The endowment, the will and capacity to consistently conceive winning ideas, especially in an industry filled with intense competition to meet clients’ expectations, is a feat that PR agencies steadily pursue.
Several agencies get additional validation for their creative ingenuity by getting industry recognition and accolades for their effective campaigns and innovative interventions for clients. Few of them go on to win coveted international recognitions to further attest to their creative superiority.
For Modion Communications, Nigeria’s fast-growing boutique Public Relations and Marketing Communication Consultants, it has taken them less than six years into operations to stake a prominent place in Africa’s marketing communications market, with a retinue of glowing international accolades.
The firm, in May 2021, became the first Nigerian Public Relations Agency to win the highly coveted Platinum SABRE Awards for Africa’s ‘Best in Show’, PR campaign in 2020, the continent’s biggest PR prize for a public relations practice. Modion Communications has qualified for the global SABRE Award with this continental win, slated for October 2021.
The Platinum SABRE Award was for a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) campaign entitled ‘Touching Lives Through A Determined School Child – Dele Fathia’, activated for Lumos Nigeria, Africa’s foremost provider of renewable energy solutions. Modion Communications had earlier clinched a Diamond SABRE with the same campaign, amassing two highly coveted awards in the process. This was the award competed for by highly placed agencies in Africa.
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Before the historic win, Modion Communications had won three back-to-back SABRE Diamond trophies between 2020 and 2021. It becomes even more interesting to note that the firm only made debut participation in 2020 with its gripping teaser brand activation for Leadway Assurance #SeeFinish, and its #Gokada2.0, a strategic crisis management campaign for Gokada.
This feat by the agency elevates its profile and positions it firmly to achieve its well-defined quest to dominate the African PR space. “We have a saying at the agency that ‘we may be young, but we have touched brands that are way older’. But beyond working for local and international brands with strong heritage and massive brand equity, we have also built a strong pan-African profile and reputation with our performances at the highly coveted SABRE Awards,” Odion Aleobua, the agency’s Chief Executive Officer, told BusinessDay.
“When we commenced operations in 2015, we envisioned an African dominance, and this only sets us in the right direction to continue to provide insight-driven winning solutions to our numerous clients. In just six years of operations, winning the Platinum SABRE Award and emerging the best PR Agency on the continent in a contest with some of the leading and well-known global and African PR brands strengthens our resolve to pursue this quest to play prominently in the African PR space.
“It is even more satisfying that our recognitions are for diverse campaigns in crisis management, corporate social responsibility, brand activation, financial PR and internal communication, a testament to our capacity to provide cutting edge 360 boutique services for our variegated clientele base across wide industry verticals,” Aleobua said.
In his remarks, the Chairman of the SABRE jury, Paul Holmes, said, Modion Communications winning CSR entry for Lumos Nigeria “was a campaign that understood the power of one person’s story to illuminate a broader issue.” He added that “the company took tangible steps to improve the situation, drawing wider attention to a serious issue and establishing itself as a leader in its market”.
“The theme of ‘Africa Rising’ has come to the fore in recent years, and nowhere is it truer than in the Public Relations world, where the quantity of work has been increasing, and the quality has been improving for the past few years”, Paul Holmes said.
Yomi Badejo Okusanya, the President of the African Public Relations Association (APRA), said, “The SABRE Awards Africa is in line with one of our cardinal goals of mainstreaming Africa into global public relations practice and reckoning. By our arrangement, winning entries from Africa automatically qualify for the SABRE Awards Europe. So, there is still the possibility of even more glory on the way.”
For a young agency to have amassed four international awards and two Certificates of Excellence within two years, more will be expected to continually remain dominant in the African PR space. But Odion seemed assured that the agency is keen and poised to maintain the winning streak. “We are primed to pivot strongly more towards digital solutions, online activations and hybrid engagements backed by the spike in technological advancements and offerings as well as innovations that would help us drive these new paradigms. We would be bolder with our ideas yet pinpointed to providing solutions to our clients as always,” he said.
Modion Communications is a full-spectrum agency that provides public relations, brand development, marketing activations, media engagement, crisis communications, financial PR, investors’ relations support, event management, digital marketing, and media publishing.
Within one year of commencing operations, Marketing Edge recognised Modion Communications as Nigeria’s Outstanding Young PR Agency of the Year 2016, and in 2018, Marketing World Awards Ghana’ awarded the agency “Nigerian Most Innovative PR Agency of the Year.
