George Omoraro, the founder and CEO of RAGE Media Group and its five subsidiaries, is a globally driven entrepreneur with a burning passion to build platforms that establish Africans as global icons through various initiatives while solving the continent’s major problems and crises.
Omoraro, a member of the Nigerian Institute of Directors, in this interview with the BusinessDay media team led by Anthony Ailemen, the Assistant News Editor, and Ladi Patrick-Okwoli, speaks on his vision for the industry as well as the need for synergy between the traditional media and advertising agencies, among other sundry issues. Excerpts.
As an advertising outfit, can you bring us up to speed on the core functions you carry out here?
Rage Media is your number-one advertising agency in this part of Africa. We have been in business for a decade now. We manage top brands, helping them with their PR, advertising, digital advertising, social media, billboards, reputation management, web development, app development, and everything that involves the relationship between the brand and the customer. It is something that we pride ourselves on. Rage is an exciting company, a combination of some of the finest hands in this space. We have people who take pride in doing things excellently.
We have worked for brands across several continents. We have clients in the United States of America, England and the Middle East. We recently launched our expansion plan of moving into other countries as well.
How has the current business environment in Nigeria impacted your services?
Yeah, like every other business, you have to adapt when there is an economic situation. There is a global economic situation, that is the truth. It is not just Nigeria that is experiencing hard times, but hard times hit harder when you are in a developing economy. So, that is what is happening to us now. Anytime there is a similitude of recession, clients cut their budgets. Most people think advertising is fancy.
A lot of people don’t understand the essentialism of advertising. So, they start to cut budgets and reduce their advertising on markets. This ultimately influences our business, So, yes, we have seen that happen, but over time, we also discovered that people need to sell more when things are hard. And we are the guys that make the cash machine ring. So, you have to come back to us one way or another to increase your business performance. So, yes, we have had tough times. We have had some clients walk away because they couldn’t afford the services at the moment. But we know they will come back.
We believe that things will get better with time. But that is the situation we have found ourselves in. Every situation provides the positives and negatives. The economic situation has also made some people come to us to say, in these times, we don’t know what to do. We are the brilliant ones. We always know how to manoeuvre brands through situations like this.
Read also: Rethinking Traditional Advertising: Victor Adewole’s Power of Integrated Marketing
Advertising is suffering from the proliferation of practitioners. How has this affected what you do?
Very interesting question. We had a conversation about this just a few days back. The ease of entry in our industry poses a threat to the credibility of our space. What do I mean? For instance, the banks. To set up a bank, you need maybe $300 million or some capital base. A microfinance bank needs maybe $5 million. I am not sure of these numbers, but it is something like that. But in our space, two guys from my office can just wake up and say, Let us start our own shop. There is no standardisation in terms of quality.
In our economy, where the client is looking for the best price, people have not really understood how impactful creativity can be on profitability. Some people just feel, Let us do the advertisement. They don’t know that it takes some level of intentionality to create something that converts from views to account balance.
You just find people hiring a small company somewhere and saying, “Do this for me; do that for me.” I think we have a challenge with the ease of entry. Someone can just wake up and start an advertising agency.
It reduces the quality of excellence that the industry puts out. You drive around and see some billboards; they look very tacky. You see some ads on YouTube, and you are like, What is this? This should not even be in our media space. It is a free world in our space. You can’t run a business and say you will bank with George, for instance. George is not a bank. He needs a licence to be able to provide that service. You cannot produce a statement from George. In our industry, you can’t just work with anybody.
I see a lot of work coming from the body that holds the industry together. Recently, there have been deliberations and conversations around this subject. We are having conversations on how to improve the standard of work to make it uniform so that you don’t have big and small agencies.
What usually happens in industries like this globally is that you start to see mergers. People can have ownership in a big company instead of having complete ownership in a small one. This ensures that we have a standard and we don’t lose credibility as an industry. It preserves our respect and dignity.
The framework for the industry and the regulatory agency—how effective have they been in ensuring standardisation?
I think attention for the longest time was not on creativity. The regulatory body is more interested in penalties.
Things like using the wrong words, and using images that are not localised, which is good in itself. I completely believe that these kinds of things will drive the industry because most advertising agencies work with stock images regularly. But we saw a recent regulation that says you should not use stock images. You should make sure that you can prove that the person on your campaign is a Nigerian. We pay shorter stock, for instance, in dollars, and it puts pressure on the currency. You have situations like that where regulators are trying to play their part, but I don’t think it bothers creativity. It is more on regulation and trying to ensure compliance, getting the right fees for approving ads.
I feel that there has to be some attention to creativity to standardise the quality of work that comes out of our industry and not just putting signs across people’s communications because they have not paid one fee or the other. That also brings us to the issue of online activities. These days, marketers flood cyberspace with products.
