‘Clients want more services on reduced budget’

The advertising industry is going through a challenging time. The CEO of one-year old 3TM Ideas, Steve Babaeko, acknowledges that. In this interview with Daniel Obi, he says the situation requires thinking outside the box for creative agencies who want to survive the heat. He also discusses issues such as international affiliation, Cannes awards. Excerpts:

What do you think is responsible for the lull in ad business in the country, apart from the much talked about global recession?

If you look at the multinationals and if you take your mind back to about 10 years ago, the multinationals were the big spenders. They were the organisations that were breaking the big campaigns. The recession is global and of course affected them at the local level as well. Though it didn’t quite shake Nigeria as much as Europe and America, this is because we are not a credit-based economy. So, what you have seen is that the landscape has changed a bit, times are when people will complain and it is true that the business has changed because budget has reduced, clients have become wiser; the budget has reduced yet they want more impact.

Therefore, clients are now asking agencies to do a rethink and it’s not about being able to spend big budget now, but with the little budget you have what can you do for us. I think agencies are little bit finding it difficult to cope with this new trend. It is like you are a Chelsea coach and you have $500 million to buy players, everybody can be a good coach in that situation because you are just going to buy the best strikers, but when you now coach Wigan Athletic with $50 million budget then your expertise to manage the club is tasked.

Now, agencies that used to do pretty good in the past because they had big budgets to manage, now find it difficult because the client is demanding so much with little budget. You have to be more strategic and think outside the box. In fact, these days there are no boxes anywhere. Agencies that cannot adapt to the new reality of the day will definitely feel the negative impact of the new reality.

Talking about the level of creativity, why are we yet to make impact in international awards like the Cannes?

There is politics everywhere. It is not impossible that the politics of awards also exist in Cannes, but beyond that I don’t think the problem is with our creative output, I believe the problem is the packaging of that creative output for that award. There is a format for it. For X3M Ideas, we are understudying agencies that have won and how they packaged their entries. Packaging the entry is as big an issue as the ad itself you are entering. We can’t keep screaming foul when India is winning, Brazil is winning, there has to be something we are doing wrong. Until we are able to crack that I think we are still going to be disadvantaged a little bit.

What is your opinion about the operation of Nigerian marketing communication agencies, especially in relation to affiliation?

We can see that the relationship between the international and the local agencies is not really sincere at the moment. Some key players who have affiliations are dumping them and some other people who are not just as good are taking them up. So, at that level, to be honest with you, I don’t even care for any of those big networks who look for affiliations in Nigeria.

I don’t think they care much about us; they are still looking more towards Asia because there is that ignorance about Africa. They don’t think that any good can come out of Nazareth, because they still think we are not there yet. I mean, for a population of 160 million nobody can ignore this country; we have our challenges as a country, but this country is still a giant on this. A company like X3M will continue to do what we set out to do and by God’s grace we will continue to grow in strength and bounds, and then by the time they finally open their eyes they will see that the landscape has quickly changed and a new crop of advertising entrepreneur has emerged.

How has the journey been so far in the last one year?

I must give God the glory that we are one year old. Sometimes, you start a business and you never know which direction it’s going to go, some other businesses since we started have folded up, but we are still here and for that reason we give God all the glory. The thing is that when you go into this kind of business, the challenges would be particularly the environment that we operate in.

I mean if you know how much we spend on diesel for instance, is mind blowing and to get the kind of manpower that will help you build the kind of business of your dream is also a challenge, but we have been fortunate that we have been able to be here, in spite of some of those challenges. Again, we have the opportunity to get to work with good clients and some of the clients we got have really made this venture worthwhile for us.