THE DEATH OF FREELANCE ADVERTISING IN NIGERIAN NEWSPAPERS?!

Have you opened a Nigerian newspaper recently? If you have, you will notice the two things most readers complain about aside from the numerous grammatical errors you’ll have fun picking out. The number one complaint is that all the stories from paper to paper tend to be the same with slight variations. The second complaint happens from occasion to occasion: the adverts. And not just any adverts, the cronies wishing their bosses happy birthday or congratulations on their son’s or daughter’s wedding and such and such.

My question concerns the second complaint, how many people really advertise in Nigerian newspapers today? If we break it down we have our government officials, we have our big companies (MTN, Chivita, Etisalat, Guinness and all your other big brand names) that can afford to splash a N100, 000 plus, over numerous papers and for numerous days I might add. Then last, but not least you have your “normal” people section. People who place wanted ads to change of name notifications. These people are the minority and probably don’t bring in a fraction of the money your government crony or telecom company will.

I bring this all up because any Nigerian newspaper worth its name in salt has an advert department. When people think of advertising, they might think of the TV show Mad Men and something along that line, where companies come and you help them advertise a product by coming up with a design and so on and so forth, those are ad agencies. Advert departments in newspaper companies are anything, but. The people who work in the advert departments should really be called marketers, because that’s what they really are. Their primary job isn’t to come up with ad ideas, but to look for people to come place ads in their respective papers going from business to business. This is where the problem is. In theory this sounds like a great idea, in practicality it is one of the worst. The newspaper isn’t dead yet, but sometimes it acts like it is.

Ten to fifteen years ago, sending a team of people around town knocking on business doors and trying to convince potential clients to advertise in their papers might’ve made a lot of business sense. Today, no employee wants to really do that, especially one who knows 10-15 years ago, advertising never heard of social media. Facebook, twitter and not to mention mobile phones including the status changing Blackberry have created newer avenues for upstart businesses to advertise. Why spend money advertising in paper, when you can send a broadcast message to your friends, start a fan page on facebook and bombard your friends with tweets on twitter about what your business is. If any newspaper is looking to cash in on the young upscale business upstarts, the newspaper isn’t the way to go about it.

So what about the older established companies, don’t they get in on social media and why do they keep advertising in papers? Well, the answer my friend is already in the question. Established companies can afford to advertise in papers and because their markets go beyond those who can afford smart phones or are connected to the internet, the newspaper remains relevant to them and more importantly no one needs to tell them to come and advertise in the papers, they know their way around, they’re established.

Unfortunately, the “old dogs” who run the advert departments or the newspaper companies themselves haven’t taken this into consideration. The freelance advert employees they sent around town 10-15 years ago didn’t have this much connectivity to deal with so it became apparent that the paper was a very top option in advertising. Also those employees established contacts with companies with which they still deal with directly. Today’s freelance advertisers are going to have it tough! There are practically no new “big” companies and when they are, like I said, they necessarily don’t need you to knock on their doors, they’ll find you!

The pressure is now on for today’s freelance advertisers to bring in customers or get the axe. Considering the difficulty they will face going door to door being told, “We have no advertising budget this year” or “We don’t advertise”, the axe seems more pleasurable. Not to mention some newspaper companies seem reluctant to advertise in order to get people to advertise with them. Maybe they know something we don’t know. I believe advertisers shouldn’t necessarily have to go out there, but instead make clients come to them. In other words, newspapers need to find a way to make advertising more lucrative and less stressful for all parties involved, because we all know, truthfully speaking we see the same adverts from the same people in our newspapers meaning they are hardly any new customers coming in.