Advertising Practitioners, Regulators Urged To Be More Proactive In Harnessing Advertisements
Oru Leonard
The Managing Director/Editor-In-Chief of Daily Times Newspaper, Aliu Akoshile, has advised the advertising practitioners and regulators to be more proactive in harnessing advertisements in order to curtail the rate at which non professionals proliferates the industry within the country.
The Newspaper MD said this at a courtesy visit by combined delegates of Advertising Practitioners’ Council of Nigeria (APCON) and Advertising Practitioners’ Association, Abuja Chapter (APAAC) to the newspaper’s Abuja Corporate Office on Wednesday, July 10, 2019.
“Advertising professionals and regulators of the industry should do more because less than 70 percent of adverts revenue is collected by licensed advert agencies while the rest go through individual hands directly to the publishers and other owners of advertising outlets. “On daily basis, non licensed individuals collect adverts and hand them over to media organisations to either publish or broadcast. The revenue on such adverts do not pass through advert regulatory bodies and are therefore not accounted for by the industry,” he said.
Akosile noted that Nigeria’s advertising revenue streams include government agencies, the private sector and individuals and noted that the reduction in the overall revenue expenditure on advertising was caused by the various challenges in a depressed economy, which he said made government and investors spend less on advertising, a development he said was in the wrong direction as the right thing would have been to spend more on advertising, as a way of boosting the economy. “Spending on advertising in Nigeria has reduced over the years and this is the outcome of a depressed economy, Therefore what we have now is about N100 billion annually on advertising. “But that shouldn’t be the case. Under a depressed economy, you are supposed to spend more on advertising so that people are enlightened on what opportunities are available for them to explore”, he said.
