Mr. Lanre Ashaolu is the MD/CEO of Four Pulley Limited, an outdoor advertising comapny in Nigeria. In this interview, the outdoor advertising impresario speaks on the imperatives imposed by the economic recession on the integrated marketing communications industry in Nigeria and other sundry issues. Ayodeji Seriki brings the excerpts:

How would you assess the outdoor advertising industry in Nigeria?

Well, the industry cannot stand alone from the integrated marketing communications industry as a whole. It doesn’t exist in isolation. It offers a means of exposure of a brand’s information to their target audience. It exists alongside other platforms of exposure like electronic, print and digital. The OOH industry in Nigeria is an interesting industry in the sense that despite the encroachment of digital media replacing the role of traditional media, the outdoor is the only arm of traditional media that is going to witness the test of time and can co-exist with the digital media through the fusion of digital out of home advertising. It is an existing industry that has come to stay.

How much of a threat is Digital advertising to traditional advertising?

I would like to respond to that question with data. As at 2020 in Nigeria, we have 99 million internet users and our population as a country is in excess of 180 million. That is roughly about 45 percent of the entire population without access to the internet. The internet population is projected to grow to 131 million users in 2023.

When people say social media has come to stay, yes, it has come to stay, it is a growing phenomenon, it doesn’t mean that social media has come to replace traditional (media) because the same audience that are already used to traditional are the ones migrating, but not everyone can migrate over night and not everyone will migrate. Base on the data provided that just barely half of the population are internet users,  what happens to half of the population that are not in the internet?

If you do your audience measurement, you realise TV is still the most dominant means of communication, because not everybody has access to the internet and if you have access what is the frequency? and if you are frequently online, what is the level of engagement that takes place? 

Yes, social media is on ground, it is a complimentary means of communication to brands and their audiences. To say or raise an alarm that it has come to displace traditional media is not actually correct. Social media as a means of engagement with the public has its limitations. We have the era of misinformation which they call fake news or however you want to put it. A serious brand would not invest on outdoor to spread fake news because outdoor is heavily relegated by Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria(APCON) and various regulatory bodies, so for any brand to be outdoor, it means that whatever they have put out there is heavily regulated and factual. We have to be mindful of the fact that traditional media, as the name implies has been around and will forever be around. 

In the outdoor advertising industry, we have digital out of home equally complimenting the traditional outdoor model. That simply means that traditional outdoor is still supporting digital and social media platforms. I believe that traditional feeds digital, because when you see an advert on TV, hear on the radio, see it on an outdoor platform, the next thing you do is to go on the internet to check for more information about such an advert.  That is a classic case of traditional advert feeding digital media. 

All platforms compliments each other, not every time you are on social media, there are moments  you are on the road  and in a country like Nigeria, we are always on the move, traffic. As long as there is physical environment, there will always be need for out of home services to engage with the audience.

Just recently, Nigeria officially slipped into recession. How can the integrated communication industry navigate and survive this recession?

Some months back when the National bureau of Statistics (NBS) released its Q2 report, I was optimistic we might avoid the recession. But here we are, experiencing it. I did mention then that innovation and superior value offering is what practitioners in the industry needs to do and come up with partners to be able to survive the storm. I still maintain that a recession does not mean there will be a shut down in economic activities. It simply means the rate at which we should  be growing is slower than expected and the whole trend is on a downward spiral, macro-economic  activities and favorable policies  need to take place to change the balance of the growth from the negative to positive result. 

This is the time everybody needs to put on their thinking cap. Old ways of doing things cannot be sustained and we need to do things in a different way to achieve a different result, that is the honest truth. Businesses will continue their operations and services, at this moment everybody has to ensure whatever he is going to put forward is something that has not been done before. That is innovation, improving an already existing things that you meet in your environment. 

Innovation! Innovation!! Innovation!!! Let every player identify their strengths and discover what is best applicable for their clients. The client’s success is also the practitioners’ success.

How has FPL Media stayed relevant in the digital space in the midst of ‘threats’ of social media?

I wouldn’t call social media a threat, I call it a complimentary media for us in the Digital Out of Home space. As the name implies, it means the same technology available for social media, we also have it. Just that we have it on a bigger platform, which is the outdoor space and the beauty of that is that we can deliver audience measurement and our audience measurement is more accurate than social media because social media has various  issues of clones, bugs, malicious proliferation of accounts and engagement. For some reason, you may feel that your brand is getting XYZ rate of exposure, meanwhile it could be just one user duplicating effort but you can’t duplicate such efforts on outdoor. 

People need to be mindful. In as much as social media is exciting, it has its own downside too, in the issue of verification of actual numbers of engagement. But in outdoor, the engagement is real and verifiable. So far so good in Nigeria, we don’t have robots on the road. This means that any audience engaging in your campaign is a human being. It is a step in the right direction, but it has its own challenges.  

Tell us about Four Pulley Limited

Four Pulley Limited, known as FPL Media is a creative OOH company where innovation is at the forefront of all we do. Our major promise is to deliver return on investment to our clients. We intend to deliver to develop innovative platforms in strategic locations that connect audiences to their brand and vice-versa so that whatever we are offering both the advertisers and audience is value for money. We are here to contribute to the growth and development of the industry. We are here for a long time because the management of the company has a lot of experience on the client side of the industry before transitioning to the agency aspect. We have seen both sides of the divide and we know the questions that advertisers and brand managers want to ask and get answers to. I am not new to the industry. I have been in the industry operating both on the agency and consulting side. Now that we are in the OOH space, we want to be able to deliver the best value for our clients.

What comparative edge does FPL Media have over other outdoor agencies? 

We have a strong passion to leverage on technology to improve return on investment for advertisers and audience in general. Other means of advertising like electronic, print to a large degree have a predictable and acceptable matrix for measuring the impact of advertising on such platform. The outdoor has just simply been relying on estimates and based on the physical traffic we see in the environment. We are investing a lot on technology, artificial intelligence to be able to deliver accurate feedback in terms of how effective advertising campaigns work on our platforms. I believe that is where the whole industry should look forward to go to so that the industry can be better respected. This will help the operators to deliver more premium services to their clients.

Can we know a little more about your background?

I have a degree in Economics from Covenant University, also an alumnus of London School of Economics and School of Media and Communications, Pan Atlantic University. I am a member of APCON and I continuously look for ways to evolve and improve myself. On the professional side, I have been privileged to work across different sectors of the economy. I have worked in the advertising, manufacturing and telecoms sectors. Now, I am here in the OOH space. My cross-functional experience gives me an overview of how the economy responds and what we need to do in terms of offering value to clients. I love history and research a lot. I also love sports.