The brief was never ours to follow: Why Nigerian agencies must start exporting their thinking, not just their execution

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being brilliant on someone else’s terms.
Ask any creative director at a Lagos agency and they will know the feeling. The brief arrives from London or New York. The brand guidelines are fixed. The tone of voice has been approved in a boardroom where nobody in the room has ever eaten jollof rice or laughed at a joke that needed cultural context to land. Your job is to localise it to sand down the edges of a foreign idea until it fits into a Nigerian mouth without choking anyone.

You do it well, because you are good at your job but there is a gap between “good at your job” and “doing the work you were built to do.” Nigerian creative agencies have been living in that gap for decades. In 2026, with the entire world leaning in to watch what Lagos does next, we can no longer afford to stay there.

Let us be honest about what is actually happening right now. Nigeria’s creative economy is projected to reach $15 billion in value by 2025, driven by Nollywood, Afrobeats, and a cultural ecosystem that has managed to do in three decades what centuries of colonial image-making tried to undo. Afrobeats’ global listenership jumped 22% in 2025 alone while the Nigerian music industry crossed an estimated $600 million in revenue in 2024. Nollywood produces over 2,500 films annually and feeds global demand across Netflix, Prime Video, Showmax and youtube. Words like “wahala” have found their way into global slang. Burna Boy fills arenas in London. Rema tops charts in markets that once barely knew Nigeria existed beyond its oil. The world is not just watching Nigeria it is consuming it, referencing it, sampling it, aspiring to it.

And yet, when a global FMCG brand wants to reach a young African consumer, they still write the brief in Cincinnati. When a European luxury house wants to tap into Afrobeats culture, they hire a DJ from the diaspora and a London-based creative agency to make it feel authentic. The raw material is ours. The insight is ours. The cultural fluency is ours. But the strategic contract, the fee, the credit, the IP flows elsewhere. This is not a new problem. It is, in fact, the oldest Nigerian economic story told with a different costume.

Winning at Cannes for a brief written somewhere else is not the same as exporting Nigerian strategic thinking. There is a difference between being recognised as excellent executors and being valued as original thinkers. Right now, the industry celebrates the former while barely attempting the latter. The execution trap is comfortable; it comes with retainers, with scope-of-work documents, with predictable revenue. But it is also a ceiling, and it is a ceiling that belongs to someone else.

Exporting creative thinking is not a romantic argument for rejecting global clients or pretending that international briefs have no value. It is an argument for positioning. It means Nigerian agencies developing proprietary strategic frameworks rooted in cultural intelligence and taking those frameworks to global brands as a service, not just as a local adaptation unit. It means building owned intellectual property: research tools, audience insights, cultural trend reports, brand methodology decks that a multinational cannot replicate in-house because they simply do not have the cultural proximity to do so. It means sitting at the table where the brief is written, not just the table where it is executed. Consider what this looks like in practice. A global beverage brand wants to capture Gen Z consumers across sub-Saharan Africa. Right now, their London agency writes the strategy, hands it to Lagos for “local execution,” and the Lagos team spends its most valuable creative hours translating rather than originating.

What if, instead, a Nigerian agency had already built a proprietary cultural intelligence framework, one that mapped the specific tension between aspiration and authenticity in how young Nigerians relate to imported brands? What if they brought that framework to the client as a consultancy offer, shaped the global brief from the inside, and then executed from a position of strategic ownership? That is not a fantasy. It is a business model. And it is one that some of the most exciting independent agencies in Lagos are beginning, quietly, to build.

Agency leaders need to begin investing in proprietary research and intellectual property as aggressively as they invest in production capability. Cultural insight is a product that can be packaged, priced, and sold to clients who are paying far more for far less from agencies that do not have one-tenth of the cultural proximity a Lagos agency carries by default. The industry’s relationship with talent must also evolve. The best creative thinkers in Nigeria, the strategists, planners, and cultural translators who hold the real gold are currently priced as cost centres rather than profit centres. Some are leaving for tech companies, content platforms, or the diaspora. Retaining and properly valuing strategic talent is not just a human resources question; it is an existential business decision. The conversation between Nigerian agencies and global platforms needs to mature as well. Netflix, Spotify, and Meta are not just clients, they are distribution infrastructure for Nigerian cultural IP. The agencies that position themselves as strategic intermediaries between global platforms and local cultural production, rather than as post-production vendors, will own an entirely different category of revenue.

Nine years ago, a group of us sat down to build something that did not fit neatly into any existing template. The People Company Group was founded on a simple but radical premise: that African cultural intelligence is not a service offering to be bolted onto a global model, it is the model. The infrastructure, the talent architecture, the creative and commercial frameworks, all of it built around the idea that culture is not a backdrop to business in Africa. It is the business. That conviction did not come from nowhere.

It came from watching, for years, as the most gifted creative minds on this continent produced world-class work under conditions that would have been unacceptable anywhere the industry considered a “primary market.” It came from understanding, finally and fully, that the problem was never capability. It was positioning.

Nigerian agencies are not behind. They are misfiled. They have been placed in a category “local execution partner” that was designed for a different era, a different economic reality, and a different cultural moment. That moment has passed. The world has changed its mind about where creative authority lives, even if the contracts have not caught up yet. The brief, going forward, needs to be written here. Not because it would be nice.

Not as an act of cultural pride, though pride has its place. But because the work will be better, the strategy will be sharper, the audience connection will be more honest, and the commercial outcomes will justify every argument made in this piece ten times over. The world is ready to follow Nigeria’s creative lead. The only question is whether Nigerian agencies are ready to take it.

 Adim Isiakpona, Co-founder and Group CEO of The People Company Group (TPCG)