‘Ethics, Reputation, Technology are key to Nigeria’s rebirth’

The Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer, Caritas Communications Limited, Adedayo Ojo in this interview, shares his views on the need for adoption of strong ethical standards, reputation management techniques in business and the adoption of cutting-edge technology, not only in the public relations business but other sectors of the economy. He said that Nigeria’s rebirth will be possible if ethics and professionalism are the bedrock of business practices. 

It has been projected that the economy will grow by 2.5% in 2018. Has the marketing communications industry recovered from the recession yet?
There hasn’t been a full recovery. One way the recession affected the industry is that the quantum of funds available for clients to spend on communication and marketing reduced drastically. This is because the economy shrunk significantly. The way that works is that there is a consequent reduction in liquidity. Equally, because in a number of cases, results from communication and stakeholder investment programs and projects are rather intangible, there is the erroneous impression by those who don’t understand how it works that such investment are unnecessary. As such, the communication sector suffers.

Therefore, the total revenue available for the public relations, advertising or experiential agencies reduced during the recession. Secondly, because organizations were challenged to work smarter and more efficiently, they are now asking for more from agencies. However, this is positive in some way, because it meant that agencies that are unable to deliver superior quality services for the limited available funds will be edged out.

What is your perception of technology adoption in the marketing communications industry?
In the social sciences and humanities, except you have an initial benchmark, it is very hard to measure results, and that is the challenge that most agencies that are not professional face. Another misconception a number of people make is to equate public relations with media relations. This is ridiculous! Media is key for channel communication but what about strategy, research, implementation, measurement?

So, if we approach public relations methodically as it ought to be, one will notice that measuring results is relatively easy and straight forward if one sets objectives succinctly and plots where to go were before setting out. It is just because we tend not to do things the way they ought to be done in this country that get people and organisations into disastrous situations. This is a challenge that permeates the entire society beyond public relations. And, to fulfill destiny as a nation, we must fix it!

In our profession, we have to meticulously profile stakeholders, know them clearly, their demographics, social habits, what they do, what they like, how they consume news, what kind of news and information they consume, what are the channels, what time of day do they get it, etc. When you get all of those and focus on it, it becomes clear that these are the things you can’t do effectively without technology. Several years ago, profiling has to be done using such social science tools such as observation and peer reports but today, artificial intelligence (AI) tools are available.

Today a very basic AI program can tell one a little bit about peoples’ personality just by asking a few questions. The advent of technology has helped up to be able to be more exact, even in the humanities and social sciences.

Technology has come to simplify what we do; the challenge is that anyone that does not adopt those tools is going to be left behind. I remember that 15 years ago for instance, even 10 years ago when we started Caritas, we would basically try to get all the newspapers especially since most newspapers were not online in Nigeria. You had to get media executives who would sit down, read every page and mark them. But today, we have acquired several software programs that capture keywords about organizations and even tell us the mood of reportage measured as sentiments.
Technology has come to revolutionize everything that we do including communications and public relations and the sooner everybody adopted that the better. I know that seven to eight years ago, I wasn’t on Twitter, I didn’t know what it was about, even when I knew what it was about, I didn’t bother. Today, in order to understand what is going on and how it affects our clients and how it affects even our own company and how it shapes the future of the business that we are in, it is important to be there. Except one is a participant observer, one cannot get the details nor clearly understand what is going on.

Caritas will be 10 in 2019. What have you learnt? Have you achieved everything you set out to achieve?
First,10 years in the life of an organisation is relatively small if you look at the very fact that most of the great companies and brands that we know today started decades ago. It’s been an interesting and exciting story and it’s been equally challenging.

Of course, when we started, some of the challenges, hiccups in the economy, were pressing. The 2008 crash of the stock market and the global financial crisis that followed were challenges. Caritas has come through strong and remains focused on its vision and mission. It is heartwarming that we thought there was a gap in the service market and that hypothesis has been validated. This in itself is extremely satisfying.

We started with a clear idea of what we wanted to do. One of the things that I remain very proud of, is the fact we had a very well researched business before we started. In terms of focusing on energy, oil and gas as our primary sector when we started out, that was achieved.

At the risk of being immodest, we are the leading corporate communications consulting company in the energy, power, oil & gas business sector in Nigeria. We pioneered that specialty in Africa. When we started as a specialized energy, oil and gas industry-focused consulting company, there was no other one, but since then, a few others have come up. One of the things we planned for was to start from a sector that we are familiar with, where we could very easily demonstrate skill, knowledge, competence and expertise, and from there, move on to other sectors. By the grace of God, we have been able to do that because today Caritas not only plays in the energy oil and gas, we support conglomerates, we support clients in the public sector, politics, NGO’s, financial services, Fast Moving Consumer Goods sector (FMCG), technology and telecommunications. So, we are on track!

The energy sector is volatile. Do you mediate between host communities and oil majors?
One of the projects that we worked on about four years ago which I think signposts some of the competencies in Caritas was one that was based on first of all, benchmarking what the relationship, the level of cordiality and rapport between the organization and the primary communities were.
So, we defined that and had a benchmark, we designed a number of programmes which ran over a period of two years. And periodically, we gauge and tested again to see how the communities feel, do they know more about the organization, are there expectations being met? What were their priorities? The result showed clearly that those programmes worked. The perception of the organization improved significantly. This was a project where we tested relationship, we had a questionnaire, we had focus group discussions, we had interviews and all types of tool across different sectors of the stakeholders for the client.
From the communities to the regulators, business partners and the media, there was a benchmark when we started the programme, at the middle of the programme there was an evaluation and at the end there the programme, there was an evaluation.

