Yomi Badejo-Okusanya is Chairman, Organizing Committee of the recently held Nigerian Public Relations Week (NPRW). He doubles as Group Managing Director, CMC Connect, a leading Public Relations and perception consulting firm in Nigeria. The agency just launched Crisis X, a specialized, AI driven digital platform that is designed to help organizations proactively prepare for, manage and recover from reputational, operational and financial exigencies. He explores the strategic place of Public Relations , and the AI technology advancements in this expose captured by News-Mart ‘s Chief Editor, Clifford Amuzuo. Excerpts:
You hinted on plans lately regarding something in the works under your organization, CMC Connect LLP, involving Crisis X , a platform which you launched recently. Tell us about the Solutions what opportunities it bring for the industry.
Crisis X is a crisis management service which we have now automated. , It is now AI driven and so we have a platform on which what we could have normally done and which would have taken us 10, 12 steps, we can now do it in one step by reason of that AI platform. And u need to understand its the first of its kind in Africa and definitely in Sub Saharan Africa. What does that do. We know technology plays a huge role in the future of communication, and we need to advance with technology, we need to work with technology and that’s exactly what we have done with Crisis X which we have elevated into an AI driven platform and that helps us to diagnose.. Th ere are 4 steps in the process, one is what we call the risk audit, the risk plan or let me call it Crisis Audit, your Vulnerability plan and then Vulnerability Identification. So we can go into an organization and say to them, these are the possible challenges that you may have, and then we have a plan on how to respond. Then number three, we manage the Crisis when it occurs, and then number 4 is recovery of the brand. So all of these has now been put through a process, which is, the word is Automated. It relies less on humans , the possibility of human error, of course , humans are still there because Public Relations is still about relations, but there are things that we can process through the platform that, one, makes it faster, makes it a lot more accurate and helps us in defining what kind of Solutions that we would proffer.
You talked about humans , which is to say that it still has the human feature in it, so why are you preserving the human element
Well, there is still supposed to be that interaction, and part of it is to make it easy, so you can indeed input what you want by yourself. Let me take for instance now, a Crisis occurs and am driving, I can actually access that platform even while am driving, and it will be giving me all the Solutions that I want. So by calling on NAYA, am sure a lot of you must have heard about SIRI and so on. So I can say I have a challenge and am driving, this is what my challenge is, what options do you have, what Solutions do u proffer, and I can have an engagement, as if am talking to one of my resources, one of my down lines or one of my contemporaries in the business on how we should tackle a specific challenge, you know that Crisis, many times don’t give you notice, there is a time limit within which you must address a Crisis, if you don’t, it escalates then becomes more difficult, am sure you know that, that is basic , Crisis Management 001. What this tool has helped us to do is that what could have taken us a length of time to deal with, the tool helps us to do it.
How does Crisis X help to tell us the difference between genuine breaking news and engineered outreach.
We have our way and that’s also part of it, again, that’s another resource it has. Normally you have to go layer and layer to find out what we call In- fix,. This can tell you what the fixes are. It can analyze it there and then and tell you this news…bla bla bla ..by reason of this and this .its called this. …its likely to be this or that .. and it can give you that result in seconds, something you would have had to be running around , or what to respond to and how to respond to those things.
Let’s talk deeper into PR. What’s the biggest shift you’ve observed in Nigeria’s PR in the last 5 years.
Technology has played a significant role in PR and its just starting. When I joined PR rather, not join, when I started my profession PR, computers where just coming on, there was so much we could do, but with what we have now, the biggest quantum leap that we have experienced is technology, and if you want me to go further I will probably talk about Artificial intelligence. It has changed completely the dynamics. Now, it doesn’t erase human relations because AI actually is “What you put in is actually what you get out “. And in those days, at the beginning of computer days , they had a phrase , “ garbage in, garbage out “ So, it doesn’t eliminate the humans, it just collapses or it speeds up the process, but the human element must still be there. So if there is one significant thing, just like globalization affected Public Relations at a certain time or let me not just talk about Public Relations, it affected advertising and all other forms of marketing communications,. Technology is now the key driver . So anybody who wants to operate in the PR of the future and is not AI enabled, it can’t work,
Looking at communications and brands, brands spend more on communication these days. Public trust seems quite low, where do you think the disconnect shows up.
