Agencies must help their Clients Connect to Culture —- Onabajo, Soulcoms boss

Ayodeji Onabajo is Chief Operating Officer at Soulcoms, a premier strategic communications, audience engagement and branding agency in Nigeria. The outfit which spun off from the SO&U advertising group in 2004 has become a leading marketing partner for top brands, specializing in immersive consumer experiences, public relations and digital marketing innovations driven by mart-tech Solutions… The agency boss here xrays current state of agency business operations, brand management experiences, the challenges and prospects for the industry…. Clifford Amuzuo, News-Mart’s Chief Editor captured views of this digital creativity expert in a recent interactive media chat : Excerpts — –

Marketing communications industry is quite highly competitive. So how would you describe a successful agency operation.
It’s a very competitive place, no doubts, but I think it still boils down to what I said earlier about not just creating campaigns, but about creating campaigns that offer value, and I am very very big on value. Now what is value to the client, value to the client is being able to deliver on business objectives, but for me, if I were to take it personal, what will help an agency stand out is, number one,…we are in the digital era, you can not leave out the use of technology, technology is very very critical, how are you adopting marketing technology into the mix of what we are doing, how well do you understand the consumer digital space , how are we using digitalization to drive some of the things that we do. Number two is to create an experience and engagement, its not enough to create experiences, what is the experience intended to do, is it massive enough, is it engaging enough, does it tell the brand story, does it bring about that connection, and if you look at the third part, it will be cultural relevance, that is also very very key and creativity as well. Its not enough to just create a campaign or create a nice idea, how is it relevant to culture. There is a saying when I went to brand school that culture eats strategy for breakfast. No matter how strong your strategy is, when it comes in contact with culture it’s gone. So how are brands positioning themselves or how are agencies helping brands position themselves to be culturally relevant as well, and it doesn’t have to be traditional culture, it could be youth culture , it could be youth centric culture. So culture is wide in its own sense and it is important that agencies help their clients to connect to culture, and the last one is strategy, and ofcourse agencies that are able to offer strong level of deep thinking, strong level of imagination, strong level of intelligence ….to come up with ideas that can engage customers , not just to engage customers but take the consumer through the entire brand journey, not just getting them to feel good about the brand but to ultimately get them to convert. I think that if you look at these three or four pillars that I just gave, these are things that can just help the agency stand out.
Let’s take a walk through your carrier journey, what is some of the most memorable projects you have done and what made them to stand out.
I really have to think about this, yes I have done a couple of things. for FMCGs, farmer, Tech but I will pick Diageo. Diageo has different segments, and under the mainstream Spirit there is a brand they call Origin. Origin developed a platform called original night, and the essence of Original night was more of a brand in culture initiative. Why I really loved Original night was , while the brand was trying to connect to the concept of tradition, if you look at Nigeria we are a very traditional, a very cultural people, ofcourse its still trying to find that blend of modernizing tradition, let me put it that way, and this was an activity that we ran across multi City, I can recall we had the grand final in Lagos, and what stood out for me in this very one , was the fact that we had a a coronation event , we had a modern coronation, it was supposed to be a musical concert, Mayoku was supposed to be the highlight of it, and Mayoku’s nick name was Mayor of Lagos, and what we did differently then was that we did a coronation for him before he started his performances , proper traditional coronation, we did for him, we had two Eyo on the stage , we had a crown, we had women, traditional rulers and everything was set, we crowned him Mayokun of Lagos and then he started to perform, so I think that was the high point and its something that was very memorable. The second I think was the one that we did very recently, its the one that is very close to me and its called The Gathering, The Gathering is a youth centric experience, we used the Gathering to launch MTN’s youth thematic …..campaign called Living 100, what MTN wanted to do was to get the youths to live their lives to 100,and in this case we created a 100 hour non stop , and when I say non stop, we created a city that doesn’t sleep with youth centric activities. The beauty of it was that we didn’t just suggest, you know, the youths of today which happened to be the biggest market segment in Nigeria, they don’t want you to tell them what to do, they want to do what they want to do, so what we did in creating this experience was that we were able to run through a level of survey to understand what they wanted to come through and what they wanted to see at that event, so things that came through was things that centered around entrepreneurship, entertainment, from gaming to music , games, movies, fashion was also there ,full 100 hour non stop with different experience, ofcourse, the beauty of it for me was the Structural Built, we used the National Stadium, Structural Built has a 100,we used a tent to right the number 100, one, zero, zero and everything was connected, so you could walk from one space to the other, if you recall, I mentioned how important it is to use technological drive experiences, what we did was, because we were yet to understand the pattern of consumer behavior in that very space, it was a full 100 hours non stop activities created with different experiences, the beauty of it for me is that, we were able to see the different activities that people participated in and what’s happening at every point in time, it was so interesting that we saw the most active person in that space, based on the code usage in that space, that’s another example of being able to use data , not just in creating experiences but to have a technology that can now create some level of data for us that we can even use to plan the next one ultimately, having known the type of activities that the youths like to engaged in, in planning the next one all we need to do is to scoop data from what we ‘ve done in the past and deploy that for the next one. So I think those are two for me that I will always pick.
