“Agencies Are Creating Value for brands Through Performance Marketing” ……..Onyemauwa ….Bean Creative IMC boss

Anthony Onyemauwa is Vice President , Agency Lead at Bean Creative IMC…. next-generational integrated marketing communications (IMC) agency based in Lagos, Nigeria,. The agency focuses on connecting brands to youth centric culture through strategic storytelling and digital innovation. Fondly called Ikemba in Social circles, He is widely equipped with industry experiences spanning near two decades in Strategic Marketing, Brand building and integrated Marketing Communications (IMC). He has worked for key notable brands including , MTN Nigeria, Konga, Luckbets , Emel Group and Lowe Lintas.
He oversees the agency’s four core verticals that includes talent management, new media , PR reputation management , Creative and traditional advertising. He takes critical examination of state of Nigeria’s IMC Industry operations, prospects and challenges in this online media expose captured recently by News-Mart Editor, Clifford Amuzuo. He believes agencies could create greater value for brands by way of effective Performance marketing. : Excepts

What’s your assessment today of Nigeria’s advertising and Marketing Communications industry
The industry is a very vibrant one although it is fraught with lots of challenges in recent times, particularly is the fact that increasingly Marketing budgets are shrinking, increasingly experienced and competent professionals are leaving the space. They are leaving the space because of the advent of things like fintech, remote work, Artificial Intelligence, a lot of that, and so when you combine those factors and a couple of other factors, those comprises what you want to see as challenges in business that the industry is facing, but by and large I think it is still a very viable industry, it is still an industry that is doing well, an industry that in recent times they’ve been winning Awards particularly on the agency side and n terms of representations at the global level. We have more award winning works coming out, so if you want to look at it from the perspective of how well its doing, I think its doing very well except for the challenges that I spoke about, the shrinking budgets but, by and large I think its not in decline, its doing well.
You do agree that Marketing budgets are shrinking, so how do you think that agencies are coping to achieve better results for clients.
Marketing budgets are shrinking as expected and that is because as we are told in elementary economics that human wants are endless but the means of satisfying them are limited, so when you have businesses coming up and you are still targeting the same number, the same population, the same vision , of course you will have less and less to work with. So what are agencies doing to work with that Marketing budget, number one is performance marketing, agencies are increasingly having to be able to justify every kobo they spend, every sent they spend, that is performance Marketing, they are also looking at how they use AI and technological advancement to justify, particularly data, using data tools to justify why X amount of budget should be spent on Y campaign and all of that, agencies are also looking at instead of doing just advertising or PR or marketing, agencies are increasingly looking at how they can do integrated Marketing Communications, meaning having all the aspects of marketing being provided together as a bundle for the client ensuring that the clients have better value for the money they spend. If you look at these three aspects of data, performance Marketing, IMC, providing a bundle as against providing just advertising or Media planning these are the things that agencies are doing to ensure that they can get better value for the Marketing budget for the clients no matter how small it is.
What’s your outlook for advertising spend for the remaining months of this year, and how does it come to you compared to the first half of the year.
The first half of this year has been sluggish, it has been slow, clients and brands and businesses has not really been spending as they are expected to spend and it’s very understandable seeing the economic temperature of the country, however going into the second half of the year I expect that there will be more spending, though it could be cautious, but when I say more, I don’t mean as in having more money available to spend and everything, am actually looking at more in terms of strategy, being specific, specific things that can be done to bring about better value for spend. So I think there will be more spending because if you look at it always, second half of the year there are more economic activities, consumers are more prone to spending, it’s a time when there is usually more spending from the consumer end, I think brands and businesses will be able to take advantage of that, but they will be strategic about it, so while raising their spending a little bit they will still be strategic about what they are using the spend for.
There is growing pressure on returns on investment, brands wants to see the results on what they’re invested in which is understandable , but would you agree that Ssles should be the only indicator of these investments being successful.
