THE FUTURE OF OAAN’S ADVOCACY

OAAN’s history, from inception in 1964, is replete with significant interventions and advocacy for its members. Whether fighting the myriad of regulators for fair and reasonable fees and levies or doing excellent liaison with other advertising sectoral bodies, it has generally used the power of mass representation and advocacy to improve the businesses of its constituents.

But the times — they are changing!

The out-of-home advertising landscape and indeed the bigger Nigerian economy continue to witness rapid changes. Of all the important elements reshaping the out-of-home advertising landscape, the two most significant are arguably:

The broader national economy and a preference for greater openness.

Technology and digitalization.

Although Nigeria is essentially practicing a mixed economy, the global pull, one that successive governments have found irresistible, is for more openness, trade and integration. To this end, Nigeria is about to sign the Continental Free Trade Agreement (AFCFTA). This agreement, the first of its kind in Africa proposes to create a single market for goods and services, with free movement of people and investments across 55 countries eliminating tariffs on 90% of all goods traded within the continent. What’s the implication of this for out-of-home advertising sector?

While all of the ramifications of this epochal event might be hard to call, what’s not in doubt is the increased competition that this will bring to the out-of-home advertising sector. In essence, the market will receive newer investments from players big and small across this economic bloc. How might practitioners who are already contesting the foray of an important global player react to even more competition? The default, easy route will be to seek to insulate their businesses by deploying protectionist laws and edicts in the extant laws of the land in a bid to place barriers to entry into the market.

A more pragmatic route however will be to quickly prepare for this change by embracing mergers and acquisition, even beyond the Nigerian borders to create stronger, bigger companies. This point while not new has remained unheeded with practitioners seemingly unable to countenance losing (their) titles and control. There is sadly, only one possible outcome if this resistance continues — slow death. To avoid this, OAAN needs to be at the heart of the push to embrace an open, competitive market, one where mergers and acquisitions are positively perceived. As a first step, it is important to do away with price fixing. Contrary to popular thinking within OAAN, allowing the vagaries of demand and supply to determine rates will lead to greater prosperity for practitioners.

While technology, digitalization and the accompanying disruptions are buzz words in many industries, it is at the heart of value creation in the out-of-home business. As traditional users of (out-of-home) advertising services have sought to generate better value for their investments, they have found technology and digitalization as key tools.

The trends for the single most important element for the future of the out-of-home advertising thus points in one direction — greater digitalization. As the technology to power this digitalization is mostly unavailable locally and has to be entirely imported, it means only the biggest companies can keep up with the financial resources required. Another strong motivation to embrace mergers and acquisitions if ever extra motivation was required.

With value creation through technology an impossible ask in the short term, the future of OAAN lies away from levies and fees related advocacy to unlocking significant value through investments in research.

What does this really mean?

As practitioners know, advertisers no longer buy media, they buy audiences, and the more a medium knows about its audience the easier it is to make value propositions. The buzz surrounding the hyper-granularity of online measurement continues apace, ongoing improvements planned for audience measurements in the local broadcast sector is gathering stream, the out-of-home sector sadly remains the laggard at the back of the pack, stunting its growth prospects.

Taking a cue from out-of-home associations in leading markets, the immediate focus has to be market research centered around independently undertaken, broadly accepted research around the metrics that matters to advertisers through the creation of joint industry currency.

A joint industry currency is simply industry funded audience measurement system that provides research into the metrics that matters (to advertisers).

Below are joint industry currencies in leading OOH markets across the world.

USA — Geo Path

UK — Route

Australia — MOVE

South Africa — ROAD

Rather than file this piece under ‘Keep In View’ like most papers tend to be, OAAN can take urgent steps in fashioning its own joint industry currency. A good first step will be to reorder its (admittedly limited) resources to give priority to spend on research. The time to stop paying lip service to research is now.

As the experience in South Africa in particular shows, the joint currency can be unsophisticated at the onset (even a periodic, centrally conducted traffic survey organized by demography can be useful) evolving over time into a complex tool that helps deliver greater value for advertisers and provides a shot in the arm for a sector reeling from under-appreciation in the media value chain.

Failure to embrace this, OAAN risk further diminishing itself as the go-to association for the industry. Already, newer, nimbler out-of-home advertising businesses are opting against joining because of a perceived lack of value. With its traditional advocacy increasingly hit or miss, new investors are putting their energies into superior value propositions and betting their business survival on going it alone.