Brands Must Promise More Than Functionality…

Kenny Badmus does not come as eccentric in looks, but he can be creatively crazy. Proof number one: He quit a well paying and secure job as the creative director at Centerspread Advertising to go start The Orange Academy, an avante garde brand building and management training school. Three years down the line, the school is not only waxing stronger, it is also garnering respect within and outside the IMC industry. In this interview with Olaseeni Durojaiye, he speaks about the school, the Orange Academy Wall of Fame and sundry industry issues.

How has it been in the past three years at the Orange Academy?

It is been a journey of self discovery for us. We started on something strange, nobody was ready to venture into it; people were saying nobody will buy into it. Some even snared at us and said we weren’t going to survive for more than three months. Right now, the story is that of ‘it can only get better’.

As a matter of fact, we have more demands than we can actually meet right now when it comes to manpower. So we believe that it was a pioneering effort worth the while by helping to train young people and helping them get into an industry that had barred them all the while by some kind of sect or some kind of godfatherism. But with the Orange Academy, the road has been eased for a lot of them.

For us, it’s the story of people being able to come through and work where some of us couldn’t work in those days when we came into Advertising.

What brought about the Orange Academy?

Basically, when I was in Bates Cosse as creative manager we used to have a lot of people come in from Glo because then we were working on Glo. They used to come with a lot of young people from the universities who go to them and tell them they have ideas for Glo; the other person will say he has an idea for MTN. You never could explain to these young people that it doesn’t work like that. You cannot have an idea for a brand and bring it to the agency to execute. Nigeria is full of talents, but most of these people do not know that every brand has strategies and theme. That’s what inspired me to help these people harness their strengths and talents properly.

So when I got to Centerspread Advertising it became a big issue for me. I was surrounded by a lot of young talents who wanted to come into the industry and most of the employers were always asking for two years experience. Then I was like, we already have APCON which is training people for professional certificates; can we have a school where people can learn practically, like an internship, and based on what you have done with your hands you can go to the agencies and be able to get a job; not just a school.’ So I started toying with the idea and here we are today.

What were the initial challenges you were faced with, besides funds?

The initial challenges were like, basically I was working and how was I going to combine my work at Centerspread Advertising, considering that the creative department was one of the most challenging at the time because we had a lot of pitches and at the same time I was trying to put this together. It was a lot of hassle trying to put all of it together without cheating on my employer; that was the challenge for me. It turned out to be good and my employer was carried along.

I told them what I wanted to do. I even asked them to buy into it, but everybody was like, this guy is always crazy and coming up with ideas, this is a new thing you are doing; let’s see how it goes first.

We started at Sweet Sensation on Sundays. We would wait for people to finish their meals. Whenever they had a function, maybe a birthday party or something, we had to clean up the hall first and as men came in we would have a flip chat; it was really tiring but it was worth it.

What did you want to achieve when you came up with the idea of the Orange Academy Wall of Fame?

The Orange Academy Wall of Fame is another dimension to awards that are given to brands and companies. We found out that a lot of awards being given out are skewed toward creativity, Radio Ad jingles and all that; but we realized that this is the new era, consumers are no longer endeared to brands based on all that anymore. They are endeared to brands based on the promises the brand made and fulfilled. The Academy award is a trace, its a way to look at whether brands actually fulfill their promises or are actually charting new frontiers. We study brands and throw them open to our students and faculty so they vote based on how good the brands are doing in terms of fulfilling their brand promises. So, the academy award is actually rewarding brand experience that has been consistently delivered over a year.

Do you mean these companies don’t send their staff to the academy for any form of training?

I can assure you that our forte at Orange Academy is to train fresh graduates and we have trained over 500 graduates so far. It is rare for people from these companies to come and be part of our programmes because our programmes are too shocking for the cultures some of them are in; you have to really throw away all your conservatism for you to be part of the Orange Academy. We cannot go through all that with some of these older companies so we’ll rather stay with the younger people, those that can be active on Facebook, those that twitter. We are not patronizing any of the companies that win the Orange Academy Wall of Fame Award.