Well Ideally, for every business enterprise the whole essence of investing in Marketing or any sort of activity is to get customers to sell, however Marketing goes beyond selling, marketing actually is not even selling, Marketing is a quite a bigger thing, you are looking at brand awareness, you are looking at engagements, you are looking at a lot of things, so I think that if you really want to measure how well advertising and campaigns have worked Sales alone is not enough, it depends on what was the objective of the campaign, the campaign objective may be to sell, the campaign objective may be to have visibility, to have more awareness, to have more engagement, so if the objective of the campaign is to have more people know about the brand but not necessarily buy the brand it will be unfair to judge or measure the success of that campaign using Sales because that was never the objective, however if the objective of the campaign is to get products or goods out of the door into customers or consumers hands then ofcourse you can use Sales specifically as a tool to measure it. Like I told you, it’s all about the objective of the campaign. For example if I have two thousand boxes that I want to sell and I want to sell them in two weeks time, if in two weeks time I sell one thousand boxes , by the time the timeline terminates, if all I’ve sold is one thousand boxes, from a target and objective point of view, I have not succeeded, however from a bigger perspective, long term, even though I have only been able to sell one thousand within the timeline I have given myself, there is every likelihood that in the next two weeks or one month I might even sell four thousand more, so that is why I spoke about the objective, so if I have a timeline, I have a date, I have a specific period that X amount is supposed to be sold, if that amount is not sold, on the basis of that, the campaign may not have been a success, however if I say I want to sell, and I want to be able to sell x amount, and did not sell upto that amount and I know within the next weeks or months, I will exceed what I set out to sell then I can’t completely call it a failure, so like I said, its about the objective, what is the objective, if the objective is to sell within a space of time then Sales could be used in measuring it. This is because everything in Marketing is built around timelines, that is why in Marketing and in the business place the year is broken into quarters, Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4. So in some business if you have a budget, you must spread it up in Q 1, if you don’t finish that in Q1 you spread it over to Q2, if I don’t spent that money in Q1 by Q2 it’s money lost. Same way if you have a Sales target to meet by Q1, even if the projections is that you exceed that target in Q2, as far as Q1 is concerned you have not succeeded, so it’s a function of the objective of the campaign always.
Industry experts now argue about creative effectiveness, media effectiveness should no longer be measured separately. What’s your take on that.
Yes I agree, they should no longer be measured separately because in the present economic space that we have now they are both co- dependent, you have creative effectiveness, you have media effectiveness. If you have great creative and you use the wrong media , it’s like what we say in advertising that if you are not advertising , its like winking at a woman in the dark, you know you are winking but she can’t see you, so the whole purpose of winking is lost, so if you have a great creative , your creative is effective but you put it in the wrong media , of course the creative will just die, its like driving a Lambogini in Lagos traffic, it’s a Lambogini you can speed, you can be on the highway but it’s a waste because you don’t put it in a space where it can achieve its true potential. so I strongly believe that creative effectiveness and media effectiveness should be measured together and not separately. If you have a good creative, to make it work you have to put it in the right media, if you have the right media and you have a good creative , the good creative will perform poorly even though it’s in the right media, both of them should be measured together.
You frequently advocate for data driven decision making, are Nigerian brands making use of enough consumer data, or do you think too many decisions are still based on instinct.
I think I must be honest with you, before now lots of decisions made by Nigerian brands were made either based on experience, factual experience, industry experience, gut feeling or what you call native intelligence, I just got that feeling. In the past, we walked to that and we found out that between nine to ten its always correct, but because of the advent of digital, increasingly there is a need and a call for data to be used and a lot of data is been used because data does not lie. With data , what you see is what you get. So increasingly data is been used as a means of making important decisions for businesses , for brands, for campaigns and what have you, but still, there is still a lot of gaps, .particularly with the older guys who still base a lot of their decisions on got feelings, native intelligence, personal experiences they’ve had over the years, but I think that the younger ones and a couple of older guys who are amenable to digital are beginning to appreciate the need to use data. In many industries or let me say a couple of industries where the business is heavily based on digital, data is used for decision making, you can not make any decision in a space of e-commerce without using data, you can’t make decisions in a space like telecoms without using data because the data is coming everyday, you know who is buying and who is not buying, for e-commerce you know how many people shopped , how many are returning customers, how many cartons were left unattended, how many cartons were pending for one week, the data is there, so you have to make decisions. I think for the older folks , some of them still make decisions based on got feelings or native intelligence, but increasingly more professionals and business are becoming open to using data as a means of guiding decision making.
