New generation agencies understand how media works – Babaeko

Steve Babaeko leads a team of young creative talents as CEO/Chief Creative Officer, X3M Ideas. With the incursion of foreign agencies, Babaeko who has 17 years hands-on experience and nine months in the saddle as CEO, advises that local agencies must deploy insights from local culture and nuances as comparative advantage over foreign agencies in this interview with ADEDEJI ADEMIGBUJI

Can you explain what an effective ad is?

David Ogilvy once said that ‘it’s not creativity if it doesn’t sell’. Effectiveness is when a client comes to you and says there is a marketing challenge and the agency comes up with a creative solution to help resolve the challenges.

To say an ad is effective, it must be able to attract attention to the service or whatever the client wants to sell and it must effectively sell and I think it’s a combination. There is this on-going debate between the magic school of thought and the logic school of thought. Some people would say magic is a wow effects that creates an outstanding creative that is going to win awards, while the logic must be backed by research. But I stay somewhere in the middle which has to be a combination of magic and logic. An effective ad must create that wow effects and still be able to communicate effectively and sell.

What informs your creative mindset?

My creative mindset or creative philosophy is what drives me and it has always driven me when I was a young copywriter since 1995. It is the fact that if a client gives you money – invest in communication through your agency and you develop ideas that go unnoticed, people are not talking about the materials and they are not adding value to the brand, you have wasted the client’s money.

So, you see with that kind of mindset, one is putting pressure on himself to always deliver value when it comes to your creative output. So, each time we get a brief, what comes to my mind is how do we make a difference in the market place, how do we set the client apart, be differentiated from the crowd and give them the edge in the market which is essentially what every client wants. So, that is our philosophy, it is what drives us and keep us awake.

The 0809ja has become an enduring one, what was going through your mind when this idea came?

Well, I will say again that in advertising we always give credits to the team and let me just say I was part of the team that invented that name because truth be told that there were a whole lot of people including the clients and agency where I was working then.

Part of the research we did initially when Etisalat was coming was to test the name Etisalat to see how people would respond to the name. The owners of the brand knew they were going to compete in the Nigerian market place where other companies were already working cleaning out! We had to prove that we are the Nigerian telecoms company, so, we needed something, we needed an edge that would help differentiate this new brand and we hit on the number suffixes ‘0809’, ‘9ja’ as it is popularly known among the youths ‘9ja’. 0809 network and 9ja provided a perfect fit. The team went for it, the rest is history as people say.

As a new generation agency what do you bring to the table as distinct from the older generation?

Clear demarcation is that between old and new school, old is old and new is new, end of story. But if you look at it in a broader sense and look at the universe in communication, you will ask, what are the tools for effective communication? Really, there are certain new tools within the new media sphere that people need to use without sneering at whatever the traditional media has to offer.

It is a combination of both that you need to put together. New school agencies understand the way the new media works and for the very good old ones, they know that if combined effectively with traditional touch point, you can actually create magical results for a client. For old school agency, to them it may look like Greek and that is a clear demarcation but for us what we bring to the table is the fresh thinking and if you go to our websites you will see that we are the “future forward agency” and I don’t know if there is any other digital agency that can compete with us. So, it is between digital thinking and analogue thinking of the old school. The difference come, in here, our works speak for us.