Let’s talk about the Caritas Leadership Reputation Roundtable. The theme is, “Ethics, Reputation & Technology in a VUCA Economy,” what informed the choice? 
If you look at the key words they are: Ethics, Reputation, Technology. These three words are relevant not only to communications or public relations but to the entire economy. If you look at the Nigerian society today, the issue of ethical conduct is at the core of all of the other issues that we have. If at the family level there is proper ethical conduct, it will positively impact child upbringing, household values, the work environment, and indeed the entire society.

If people begin to think more critically about what they are doing, to ask themselves, if is it right, fair or ethical, if it will offend any sensibilities, if people are guided by making ethical considerations about what they do, at home, work, school, church or in the mosque, I bet that things would change.

One of the things that I remember very vividly was that growing up, if you have a friend that came home with you for the first time, one of the questions your parent will ask is “who are the parents” and if his/her parent happens to have a suspicious background they will say: OH NO! You can’t be friends to the son or daughter to Mr. XYZ.
Talking about reputation, I would say reputation is everything, because it is not only what you do but also what you do not do. It is also how you do what you do and what drives you into doing it and how people perceive you at the end of the day.

There is an intrinsic relationship in my view between reputation and ethics. An unethical person in a society that is predominantly ethical will not have a good reputation.
However, today, if you look at what makes up the reputation of either an individual or an organization, it is not only what the person does or does not do, it is also how the person is perceived.
That said, the moment you begin to talk about the mass media, you are beginning to move into technology. So, there is a very close relationship between ethics and reputation. Technology has become a potent factor that affects ethics and reputation.

If you look at what people consume and what people have access to, it has changed dramatically over the last few years. For instance, 20 years ago, you probably will only worry about what television channels your children watch growing up, but today you also have to worry about what kind of sites they have access to on the internet through their phones, the kind of games they play, etc. So you cannot talk about one without the other and we thought that as part of our responsibility to the society, as a company to the society that has made it possible for us to thrive and operate successfully over a period of almost 10 years we need to give back, so we thought one of the things we could do is to bring key leaders of industry to sit down together and talk a little bit about these key issues against the background of the kind of society we are in.

There is so much inter-connectivity between what people do, how it is perceived and what tools, now technology are available and how it can influence each other in one way or the other.
So, we thought that bringing experts, professionals together to talk about some of these issues is timely and then with the elections starting very soon. It is just right to talk about some of these issues.

In 2017, the New York Times reported that Walmart spent over $18million on ads to improve its reputation. What’s your assessment of the attention Nigerian companies pay to their reputations?

There is a significant opportunity for Nigerian companies and even multinational companies based in Nigeria to do more in shaping and protecting their reputation. There are a number of sectors in the economy that you can describe as being accident-prone and the truth is that if there was more investment in preparedness to deal with emergencies reputation capital will be better protected.

So, with more investment in terms of preparedness for the people, for the organization to determine what it will do if it happens, how you will do it, practicing and training people to do what is right, it will definitely reduce the reputational capital that is lost when the inevitable happens. Crisis preparedness is an area where companies in Nigeria can make a lot of improvement.
Many people believe erroneously that it is only in the energy/oil and gas companies that you need to do a lot of work around crisis communication and crisis preparedness. It should be everywhere because you cannot be too prepared for emergencies and the more prepared you are, the better for the organization.

There is significant opportunity for Nigerian based companies, whether multinationals or local, to also use more of the expertise that resides in professionals. Most of the companies in Nigeria do not have in-house communication professionals, neither do they retain agencies.

If you get the right professional or the right agency to provide professional advice, you will notice that at the end of the day, it is smarter to do things professionally, because the money you are spending on communication, marketing or advertising can be better deployed.

Indeed, people talk about communication loosely, forgetting that communication is a process involving two parties and in the middle are the channels, and there is a way you can maximize the channels, you can optimize the opportunities in those channels. All of those things are better done by professionals. Again, it is part of the challenge of the Nigerian society. It is not that there are no laws. For instance, several Nigerian organizations employ people that are not members of the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations. Several organisations retain agencies that are not members of Public Relations Consultants Association of Nigeria (PRCAN).

They should not. The law establishing the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations is clear. Regrettably, there is no one who is there to say you must abide by this law. Those are the challenges. It is part of the challenge we have in most of the professions in the humanities. Most people think they can do most of the things we do in marketing communications but it is not true. Until most organisations try the professionals and the non-professionals, that is when they can see the difference.

What experience gives you the most joy after several years of working in this industry?
There are a number of them but I very proudly remember some of the work that we did while I was at ExxonMobil in 1998 which led to a commendation by ThisDay. I am proud to say that it was the first time a newspaper in Nigeria would commend a multinational oil and gas company on the way the company handled information sharing and communication.
That experience has helped us to build a practice that is ready, competent to support other clients on how they proactively manage information especially during a crisis.

What drove you to write the book, Public Relations Thoughts and Deeds?
Wow! I thought it is important I write a book because I have been privileged in several ways.  I have had a career that has traversed what ordinarily would be two professions – from journalism to public relations.

I have been able to work as a second generation, probably first generation, of communication professionals in the energy/oil and gas industry. And when I looked around, I noticed that not many people have the kind of unique experience that I have, and, most of those that have the kind of experience that I have and even more, have not documented their experience. I thought there was need to document what one has learnt and experienced, not only as a way of helping to remember what has happened in the past but also to shape the future.