BY LUKMAN ARIYIBI
Avid football fans know what a studs-up tackle on an opponent is. It is the sort accompanied by excessive force or brutality and with studs showing in a way that endangers the opponent’s safety, sometimes in a way that could lead to career-ending injury. Once identified, it is punished with a red card.
This piece, as the headline shows, is not about football. It is about the advertising industry, where the Advertisers Association of Nigeria (ADVAN) has been making, for as long as I can remember, studs-up tackles on advertising agencies, endangering their safety (of their business) in the process. That has caught the attention of the Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria (ARCON), which has felt the need to save agencies from horrific injuries that could leave them hobbling for long spells or put an end to them as businesses. ARCON’s intervention, through what is a duty of care, unsurprisingly, has got ADVAN red-eyed and near-belligerent.
ADVAN, as with most equity-averse individuals or organisations, is fizzing with rage over ARCON’s measures to level the ground, change the narrative of the agency-client relationship to that of equity rather than the subsisting one that is akin to that between an indentured servant and master. ADVAN announced its equity aversion, very loudly in 2021, following ARCON’s (then APCON) issuance of the Advertising Industry Standard of Practice (AISOP). The AISOP spells out, among other things, modes of agency engagement, disengagement and payment; media rates and commission, audience measurement and dispute resolution. Its provisions were those that the industry had been crying out for, as they address the gross imbalance in agency-client relationships.
That, exactly, was what ADVAN does not want to hear or see instituted. It gave, so to speak, a middle finger to AISOP, especially against its provision stipulating a 45-day payment period for campaigns executed. ADVAN, which had become used to the long-standing payment template of 90-120 days, in the best of circumstances, took to an adversarial media campaign against AISOP. Its eyes got redder, presumably, with the AISOP provision of a payment of a percentage as default penalty should the recommended payment period be exceeded. The prescribed percentage is to assist agencies in coping with the charges their lenders may level when they also default.
The previous soap opera-length period of payment to agencies adversely affected not just their businesses, but also those of their suppliers like media organisations, which were forced to endure inordinately long waiting periods to be paid. Naturally, what obtained was an unhealthy power dynamic, with agencies compelled to stay in the relationship because they had been intimidated into paralyzing subservience.
I consider ADVAN’s rejection of these provisions as a desire to elongate the life of an ethics-free trade in which it has luxuriated for so long to the detriment of agencies and their vendors, which are confronted with the difficulties in meeting their own financial obligations. I consider ADVAN’s reaction, which was framed to cast ARCON as an interloper in contractual agreements, as churlish. Around the world (and this is verifiable), periods of payment are subject to industry-prescribed standards.
For example, Germany, France and other European nations operate a 30-day payment period, while the model in the US is 35 days. In China, it is 30 days, with South Africa, Kenya and other African countries favouring 45 days. India has a slightly different system, which is a cross between prepaid and postpaid models not exceeding 30 days. Exactly why ADVAN’s fat cats should Nigeria’s to be long-drawn is a guess for which no prizes would be given.
All through the time that AISOP was being formulated, records show that ADVAN was involved in the process that birthed it and other policy initiatives. It had, for example, a representative on the AISOP committee, the Nigerian Advertising Code Review Committee, National Advertising and the Conference Committee. It is presently represented by two members on the Advertising Standards Panel (ASP). It is, therefore, mystifying that it was after the adoption of AISOP that ADVAN is raising dust. It is because it is about to lose a major advantage, one enjoyed unfairly.
ADVAN would get into further funk, from which it has not got out, last year. This followed the passage by the National Assembly and eventual signing into law, by former President Mohammadu Buhari, the ARCON Bill, repealing the APCON Act. The law awards ARCON full powers to regulate and control advertisement, ensure the protection of the general public and consumers, promote local content and entrench best international practices. Importantly, it became the framework guiding all industry-relationships, addressing the lack of balance in client-agency relationships and setting standards.
Feeling that the rug was being pulled from under his feet, legally to boot, ADVAN announced a threat of civil litigation, with the intention to have ARCON’s powers taken from it. It believes that the ARCON Act is one that breaches the constitutional rights of its members and is contesting the competence of the National Assembly to make laws guiding advertising practice. A major source of ire for ADVAN is the provision in the ARCON Act banning the use of foreign voice-over artists and models in advertisements which, as part of ARCON’s local content policy, is conceived to make Nigerians benefit from advertising for the country’s market.
The provision prescribes a minimum local content percentage in all advertisements and mandates advertisers with the intention to advertise in the country to feature Nigerians in such. The intention of the provision is to reverse revenue losses, estimated at N120 billion, by Nigerian companies. As with AISOP,
ADVAN was among the industry stakeholders in attendance during the public hearing into the ARCON Bill, as it was at the time. It also made oral and written submissions to the National Assembly, which it now believes lacks the competence to make laws. What other platforms make federal laws? Confounding.
I understand, like many other people keen to see agencies escape the clutches of oppression, that the only reason ADVAN is angry is the loss of unfair advantage. If there was a doubt at all, it got erased by the association’s rejection of the agency disengagement policy stipulated in the ARCON Act. Of course, clients reserve the right to hire or sack agencies. But they do not have the right to be indifferent to financial reconciliation and outstanding contractual obligations before dismissing an agency and hiring another. That is what the ARCON Act is against. It is what is just, fair and equitable. On that basis, any rejection of the prohibition, heavy or slight, should be deemed a rejection of fairness.
• Ariyibi, a communications expert, writes from Lagos