Talking about technology, artificial intelligence is now transforming creativity, media buying and customer engagement, how can agencies embrace AI without loosing the human touch.
I always tell anybody that cares to hear that AI can never replace the professional in the sense that I see AI as an entanglement, AI is supposed to be something that enables you to do your work better, so AI cuts down time, it helps you to do repeated automatons but AI can not replace human empathy, it can also not replace the way people speak, AI can not replace that, the nuances , the pop culture, there are things that AI can not replace, so I think that, number one, AI should not be seen as something that is coming to replace something, no. AI provides data for you, AI provides information for you, AI will cut down time on routine task and what have you, however, the strategic thinking, the human element, the understanding of the society , feelings and all of that is still something that AI can not replace, so I think what professionals are doing now , how they are leveraging AI is to say, what are the things that AI can help us do better. AI can help you do research, AI can do lots of research in minutes, if not seconds for you, so we are looking at how we can use AI to do lots of research, we are using AI to achieve repetitive tasks, those things that you need to do again and again, but that is where AI stops, after that the parts that has to do with thinking, analytic thinking , understanding the consumer, understanding the market and all of that is still purely the human thing, so I think that professionals at the moment are using AI for what it ought to be used for and those who are concerned that AI would replace them are probably not really good enough because if you know your onion you should be able to know that AI is just a tool to help you, that you can actually use to make better decisions , to work faster, work smarter but it can not completely replace you as a professional.
Do you believe in pitches and how do you see the pitch process. Do you believe agencies should be compensated based on the intellectual property that they possess.
Pitches, yes, anything involving human beings can never be hundred percent fair, it can not be fair because I have been in this industry now for about Nineteen years now , I have been on the agency side, I have been on the client side, Now I manage an agency here, so I’ve been on both side of the divide,. I have gone for pitches as an agency, I have overseen pitches on the clients side, so I know that as much as we try to be pragmatic about the process, there is still a place for us having preferences based on whatever reason. Then as a matter of paying compensations, I strongly believe in paying compensations because when agencies go for pitches they go all out, resources are expended to put together the briefs that are presented, team members are taken off existing tasks that bring revenue to fix on this one with the hope of bringing in a new business, so I think that ab- initio when you make engagements it should be made clear that hey, we are engaging only four agencies to pitch, the successful agency will get the account whereas the other three if you don’t get the account we are going to pay you something to compensate, what does that do, it ensures that everybody goes all out, putting their best knowing that the worse that can happen is if you don’t like it, at least you get compensated, but we will do our best to get it. I know some people may also think that oh if there is compensation then we do whatever we can and we get compensation and we don’t have to stress so much, but more often than not agencies will go for those pitches because they desire to get the account, and they go all out, so I strongly opine that agencies should get compensated for pitches when they do not Win the account or perhaps, a middle ground can be reached whereby we have a scoring system, there are four or five of you pitching, we have a scoring system , the winner gets the account, of the remaining four of you , any of you that score above a particular threshold, will get compensated, you are not getting the account but you get compensated, then the others will go. That will ensure that people don’t do shoddy work and expect that we just get something whether we are selected or not we will get something, so that should be the way forward between the client and the agencies, ensuring that the client gets the best possible work and the agency also put in their best. I think that should be the way to go about it.

Let’s talk about young professionals in the industry today, some of them don’t think of joining the professional bodies, what’s your perspective on this, do you think it’s important for young professionals joining professional bodies.
I think its important for a number of reasons. Number one, joining a professional body shows that you are a professional and you belong in the industry, you identify with the industry. Number two, most professionals don’t have colleagues outside of the environment where they work, but by being a member of a professional body it also enables you have other people outside your work place that are professionals like you that you can keep professional relationships with. Also, it also opens up opportunities for you such that if you are a brilliant young professional having all it takes and you are in the mist, because you are there, they can see you and they can testify to your brilliance, your hard work, when opportunities come you can be recommended. Also, because professional Associations has all age band across the spectrum such as members, associates, Fellows and so on, there is always a space, an opportunity for mentorship for young professionals.