Are Nigerian Outdoors Not Good Enough For The Grand Prix?
At the 2009 LAIF Awards organised by the Association of Advertising Agencies of Nigeria (AAAN), no outdoor company won the Grand Prix in the outdoor category. Since awards are given to appreciate best practices and excellence, and to encourage the recipients to do better, one wonders whether Nigerian outdoor companies had no offering in the last one year that was worthy of a Grand Prix. Onyinye Obiweluozor spoke with some practitioners and stakeholders and reports that there might be some knotty issues bothering on selection criteria.
The 2009 Lagos Advertising and Ideas Festival (LAIF) organised by the Association of Advertising Agencies of Nigeria has come and gone but not without leaving some questions unanswered. The awards were grouped into four categories which included Prints, Television, Radio, and Outdoor. Each category had a Grand Prix with TBWA Concepts, Bate Cosse and 141-Worldwide taking the Grand Prix Awards for Television, Radio and Prints respectively, while no work in the outdoor category qualified for a Grand Prix.
Against the background of this, many questions are being asked. What happened to all the outdoor displays on our streets? Do they not qualify for the Grand Prix and why? What were the yardsticks for measuring the winners of these awards?
Mr. Lekan Fadolapo, Executive Director/CEO, AAAN points out that none of the works submitted for the outdoor category met the requirements for winning the Grand Prix and attributes that to internal challenges.
“The jobs that were judged for the last LAIF awards were the jobs of January to December 2008 not 2009. That period was one of the most turbulent periods for the outdoor sector nationwide because 70% of their businesses are in Lagos and that was when outdoor agencies had issues with the Lagos State Signage and Advertisement Agency (LASAA). The patronage of the sector reduced during that period, so there was a notable reduction in the quality of creativity since no company will want to invest in a problematic venture,” he says.
Going further he says: “The Grand Prix in each category represents the best job in that category. Originality, craftsmanship, execution, relevance to breed (the job’s relevance to client’s demand) and production values were the criteria the jurors based their judgements on. Unfortunately, none of the entries submitted for outdoor category met the requirements for winning the star prize. Their scores were very low. Some of these entries lacked originality and were not relevant to clients’ demand; even the execution was too poor.”
He also revealed that in sub-categories, there were only silver and bronze and no gold won by the outdoor agencies.
“It is not compulsory that we must have gold. It all depends on how the job can meet up with the five criteria. If these jobs do not meet up with the jurors’ scores for gold, there will not be any Gold Award Winner,” he adds.
Practitioners, speaking on the qualification of the Nigerian Outdoors in winning the Grand Prix, also bared their minds.
Mr. Alfred Akokhia, Associate Director/CEO Wetherheads Outdoor Ltd, points out that, “The best person to answer that question is the client because you can get good outdoor companies in this country that have been very creative and innovative in the past one year. Technology has become an in-thing in outdoor and I think this great stride should be better appreciated by agencies.”
Mr. Sola Akinsiku, Managing Director/Chief Executive, KOK Visibility Edge, opines that, “I do not think that the Nigerian outdoor advertising practice is not good enough. I do not agree that that was why no Grand Prix was awarded to that sector by the LAIF people. I enjoy the benefit of my deep professional conviction that the outdoor industry in Nigeria competes quite favourably with what is obtainable in the more technologically advanced economies. Yes, there are rooms and opportunities for improvement and for better performance. But, I am convinced we are not doing badly.”
Speaking further he says, “I do not see why or how Outdoor as a sub-sector of the media of display should be judged using those criteria. They can only apply to the ad agency category, as they relate purely to the development (and not to the medium of deployment) of the Out-of-Home message. I know that our brand of outdoor practice is creative and it thrives on innovativeness. It’s about the most vibrant in the West African sub-region! Perhaps we should get it quite clearly here: the organisers may have excluded a prix for outdoor message creation, and not in terms of exposure. Creating the message and deploying it are two different issues. If the jurors did not find any of the outdoor messages (created by the ad agencies) worthy of a prix, so be it.”
According to Mrs. Maureen Umanah, Managing Director, Executive Options Media Ltd, “The Nigerian outdoor displays are good enough for the Grand Prix in every angle except, maybe, on originality where we can say that some of us are not very original in our displays. But the environment we are in does not give much room for creativity with the activities of LASAA, power failure, social miscreants and so on, especially on the aspect of power. Most of the displays we see in technologically advanced economies are very good because a better environment for business is put in place with adequate power supply. With the state of things in Nigeria and what we do presently in the industry, I can say we are doing well, though there are rooms for improvement.
