BrandiQ Report
President of the Media Independent Practitioners Association of Nigeria (MIPAN), Femi Adelusi has undertaken a critical assessment of developmental trends across Nigeria’s Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) sector and predicted that the industry will overcome its current business challenges to emerge stronger in the post the COVID – 19 pandemic.
Adelusi who recently ascended to the leadership of the association has declared that the new executive council under his watch would strive hard to stir the course of specialized media advertising in Nigeria to enviable heights through deploying a renewed growth agenda defined by the acronym – THINC, focusing on technological development, data innovation, human capital development, Industry thought leadership, commercial stability of the media ecosystem amongst other things.
His predictions for positive growth performance in the sector was based on a number of assumptions suggesting that a shift in advertising expenditure was basically driven by market and consumer behavior, and to that extent, marketing budgets were bound to rise steadily as the nation gets out of the economic lockdown and restrictions, and advertisers will ultimately need to invest behind their brands to recover some lost grounds.
“I think there are exciting times ahead when we cycle out of this pandemic and recession. With the pace of technology innovation, digitization and the internet of things, it is impossible to see too far ahead and so much can happen so quickly”
“With the pace of technology, media fragmentation, and consumer sophistication, our job is well cut out for us. I can see more disruptions, not necessarily a pandemic” he stated.
Giving general highlight on impacts of the pandemic on businesses across the sector, the association boss observed that several clients across the business chain had witnessed brand equity and brand value decline over the period of the lockdown, a trend, he said, was unlikely to go away quickly for many product categories.
According to him, this has also inevitably led to a significant decrease in the level of investment for a lot of sectors as the consumers are having to make tough decisions, prioritizing expenses on essential products and needs over wants.
He added that owing to the pandemic, there had been a rapid fall in some media channels, notably, the Out-of-home sector which suffered a significant decline in advertising investment during the lockdown as well as cinema advertising even as the cinemas still remained under closure.
He however observed that as Newspaper readership online and online radio recorded growth in the period, other areas including TV, Online movie, and music streaming grew significantly, and also Video Gaming has increased, adding that this was obviously positive for online advertising, been the biggest gainer.
