How Insight Communications Set the Industry on Fire ( 1 )
Biodun Shobanjo, Chairman Troyka Investment Holding company, owners of Insight Communications recently marked his 40th year in the industry.
Shobi as popularly called, after a stint in radio started his advertising career at the then American-owned Grant Advertising, which he joined as an Account Executive Trainee in November 1971 rising rapidly to become its Deputy Managing Director in just about 5 years. He quit the services of Grant along with all the rosy pecks of office in December 1979 to co-found Insight Communications in January 1980. To mark the 40th anniversary of his venturing into marketing communications, he interacted with the media and revealed that attitude, passion and dynamism have kept him and his company on the front burners.
The industry is Dynamic
I have not been in active work for six years now. I deliberately said to myself that enough was enough. With the 40th anniversary of my venturing into marketing communications, it seems there is really nothing to say. We’ve told the story too many times. But I think we need to tell the story again because there are very few Nigerians who have been doing the same thing for 40 years. Even I find it hard to believe it is 40 years already, and it should interest you that I still don’t find the subject boring. Forty years down the line, I am still very passionate about what goes on in the industry which tells me that advertising in particular, and marketing communications in general, is a very dynamic field.
Different things are happening every day. That’s the beauty of the profession. Even though I jokingly said one had been doing the same thing for over 40 years that is totally incorrect because different things happen every day. And I think that is the reason one can spend such a long time in the business.
It’s about Attitude
People do things for different reasons. For instance, if you are a photographer and you want to be a different kind of photographer, there is an attitude you must take to the profession and I think that explains everything. If you want to be an outstanding journalist, you must bring a totally different attitude to the profession. And when you bring this kind of attitude to your profession, you begin to discover different things that even your peers don’t find and that keeps driving.
Remarkable experiences
I can tell you that something new is happening. Today I am with client ‘A’ and he is telling me about his intention to launch a particular product in a particular category and you know that in that category there are big players. That is very exciting because it is part of your responsibility as a consultant to that client to ensure that that new born baby survives and ultimately becomes a market leader. And I cannot tell you how many babies I have worked on who today are leading brands in this market.
Can you imagine doing that almost every three to six months? And the dynamics that come to play are different because you are not going to apply the same techniques that you applied to a particular baby for some other person’s baby. It doesn’t work that way. So, it is not a holiday at all. And when you are looking at it, you are not going to look at it from the perspective of advertising alone because the issues that will come into play may be as diverse as six or eight or 10 specialist inputs that would make that child survive.
This is because every brand you find plays in a hostile environment. No exception. You and the owner of the brand are concerned; and I need to be concerned as much as the owner of that brand because we are working together. If that brand fails, then we fail. If the brand succeeds we succeed. It is a symbiotic relationship. And when you do that for so many brands in various categories, nothing could be more exciting.
Sometimes you get home and you cannot sleep. That’s passion because some others are lackadaisical about the fate of their clients. Sometimes we may even have to call the client in his house to bring to his notice what we hadn’t even talk about at the meeting. And you begin to agonise over what the next solution will be. It is a very challenging thing. Success in the industry goes beyond looking smart.
The Metamorphoses
Forty years ago, the industry was in the hands of expatriates and one learnt the ropes as one went on. Looking back now, it was not that sophisticated. But for most of the big agencies at the time, a lot of their creative work actually came from overseas. The big players in those days were Lowe Lintas and Grant. Mr. Erhabor Emokpae who was a graphic artist and also a very colourful man bought into Lowe Lintas at some point. Most of the advertising agencies then had expatriates and at that time, the thing was just great advertising to sell.
Post-indigenisation, the consumer started getting more sophisticated and that created an opportunity for people to develop real creative communications that would connect with consumers. And the agencies saw need to begin to train their people and some were sent overseas which opened people’s eyes to the fact that you just do not do the kind of open advertisement that people used to do in those days.
They were just banal communications, very ordinary and straightforward. The agencies then became Nigerian-owned. That created opportunities for people to grow communications the way it should. It was in that era after some apprenticeship that I left to start Insight Communications.
It was an era that also radicalised the way communications should be done.
We thought we could be more sophisticated, we thought we could be more creative and we started doing very daring advertising. There were a couple of us. So you could call that the second or third wave of advertising agencies. We saw that what was required went beyond just advertising like the specialized sides of marketing that we needed to look at and that also created opportunities for different kinds of companies to begin to be established so that they can add to the process. And that gave birth to what we today call integrated marketing communications. We played a major role in that. And I think the benefit of some level of sophistication and exposure to the Western world also helped that process.
Being No.1 is no birthright, A brand has to fight for it
As an individual, I can claim not to have failed. But we have failed as an organisation because we have a couple of things that didn’t quite fly. That’s a fact. I don’t want to be presented as an enigma because, in fact, I am not. I am just this ordinary guy who is trying to ensure that we do things properly. Why we seem to have got this far is down to the fact that we think through everything that we try to do and we also do not just try to go and do something. We first identify that there is a market, that there is a need for what we want to do. And then we find the right people to go and do those things to add value to our client.
There is a hunger to satisfy clients. If our client is number three, how can we make him to become number one? Likewise if our client is number 10, how can we make him to become number one? This is what drives us and that is the passion I talked about earlier because I belong to the school of thought that says that nobody has the birthright to be number one – I don’t believe so. To be number one, you have to work for it. So if a brand has to be number one, it has to do all of those things that it needs to do to become number one. It doesn’t have to be number one because the manufacturer is so and so. It doesn’t work like that. You have to fight for the number one position.
We started working for a client about 18 years ago. At the time we wanted to get the account, the expatriate manager said they have worked with so many Nigeria advertising agencies and he was not satisfied with any of them and he asked me ‘why are you different?’ And you must know, 19 years ago, we were a very hungry company. I looked at him and said ‘I know for a fact that you are now number two in the category you operate and the guys who are number one are very mean but my intention is to make you number one; working together with you, you can become number one.’ And the man agreed to work with me. We did a lot of things. They had an array of brands and some of their brands became number one in their categories. They may not be number one in total but they took on the giant (market leader) and we were not scared.
Read concluding part of the interview here {jcomments on}
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