The Industry Should Focus on Accountability, Empowerment of the Younger Generation
Young but highly experienced Ayodele Kupoluyi, assumed the leadership of Starcom Media in February 2008. He joined the company, a member of the Rosabel group from LTC JWT, where he worked across different functions including media and client services. Having learned under the tutelage of Ayo Oluwatosin, founding Managing Director, Starcom Media, Kupoluyi says the company currently plying its trade across the West African sub-region and beyond for its clientele has all its takes to operate at the highest professional level of the media planning and buying function. He also touches on pressing ethical and professional issues expected to take the industry to its next level. He spoke with O’Lekan Babatunde and Yetunde Ogundipe.
About Starcom Media
Starcom media was nine years last month precisely on October 16, having been established in the year 2000. The credit for this goes to Ayo Oluwatosin, pioneer GM/MD, Bunmi Johnson, Dan Oshodin and Williams Onwuso. They are the four major people that moved from Rosabel to start a media independent (MI) for the group to have a share of the MI practice which was the new dimension to the business of advertising then.
The company is one of the very few MI that started in Nigeria. It was like they were just thrown out without any business. Unlike most companies which will move their media business to the new MI to provide some soft landing, the Starcom team was started from the scratch. The first major account they pitched and won was the P&G media business. Fortunately after the pitch it came out that the business was part of Starcom group’s account, so that invariably helped to consolidate the business. Over the years a lot of businesses have come in. We won the Nestle account which moved after a while due to international network realignment. We also worked on OOH for V-Mobile till they changed to Celtel, but due to conflict of principles, we had to resign the account at a point. Other businesses in our kitty include Malta Guinness, Redbull, Samsung, Chi product among others.
Starcom Media is a very youthful organization but highly experienced organisation, the people in charge here are perhaps some of the youngest in the industry, do you see this as challenge or a plus for the company?
Like I said, exposure is something that is very good, globally when you are getting to 45 you should be planning retirement. Now if you check most executives and most CEOs, are between 35 and 40. It is only in Nigeria that we imbibe the sit-tight attitude, probably inherited from the political class. The owners of this business at a point in time last year just felt that they have done well enough, so they pulled back to see what the younger generation has to offer. And God has really helped us. The business is growing stronger and stronger. So I will say it is an opportunity and the challenge is working for us. I will also encourage the other agencies to empower the younger generation.
10 years ago or thereabout, the drive for specialization and better ROI compelled multinationals to subscribe to media independent’s services, is the story true today?
It is a global phenomenon and mind you no country is an island unto itself. MI business has been a global success even before it was embraced in Nigeria. And really, it has proved and continues to prove profitable and yields very high return on investment to organizations that engage the services of media specialist agencies. This is the era of specialization. Before now, specialist functions like PR, media, events and so on resided in the regular agency. But now you concentrate on your area of strength which is better for all – the agency, the client and the industry.
The Media Planning Services (MPS) is perhaps the best of the data available in the industry today, some say it is not sufficient for reliable planning and buying decisions. What are the challenges?
The Nigeria nation, close to fifty years is still struggling; we cannot get to our destination in a day. The most important thing is not to be stagnant. MPS started well by providing data for the industry, from the point where it started, it is obvious there have been a lot of progress – the response rate has increased; even the usage of the data itself has improved, interrogation is becoming better day by day. I am privy to know that MPS has launched another package which is far better than what was obtainable.
Expectedly, the data appreciation has improved. The truth about MPS is that, it has helped media planning in this market. You can now rate programmes without bias, I can tell you that in Lagos for instance, there is a Radio station launched just last year, and within six month of its entry, the station was rated and on the other hand are stations that have been around for more than five years, yet ratings are low. So, it is not about what stations claim, but rather what target consumers listen to and watch. There were programmes that we’re rating very highly in the days of soap opera, tele-novella showing within peak time belt, but when that was yanked off by BON regulation, the data showed this. Media planning/buying is no longer based on relationship but is data driven and MPS is trying hard to sort the data end.
There are constant frictions between the media tracking companies and MIs/media houses mostly on compliance issues, what is the compliance rate in the market?
This is another angle to auditing the auditor that is monitoring agencies. Compliance in this industry is less than 90%. That means, any client that is not using monitoring agencies is losing a minimum of 10% of its advertising spend. Having said that, the monitoring agencies, media providers and media buying agencies, are now like a triangle, with all of them functioning as one part. The service of media monitoring is to ensure that whatever spot or insertion that is put either on air, in newspaper or outdoor is done to specifics. Media Vendors were not subscribing to reports until recently and there have been a lot of controversies about the genuineness of monitoring agencies’ report.
What is the grouse with this media tracking reports?
There are alleged reports that some monitoring agencies sometime generate different reports for media buying companies/advertising agencies, the media houses and the clients. We need to investigate this to be sure that whichever report comes out of the monitoring agencies are correct and that it is not biased or intentionally falsified to cause chaos. Tracking companies must be above board by capturing the real thing. What we’ve also discovered outside Lagos is that some of the media monitoring companies do not have their transmitters in the perfect locations. Sometimes they install one transmitter to cover two or three states. These may be grossly inadequate for proper monitoring which is necessary for coming up with correct report. This may be part of the challenges that we currently have. But ultimately, with advancement in technology via satellite, there will be a lot of improvement. Some new players are coming into the sector and they are ready to do monitoring that is almost foolproof.
Closely related Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC), MIPAN, ADVAN, AAAN are passionate about this, as a practitioner in the industry, don’t you think it is taking too long to materialize? What are the implications of this on the industry?
The industry cannot play in isolation of the global environment and everywhere, print advertising is paid for by circulation figures. You calculate advert rate based on circulation figures. It is not based on inflation neither is it based on increase in fuel pump price nor on how much the media houses pay their staff. It is based on circulation figures and based on that, we calculate your rate; the number of people that read the paper will then determine how much one full page advert should cost in your newspaper. This is not so in Nigeria today. There are no authentic figures.
Will it be appropriate for the client to fix media rates? That has been the contention of the media owners.
We are not fixing rates we are only saying that, that is how it is done globally. There are scientific ways of calculating advert rates. And in some markets, the rate could fluctuate. So when your circulation rate increases the advert rate will increase, likewise if your rate drops your advert rate should follow suit. So there will now be a need for newspapers to market their product such that, the circulation figures will either continually go up or it will become consistent.
The short term measure by ADVAN, AAAN and MIPAN, has generated its own controversies, but were those figures actually useful for planning?
The data is ready and in the market. It is just unfortunate that a lot of us over estimated not only the circulation but also the print-run per day. The people who did the research are “professors” in this newspaper industry. These are people who knew all the newspaper agents (they distribute the papers) all over Nigeria. And these newspaper agents keep figures of newspapers that come to them everyday – Mondays to Sundays – these researchers went to the newspaper agents for figures of XY newspaper. So if anybody is contesting those figures, let them do what is right-ABC.