I am sure that established institutions like yours must be concerned about these challenges.
Yes, because what false advertising does is that it reduces the credibility of the entire advertising space. So once people stop believing in advertising, it means that we cannot be effective or functional as a company. It is one of the things that the regulatory bodies are considering; no matter the platform that it is going to run on, the advertisement should be vetted.
In vetting, you are always asked to show proof. To show that your claims are right. There was a trend online: what I ordered versus what I got. It means you order something, you receive it, and it is completely different from what you ordered.
Things like that are being checked by the regulatory body. Let us see the advertised facts before you push them out. I think it is a journey that will last another 10 years. I will be very frank with you: how do you control over 15 million people on the internet who have the freedom to post anything at any time? It is going to be a mess. I think eventually we might be able to create a working system if we successfully partner with companies that control online content like Meta and X, among others.
If there is a system in which, before you put up an advertisement or a specific kind of post, you must have a certificate to show that it is approved, if we can get to that point, it will bring in a lot of revenue for the regulators because there is so much going on in terms of posting products and advertisements. Everybody is trying to be an entrepreneur, so that is a lot of money. Eventually, I think it will create some form of trustworthiness for the industry that we play in.
Qualified manpower remains one of the challenges faced by practitioners. How have you been able to tackle this in your organisation?
Well, this is a very tough question, and I don’t think there is anybody in business who, at one point or another, has not faced issues around manpower and even the development of staff. Our industry has some form of training embedded in the system, meaning that you may enter as a fresh graduate or without having so much experience. But by working in teams, you learn a lot. You get to try your hands-on projects and develop as a person. Our space is a combination of strategic and creative knowledge.
You have to think strategically, think like the owner of the brand, and then you also have to be creative. It is finding that balance that stands you out in the space. If you work in a bank, you don’t necessarily have to be creative. If you work in the music space, you don’t necessarily have to be strategic. But we combine both because you are required to do some in-depth analysis of the market, product, and viability of whatever campaign you are doing. You have to create beautiful campaigns that can run in the market. So yeah, we have that thing embedded in the system that builds you naturally.
So you come into the agency, and you are paired with someone who will help you grow. Recently, we launched an initiative called the Graduate Training Programme. We pick people who have no experience whatsoever, and then we take them through a one-year training process. This is something we learnt from companies like GT Bank and Access Bank that have a standard training school. This re-engineers your mind and helps you start to think like you are in the business already.
So we do a lot of that in terms of development. We have training all the time; it is part of our continuous improvement process. But the truth is that finding talent is becoming more difficult, and this cannot be overstated. The reason is simple. I would easily take the easier route and blame it on the economy. Back in the day, a salary could do so much for you, but I sit here and I truly ask, How much can a salary do for you now? You have to open your mind beyond that. I tell everybody who works with me that salary is a treadmill; you just keep running, but you are not going anywhere. I encourage our people to become entrepreneurs and build their portfolios. We operate a commission-based system.
In these days of online marketing, do you see the traditional advertising practice surviving for long?
Back in 2010, when I newly came into the industry, there was this synergy that existed between the traditional media and advertising agencies, but I don’t think it still exists. Today, clients go directly to media platforms, get a good deal, and leave the agency out of it. Now this removes us from that conversation, which is where the bulk of the money is.
There is the need for us to go back to the good old days when the agency was the primary contact. That is the only way we can have a good working relationship again. There is also the argument about how relevant media platforms will continue to be, especially with the advent of artificial intelligence.
I remember years back, I attended a conference in America, and we were told that TV was dead. I still look at the numbers; just last week, how many people watched live television in America? The numbers are off the roof, so before making these assumptions and trying to be futuristic, let us look at data. If we improve the relationship between media platforms and the agencies, and if we continue to show how impactful the platform can be, we will enjoy our time together.
In these days of low purchasing power occasioned by the poor economy, how are practitioners managing to survive?
Your thoughts on the media industry’s current challenges are quite insightful. Advertising remains a significant cost due to its role in reaching a large audience, and this cost reflects the value of the exposure. While the desire to lower advertising costs to help smaller businesses is understandable, doing so might diminish its prestige and effectiveness.
Your emphasis on focusing on big brands with substantial budgets seems reasonable. Supporting them can help sustain the industry and keep it robust. At the same time, helping smaller businesses with alternative, cost-effective advertising strategies is also crucial.
Looking ahead, the integration of new technologies like artificial intelligence and augmented reality could indeed reshape the media landscape, making it more inclusive and dynamic. The future seems poised for innovative changes that can offer new opportunities for growth and engagement.
