Recession, biting hard on advertising – Expert

The Managing Director, Culture Communications, Mr. ‘Yomi Benson, has revealed that the effect of the economic recession is biting hard on the advertising sector as it has reduced the purchasing power of consumers.
To him, if there is recession and consumers are not willing to buy, there is a ripple effect. Basically, he disclosed that stakeholders are feeling the impact of the recession.
“Disposable income has come down; there is a ripple effect on the ability of the consumers to buy. What that means is that the volume of business that our clients do has dropped. That means that the advertising spend or whatever spend in the value chain, has been affected,” he said.
To beat recession, “We have to use technology. We have tried as much as possible to look inwards and reduce costs without reducing efficiency and quality. We have cloud technology now; so all our data is stored there.
“Also, we use what we have to access information everywhere in the world without spending too much. Even nowadays, we don’t meet our clients physically anymore; we meet them via teleconferences. So, we cut down on costs. What it has done for us in making us different from others is that we have now been able to imbibe more data to use to understand our consumers more,” he added.
Highlighting the challenges facing stakeholders, he explained that advertising used to be flamboyant but that is gone. Another thing, according to him, is that the sector has a lot of people who are not expert and are turning advertising into a commodity.
He said, “Everybody can come in because the barriers that you have are not many, and that makes it difficult to differentiate between the real people who can give you good communication and those who are not. Even though we have Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria that is there to regulate and the Association of Advertising Agencies of Nigeria that is there to ensure that agencies come in; unfortunately, most clients don’t go to registered practitioners. That is a huge challenge in identifying who the charlatans are and who are the real advertisers.”