But some of the so called conservative companies already have presence on Facebook, Twitter and other social media.

What I’m saying is that we’re not patronizing them by giving those awards. These awards are given out by our students; these are brands they admire, these are brands they’ll like to study and work on, and also, some of our students do internship with some of these brands.

Its only a way of the students saying we’ve learnt about brands and these are some of the brands that we feel fulfill some of those things that we talked about in class. The highest contacts we have with some of these brands is that some people from these brands come to lecture here as part of our faculty.

Besides fulfilling brand promises, are there other criteria?

Honestly, it is thrown open to over 500 alumni and people actually cast their votes which we collate to arrive at results. It used to be an online thing where everybody could join but as the academy grew, we became bigger and we felt there was no point to make it public and it became an in-house thing because our people are well informed about brands, they understand what brand experience really means a brand experience doesn’t necessarily mean having a jingle on radio.

For us, people that vote are people that understand brands. They are people that have done projects on branding so they can see brands and say oh, this brand is toeing the line here while this other brand is doing this differently.’ So, choosing them is strictly about delivering brand experience; there is nothing more to it.

What’s the ace for the future of the industry?

The future is innovation. The walls will be broken down; I mean the fifth wall of advertising. The fifth wall of advertising is when you do advertising or you do branding that touches people and yet people do not realize that you have actually advertised to them. The word is engagement, it has bypassed expectedness, and people just get into it; without knowing people are already part of it. We talk about viral stuff going on and people just get into it without knowing it.

This was what was used for the Obama campaign. A lot of people were volunteering and even putting their money into it. That’s where branding is going, so any agency or practitioner worth his salt and who wants to deliver branding, or who wants to deliver brand advertising has to have the tools that work; tools that will be able to engage people because people are now more marketing savvy. So what new thing are you going to tell them? They already know it’s a television commercial when you show them, they already know it’s a billboard when they pass by it. So how can you use radio jingles in a different way? How can you use billboards in a different way? How can it not be about you all the time? How can it be about the consumer,  which is called ‘prosumer.’ These are people who determine what they buy. They have choices.

Look at the telecoms industry, people can decide to shun if they are tired, though it is somehow difficult because you’re used to your number. But you can really see that there are few loyalists who can really say ‘I love my network.’ However, for as long as brands and advertising continue to promise functionality which is one of the major promises of a brand, it can only last for a while.

But when you can promise a connect with the consumer, when you can promise something that the consumer can connect with much more than usability, something that can speak the language of consumers or that can outline their lifestyles: who they are, something of their culture, their trends, then you have them.

I always talk about Cell-C in South Africa. Cell-C came out of Vodacom but you’ll never know except if you’re an insider. Cell-C came out and speaks the language of the youth; they never came out to say they wanted to rule over the older generation. They speak about the youth market and they try to do a lot of things to try to get the youth market. This is a brand that is kind of irreverent, it’s a little cheeky and it’s got a lot of followership from the youth market there. We cannot all talk to the mass market, we have to try and find our niche what’re the people we really identify with? Where do we belong?

But what we find in Nigeria is the bandwagon thing. Look at what’s happening now, there is a Zain Wake Up A Millionaire promo going on and every where you turn to, there is one promo or the other about winning millions, every brand wants to latch on to that. The question is, What does your brand stand for? Who are you talking to because there are psychographics for every brand. Your brand’s psychographics may not exactly be the same as mine. Psychographics are something that over time has blurred; people are now doing a kind of dog eats dog because they want to get money from the consumer through airtime. But the consumers now know better because they are now ‘prosumer.’ At the end of the day, people have their phones sometimes they do not load it as often as they used to. Some people resort to CDMAs to make calls and only receive with their GSM lines.

So a brand that comes out there to promise just functionality may not last long. But that which comes to promise a lifestyle, that is, a consumer’s way of life, is the kind of brand that agencies will begin to manage in the future. And for you to manage that you have to unlearn some of the things that you have learnt and then get into the groove.