That’s a very interesting question. First and foremost what breaks trust is when people’s hope, people’s aspirations and expectations are not been met, that’s the biggest break in trust . So, by the way, I don’t drink beer, but the day Gulder starts tasting like Stout, that’s a break. So I think many consumers, they have become very discerning. Globalization you did ask me, in the last five years, globalization is more than five years, it didn’t start in the last five years, so that’s why I didn’t start with globalization, I took it for granted. So the expectation of the consumer is continuously shifting and the demographics are been significantly fragmented. So I can look at you, and am going to use myself as Guinea Pig here. When I came in here, the crew said to me oh, we knew you for your bow tie, and for years, for decades you only were bow ties but nowadays we’ve seen that you are no longer wearing bow ties,, but not that I don’t wear bow ties again, I just don’t wear them as frequently, my dress sense quote and unquote has changed. Now imagine someone trying to send me a bow tie, my want, my thinking, my aspirations has changed, so if you look at me and you box me into that person that has 20 bow ties and you say, am going to send them to YBO because I jumps at bow ties , my want has changed, so I can profile you and when I look at you, I think I know what you want, but things are changing and I have become so fluid. When we talk about millennials. when we talk about genzees, you know sometimes we just box up everybody and say oh, these young people, but my son who is 27 may have things that are so fundamentally different from someone who is 30 or 31, and somebody who is 23or 24, three years difference, there may be so many similarities, there may be huge differences in them in terms of where they want to go to, what they listen to in terms of the language they speak and so on and so forth, so with the shifting expectation of the consumer and when that is not met, it breaks trust and then people begin to shift, they begin to meander, they go from one place to another place. Nothing exemplifies this like, let’s talk about restaurants business or the Night Clubs business,. At a point in time you will hear that this Night Club, that’s where everybody is going, and then all of a sudden, in a few years, nobody goes there anymore, one, because the taste has changed. I was talking to someone, a younger person, and he was trying to describe the Night life in Lagos to meme.He says from 9 PM to may be 11 PM there is one place they go, and from 11 to 1 pm there is another place they go, then there is a Night Club in this Lagos that they open their doors at 2 am, would you think that Club business is that complex. So they cater for different wants, so for me the single thing that brings down the trust is because expectations have not been fully met.
Many Nigerian brands treat PR and Marketing as the same thing. So where does one end and another begins
That’s a serious JAMB question . There is a book definition of Public Relations, and am trying to remember my definitions. Let me star with Marketing, and am not going to do definitions here, am only going to paraphrase. In my opinion, and am also a Fellow of the National Institute of Marketing of Nigeria (NIMN). Marketing is all about the profession that drives ssales. Anything that has to do with marketing is about selling, while Public Relations is about building relationships. Now, the question is, what comes first, the Chicken or the egg, do I build a relationship before I sell to u or sell to you before I build a relationship. That’s where the synergy between Public Relations and Marketing do come in. That is simple terms of defining it. I want to sell you something, should I build a relationship first or even after I have sold it to you, what drives that relationship beyond service. So Marketing will tell you all the virtues, how you should use this brand or you should use this service. Public Relations is more interested in building relationships, which goes beyond just selling, and you realize that when you have a good relationship between a consumer and a brand or a service that’s life long, as against me just selling you and am not talking marketing,. In effect what am saying to you is that they are complementary. While one sells, the other builds relationship.
In the next 10 years, where would you like to see the Nigerian PR Industry
I will like to see it as the prime, as the premium solution provider in management. Right now, decisions are been taken in many board rooms and they are leaving us out, and then they will now ask us to come and implement what they want without taking in our input. So we need more Public Relations practitioners in the board room, we need them to seat at the table, you don’t finish it and then you say to me oh, we haven’t talked about PR, and then you have one small budget and then you give. We’ve worked, by the way, my firm, CMC Connect LLP, we are affiliates of Boson and we are also global, its arguably the second largest PR network in the world. We’ve had instances where our office in South Africa will come back to us and say oh, our client wants us to do this and do this but we are having one small budget for Africa, and you guys take the budget and go and share. PR became an after thought, because if we’re brought into the boardroom from the beginning , we would have been able to make our own input and we would have been able to advise accordingly, especially when budgets are been decided. Yes, let’s get into the room, we must get into the room, and not just get into the room, we must seat at the table.
