National Marketing Summit seeks to engage players on new possibilities

What is the objective of the forthcoming national marketing summit and brands excellence award?

Marketing Edge is organising a national marketing summit because we want to be seen engaging practitioners and professionals in genuine industry conversation. We want to be seen to be driving thought leadership in this sector, we want to be seen to be promoting contemporary issues that touch and affect the entire industry.

The idea of the National Marketing Summit came about when we looked at the plethora of issues that affect the industry that we don’t get to see an opportunity to bring together all major stakeholders in the business of brand management and management of brand business to brainstorm and have some discussions on new possibilities over old impossibilities. We have decided to create this forum to give room for further cross-fertilization of ideas as regards the business of advertising and marketing.

At Marketing Edge, we are of the view that we don’t want to be me too. The trend in town is such that every Tom, Dick and Harry wants to organise one award or the other but this is one award for which we hold in high esteem as it makes so much meaning to us because having been around for a long time, being an authoritative media platform in the industry, we have covered for over a decade, we have discovered that quite a number of marketing professionals have excelled and some that are still excelling in the industry.

As a business that is focused on promoting the brand idea, one of the ways to celebrate these personalities, these individuals and even the brands and institutions that are making waves in the sector is the why we came up with the brand personality of the year award which was a mono-award celebration where we awarded the iconoclast advertising practitioner in Nigeria in the person of Biodun Shobanjo three years ago.

We looked at the contributions he has made to the business and we gave him this award and it was well received and resonated well within the industry because this is what the industry has been waiting for, and that encouraged us to move on with the next edition when we gave award to Enyi Odigbo, also an advertising guru and a former president of AAAN who is also making waves in the industry.

Again, it also resonated well in the industry. Along the line, we felt that why making it a mono-award, it was limiting so we decided to expand the category by also nominating George Thorpe, who has been on the client side before but now on the agency side. We also gave award to notable marketing people and this year again the tradition has not changed. We are rewarding the iconoclast advertising people, we have personality of the decade in person of Steve Omojafor, chairman of STB Mccan, and of course we have further expanded it to accommodate the brand people by recognising the Brand CEO of the Year in person of CEO, Airtel, Segun Ogunsanya, we also have brand of the year, which will be giving to Orijin, one of the latest on Guinness stable and other categories.

What would you say is the impact of the initiative over the years?

The impact of the initiative is that it has helped the industry to further rediscover itself. It is a kind of a rediscovery initiative for both the advertising people and the marketing people. When we organised a thought leadership discussion like we are having on National Marketing Summit, we come to the table and focus on the contemporary issues affecting the industry, and definitely there must be takeaways from this initiative that will definitely help professionals in their various offices or businesses to guide them on the way forward.

It will help the industry to really find the best way forward, a kind of pathfinder to the industry and of course the initiative in the area of rewarding individual and giving awards to brands has also promoted the spirit of competition. we are trying to make the industry to be more competitive, set new agenda and make brand owners to assess themselves in all ramifications.

How do you assess people’s perception of the award?

The perception of the industry stakeholders out there is encouraging and very positive. We are further emboldened to continue with this award initiative because of the fact that industry people see it as very credible and very authentic. At Markeing Edge, we don’t reward mediocres, we don’t reward idiocy rather what we reward is excellence. For each edition, we have always assembled very knowledgeable experts across the integrated marketing communications to do a general review of the industry and during that period they assess individuals, brands and agencies that are deserving in terms of what they do and what they have contributed to the industry.

One of the challenges we have initially is how do we determine the best agency in Nigeria or the leading agencies in Nigeria but because of the fact that we don’t have the right data to know how much a particular agency is billing. we have to resort to quantity research approach which is why we are not restrained by factors of which particular agency is doing the highest volume of business but when we do our assessment generally there is a way that our judges do it by looking at the volume of business and all of that and they come up with the best agencies in different sectors. Also brand experts who have actually done one or two researches about the brands in the market will give us their feedback but let me also say that this should be a takeaway for industry people that our industry should try as much as possible to release information about their agencies, should release information about their brands too.

What informed the Marketing Edge idea?

The Marketing Edge idea was informed by the need to expand the frontiers of marketing and other elements in the Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC). We came up with this idea because we believe that Nigerian professionals in this sector must constantly be updated about happenings and developments within the industry, particularly in the IMC.

What have been your challenges and how have you tackled them?

Twelve years of promoting the brand idea by Marketing Edge, the challenges and the hurdles have been phenomenal I must confess. Like every other businesses in Nigeria, the challenges of infrastructure, high printing cost, access to funds, human capital deficit and other things that are common to businesses in this environment are constant.

We live in a society where the reading culture is on the decline. We write beautiful stories, well researched articles make effort to publish with the belief that there will be excitement on the part of the readers or the number of people that subscribe, only to discover that the reverse is the case. People love what we do but how many of them are ready to pay for it with their money? We have the major issue of poor reading culture that has not really helped to translate into raising the number of subscription because the magazine, being an industry magazine, is very specific and specialised, not a magazine that you sell on the newsstands like every other news paper; the language is not the language of the street. On the issue of advert patronage, we thank God that we have some relations and enjoy loyalty of some brands that have keyed into the vision and mission of the magazine.