What does Soulcom represent for the future of Marketing communications industry in Nigeria
If you look at the vision of Soulcoms, Soulcoms is 22 going to 23,I would like to say that is an adult. In the Nigerian context you can vote and be voted for. I would jokingly say to my colleagues that Soulcoms have seen so many Presidents, seen different economic realities and still standing, but what has happened in the last two years is that we ‘ve undergone an evolution. Our primary vision now is how we deliver on massive experiences, driven by cutting edge technologies and marketing technology solutions, that’s the space where we are now. That evolution gave rise to new devisions in Soulcoms. For Soulcoms we have the Brand Experience division, the PR division and the new division that was given birth to is called the new Digital Innovations division. Of course, it’s not enough to go to the clients with different campaigns, we have started deploying techs, like virtual reality, ungumented reality, these are techs that we have in-house, we are looking at retail technology Solutions, virtual engagement, virtual event, not your Skype event or your Microsoft themes, we are looking at events that you can attend with your Averter, sign in and attend with your Averter, these are the events that we are looking at, that we are creating and we are hoping we can execute one, may be by Q3 or Q4 this year. For us we have started to play in that digital space and infusing digital in every single thing that we do, from Brand experiences to PR, we are trying to ensure that everything is digitally driven and of course end up with hand held device that the consumer holds and of course your regular day to day audience device that you carry up and down, where they practically live their lives. I will give you an example, we had a simple activation, if you have your singular means of activation, what you find is that , for one of our clients, I think it was household flour for Flour Mills, we tried to deploy some level of engagement with augmented reality, in that when you walk into the store, with flour you can do different things, you can make Pies, you can make Cakes, you can make Pan cakes and biscuits, I have this nice video that shows different ways you can use the flour….what we did was to use urgumented reality, and if you scan a trial open at the tail and you pick the actual product, you place your phone on the actual product, you can watch the video, the product becomes the actual trigger where you can watch different ways you can use the Flour, it’s called product Integrated ,urgumented reality , that’s an example of technology that we have deployed, that we have in Soulcoms right now , again, for us to stand out, and that’s the level of evolution we are doing now , that’s what we are pushing for, we want to ensure that in the digital era that we stay ahead, for us ultimately it’s to see how we can become, maybe a leading agency in Africa and we will see it, and we will continue to push for that.
What lessons have shaped your leadership style and approach in building a high performing team.
