BrandiQ Report
The Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria (APCON), has disclosed it is working assiduously with a view to ensuring that business players in the advertising industry become beneficiaries of the Federal Government’s economic intervention package aimed at mitigating the impact of COVID 19 health pandemic on businesses.
The Council said to this end, it has commenced positive consultations with authorities at the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to determine the modalities and the necessary requirements that enable advertising practitioners to benefit from the government’s economic stimulus package.
Acting Registrar of APCON, Mrs. Ijedi Iyoha who disclosed this during an exclusive chat with BrandiQ said the outcome of the council’s consultation with the apex bank authorities had been largely positive adding that the result had since been communicated to heads of various sectoral groups in the advertising industry for necessary action.
According to the Council boss, part of the criteria highlighted by CBN was that the intervention package could not be assessed by groups, and to that extent, only individual agencies were eligible to access the funds. She was however silent on how much of the funds were set aside for would-be beneficiaries of the fund.
“There is hope, a good number of them are making attempts to reach out to the CBN and access the intervention. We just wrote to them to let them know that the advertising industry is still part of the creative industry. They’ve responded and we have sent information to all the sectoral groups to assess as individual agencies”
The criteria they gave is not for groups but for individual agencies. So it is left for the agencies to key into it and do the needful. It is not APCON that will do that for them. Our own was to of course send information across to the sectorial groups as well so they can access from them, but I don’t know the amount.
Recall that the Federal government had in the wake of the COVID – 19 health pandemic in the country rolled out several economic intervention packages, part of which was the approval of N50 billion intervention stimulus package through the CBN towards mitigating impacts of the pandemic on micro, small and medium scale enterprises sector.
The Council boss noted that the advertising industry at large was hugely affected by the negative impacts of the pandemic just as it affected several other sectors of the economy, adding that with the gradual easing of the economic lockdown, players across the sector were doing their best to ensure that everything stabilizes and gets back to normal.
Though she would not quantify in figure terms extent of losses recorded by the industry as a result of the pandemic, he noted however that a good number of business players in the industry had made significant losses adding that advertisements vetting, a major function of the council had trickled down significantly because advertisers were out of business while only a handful of advertisers presented their advert materials for vetting.
“It was worse like 2,3,4 months ago when the pandemic was on the high side” she noted, adding “but now that it is easing out and gradually things are beginning to pick up”
