The Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria (ARCON) is pushing to promote Nigeria as a brand and evaluate the worth of the country’s advertising market.
To this end, the council has established two committees to drive the projects. While the committee on Brand Nigeria is headed by Steve Babaeko, the president of the Association of Advertising Agencies of Nigeria; the second committee is headed by Femi Adelusi, the president of Media Independent Practitioners Association of Nigeria.
Speaking with newsmen on Monday in Lagos, Lekan Fadolapo, the director-general of ARCON, said the brand Nigeria concept was the initiative of the industry as the committee will look at Nigeria as a brand and develop a campaign towards repositioning it.
According to him, the committee which will work with a renowned consultant will take a detailed look at the elements and DNA of the brand Nigeria and come up with a communication for it. Fadolapo said this was part of the industry’s 2023 conference coming up in Abuja December 6-8 with the theme: ‘Marketing communication as an enabler of national transformation’.
“This is our own industry’s effort aimed at positioning the country’s brand in its right place among the comity of nations”. He said nobody or sector will do this better than the professionals.
The second committee entitled ‘’GDP Multiplier Committee’’ will also take a look at the industry to determine the industry spending, the industry contribution to GDP, and thirdly, what is the multiplier effect of this contribution.
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As in other countries, he said Nigeria’s advertising space has the advertisers, the agencies and the media and within this eco-system, there is employment and transactions and the committee will determine the positive effect of these economic activities on the GDP.
Speaking on his mandate, Steve Babaeko said the intention was to make Nigeria a better place for all citizens. He described the task of rebuilding Nigeria as a task for all Nigerians as he described the committee as better late than never.
On his part, Femi Adelusi said his committee task was key in determining the value of the industry and its contribution to GDP. He said there were massive investments across the sectoral groups in the industry in terms of billboards and employment.
Adelusi said the committee will also examine the contribution of the industry in helping brands to grow and its influence on strategies and policies that assist in profitability.
The establishment of the committee on the value of the industry was part of the outcome of last year’s conference where Ronan Redmond, a director at TVC tasked stakeholders in the industry to engage in appropriate research towards establishing the real size of Nigeria’s advertising market believing that it is more than the present figure of about N120 billion
Giving a clue on how to calculate it correctly, he said the industry needed to define what sectors such as Nollywood, Fintech, Film production and video streaming and others to be included in the computations as done in Europe.
Ronan said that in most territories, the reason why stakeholders want to know the size of their advertising market was because having a comprehensive understanding of size helps them to present a case for investment (usually by advertisers) and financial support and funding (usually by legislators)
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