are backtracking. But, these things are not done without careful thought and reasoning.
The main challenge we have with the School of Media and Communications-SMC training is that we had winners who had previously attended their courses.
Thus, they could not attend these same courses or training again. Getting another institution with the same profile of SMC was a bit daunting thus we settled on the overall winner still going for the Thomson Foundation training. I can assure you that with the present rate of exchange in the country this cost is astronomical. Besides, we still commit to giving high-end laptops for the category winners as well as high-end camera for the best photojournalist. What message do you have for potential contestants from outside Lagos and Western part of the country? The beauty of it all is that the Quill Awards is the media awards for journalists in every part of the country. Our message has always been to the media houses to encourage their staff and colleagues.
This has not changed. We have judiciously done what we are supposed to do. It is now left for the target audience of the awards to realise that this is a credible platform with adequate rewards. Again, you cannot just publish an article and conclude that it ends there because your salaries are paid at the end of the month. If you feel that the work is good enough to merit an award then, you put it in. That is what it is all about – to encourage and reward excellence. What are the long-term benefits derivable from this Promasidor’s CSR initiative? Let me go back to the basics. Two major drivers at inception of this project are our immediate past Managing Director, Chief Keith Richards, also prolific writer and columnist, our PR agency TPT International, with their chairman, Tokunboh Modupe a core PR practitioner and their Managing Director, Charles Igbinidu, who is a core media person. They instrumental to and birthed this initiative. It was something to encourage ‘our community’. If along that line we get more patronage, it is to our benefit. Similarly, you go to school because you want to live a better life, if along that line, you turn out to be a genius that is your benefit. You don’t go out of your way to be kind to people, that is who you are. That is how it works for us not that we instituted it as a commercial plan. If it were a commercial plan, it would have been under marketing/ commercial department where they would plan specific promo techniques.