If I look very closely I will say two core things, that have come to be very true for me , they sound very much alike, if you look at the last four letters, they are very true because they have the letters t.u.r.e…..number one is culture and number two is structure, and I will tell you why. I think I started at a point where I was trying to get people to do things, of course, I realized that method wasn’t going to be sustainable, there was need for me to build something that would even outlive me myself been a leader at the organization. So culture was one of them and for us how to instil the right culture into members of staff in the organization, so culture comes from having the right values, new system, having the right mentally , having the right characteristics. We have four core values for example, Image, Imagination, intelligence and interaction. What we try to do is that, we don’t just have these values printed on a plaque somewhere, people live these values in their day to day and it comes with simple examples like excellence, excellence can be a value, some of these values even have more values under them, you show up to a meeting late for example, that speaks to your image, it speaks to your person, it speaks to a perception that people can relate to or make about you, if you for example write an error in an email that also speaks to your image, if you go to a client with a shabby presentation, if you go to a client with a presentation that lacks strategy, that lacks direction, that speaks to your intelligence, how do we build relationships with our clients, that speaks to interactions, not only to our clients, our stakeholders, our vendors, our colleagues as well, our contemporaries, practical examples as to how people can actually live these values in their day to day so that they don’t stay on the wall. We like to call ourselves Soldiers, Souldiers, that derives from our name Soulcoms,and everyone knows it that we have the characteristics of a soldier, the mentally of a soldier, and I will give you two examples of the type of mentality that we have and we trying to imbibe them in the team. One of the mentality of a soldier means that nothing is impossible, we ccan’t just run away, again when people say planes can not fly, a lot of things are not possible , its just because you don’t know how to do it, or you’ve not found a way to do it. Another mentality which we hold very dearly is that all projects are equal , just like Goerge Owel’s Animal Farm, all animals are equal, that’s where that came from, as an agency we always have this tendency of wanting to focus on a bigger project or a small project, or a better client and so on, we try to deal with that mindset internally and say, you know what, all projects will receive the same level of focal attention, the same level of detail, the same level of consciousness, and let’s park it there on culture, the second thing is Structure, structure is what holds everything together, it is very very key,a lot of agencies runs roughly the same model, whether you have client’s Sales operations, depending on if you have a creative or what not. For us it is not enough to have those dependent units, our structure is very clear, how do all the departments integrate, everyone is very clear on where there role starts and where their role stops, everyone is very clear on what they own, one big deal that we have in Soulcoms is ownership, you are the owner of this, right, while one of our characteristic is team spirit, we show up for each other, I can cover up for you, knowing fully well that, fine, it’s not my own, I can cover up for you, we allow that but at the end of the day everyone has core ownership, we know who owns the money, we know who owns the vendors, we know who owns the look and feel, we know who owns the strategy, who owns the client, we are very very clear on ownership. What structure has really done for us is, I think its made our operations seemless in terms of being able to deliver with high performance output, if you know the industry, for us as an agency it’s of a high tempo, we are moving very fast, quick turn around for brief, if we are not able to operate at that tempo, its going to be a matter of time before we are redundant, and of course, with that level of structure it also help us to avoid any form of burnout, burnout is something that creeps in because of the high tempo that we have, so for me two core values that has really helped my leadership is culture and structure .
If there is one thing you like to see change in the industry, what would it be.
This is a dicey area, very very dicey area. Well I think it’s one pain point and a lot of leaders will agree with me as well. I think it will be payment terms, sometimes we have to finance projects running into billions, if you look at the harsh economic realities as well that’s also something that is eating deep, if you look at interest rate for example that’s skyrocketing, you have to get Finance from the bank, you have monthly interest running on this Finance and some clients pay you 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, 120 days depending, sometimes you have your invoices not coming out in time, so I think that if there is a way we can find more structure to that, because I believe that for a lot of agency chief executives that’s a major pain point for them, because we have to be financed, what you want to see as profit, by the time the money is coming back to you you end up having no profit at all or nothing in it all, what you are doing is just trying to sustain, so if there is one thing I would want to hit upon and see changed I think that will be it. I think it’s a major pain point and a very very painful one when it comes to Finance.

So who is Ayodeji Onabajo outside being a professional person. Tell us a bit about yourself.

Ok, who am I outside work, very interesting actually, am a husband with a supportive wife. Am a fan of Manchester United, I like football. I don’t like to say this but let me say that I like boxing, I enjoy boxing a lot, I have won an amateur fight and a white collar fight in London, I think am an aspiring boxing promoter, I want to see boxing grow in Nigeria, I have a professional license to grow boxing in Nigeria, that’s something am working towards as well. In terms of my taste for music , I like things that have Violin actually, I would love to play violin but I can’t play the violin, I think everything that has the violin I listen to, I love the movies, people don’t think am shy but I can be shy sometimes, I am outgoing and I can be suddenly reserved. I am a fine blend of the external and sometimes I just like to be in my own space. I love to dress up, but for myself, people say am fashionable but I think I like to dress up for myself, I like to look good.