Speakers: Femi Falodun, CEO, ID Africa; Jessica Hope, Founder and CEO, Wimbart
Moderator
Okay, welcome back everyone for their final stretch of sessions for this afternoon. And next we have Africa challenges and opportunities. So welcome to the stage, Femi Falodun, CEO of ID Africa, and Jessica Hope, co-founder and CEO of Wimbart
Femi
Alright, good afternoon, everyone. Okay. Africa, Africa is very interesting. And I’m glad that we’re going to have a quick conversation about that. Again, I’m saying follow down. I grew up in Nigeria and have worked for a couple of years in Nigeria and glad to be here.
Jessica
Nice to meet everyone. I run a PR agency called Wimbart. We’re very, very niche. We specialise in the African tech space, which is very, very small, but it is growing rapidly. And I am not Nigerian. I’m not African, but I used to run comms for a company. Called iROKO, which is one of the first big kinds of African entertainment and tech companies that raise significant funding. And I worked there for three years, I worked and spent a lot of time working in Nigeria, South Africa, and in the US as well, actually engaging with the diaspora in multiple markets there. And I kind of fell into this space, built a network and have grown an agency from there.
Femi
Thanks, Jessica. And speaking of working in Africa, I think one of the things that we’ve come to understand is that the world doesn’t seem to understand our continent. as they should. And, and that I think is part of why we’re having this conversation to share some of the insights and knowledge of working on the ground. I’ve been working in marketing comms and specifically PR for 10 years now with Black House Media and we started at Africa in 2015, mostly to adopt some technology approach to communications, including using use of digital use of social, which at the time was not exactly well embraced on the continent or athletes within the area of practice that we were in. And over time, we’ve seen that we’ve done some good work on the continents, but it seems like the world has not fully embraced some of the work that we’re doing. And I think part of the challenges that we’ve seen working on continents and working with brands and trying to communicate and all of that, is that even though it seems as if the continent is not full of opportunity, but there’s actually a lot of opportunity, and I was speaking with Jessica earlier, and we said we’re going to focus more on the opportunities and challenges. So, we’ll talk about a few things that are brewing in space, whether as communicators or as businesses operating on the continent of Africa. First things first, I think I’ll just try and paint a picture of what the opportunity that Africa offers looks like. Earlier this year, in January, there was the proposition or the signing of the Africa free continental free trade agreements, which was supposed to open up the continents or 54 countries that is, Africa is not a country, like we say 54 countries to trade openly so it’s going to be the world’s biggest free markets. And that opens up about 1.3 billion population, a market of that size to the rest of the world. So, what does this mean to us as consultants and advisors to the companies that we work for? What kind of opportunities are this open up in terms of business? And I think that’s one critical example of the trends that we are seeing on this space in the continents, and the opportunities that are opened up to businesses on continents. So, for communicating or working for brands in Africa, one of the critical opportunities that we can explore is how to tell a more continental story in terms of the growth in terms of opportunities. According to the World Bank, I think by 2050, half of Africa’s population will be under 25. I don’t think there’s any other region in the world that is that youthful, with that kind of size, you know, that’s like the size of China or India, really. And now with the free trade agreements, you have open borders across 54 countries that would have been a challenge in the past. And that’s one major opportunity that I think brands in Europe, brands in America and the rest of the world can explore. And for us as communicators and advisors to these brands. It’s also an opportunity to tell the story or guide them in terms of advisory tours this Jessica has worked in in or helped to tell the story of another massive, massively exciting sector of Africa and as the tech, the technology space with start-ups, and all of that now, I think she has a few things to share around the opportunities that are there and the promises that are set forth or even lessons from helping to tell tech stories.
Jessica
Okay, I’ve got a few slides. So let me go first. Okay, so, as Jamie said, like, really importantly, like Africa is not a country. There’s 54 countries and they all have a diverse media space as well. I say that a lot of the kind of Pan African companies that we work with that kind of pitch to global PR companies, and they kind of just talk about generally Africa. We can do this in Africa. We can do that in Africa. But you know, Nigeria is different from Ghana, I think really close to each other. Kenya’s? South Africa has completely different markets almost everywhere else in Sub Saharan Africa as well. So it’s really important that I think that, you know, whilst, whilst trade agreements like the AFC FTA is going to bring the continent closer together in terms of communications and kind of connecting with your end users or investors or anyone it’s really, really important for communicators on the continent, to see each country individually and understand the media space that they’re operating in. Interestingly, again, like the AFC FTA has taken a really, really long time to get off the ground. It’s really been like it’s such a massive project. And it’s, it’s been quite problematic and there was a lot of back and forth and the communications were broadly okay but they’re, you know, the worst issues as well. But I think going forward on the continent in terms of opportunity, crisis, comms is going to become a priority for a lot of a lot of companies as well. Now, interestingly, I think, the spaces that I work in as well as technology, so I work with a lot of finance FinTech companies, and also health tech, and so any companies that are operating in highly regulated sectors are going to require more and more PR and comms support. If anyone here knows anything about say, for example, the Nigerian finance space, the CBN, for example, will you know one day just decided to basically make crypto illegal. Now that’s very, very difficult for market, growing crypto market that’s focusing on the African continent. So, I think it’s going to be really important for brands and businesses to understand and prepare for crisis calm so they can deal with these issues when they come as well. Because as I say that the market is moving very, very quickly. And sadly, often regulators aren’t actually as up to speed in these areas as they should be, but I think that companies need to get one step ahead as well. So that will be a priority. I think, going forward. I think interestingly, as well, like there’s an opportunity to educate the market on PR. Certainly it changes from country to country. But you know, in the space that we work in, you know, earned media that is quite tricky. Because, you know, a lot of journalists still require payment for placement of content, and that’s not ideal. And furthermore, also as well is that a lot of the companies that we work with and probably the smaller ones, there are kind of grey areas between what’s PR what’s marketing, what’s advertising, what’s Stakeholder Relations, as well. So, we spend a lot of time taking the companies that we work with on the journey and trying to help them figure out okay, what’s newsworthy? What elements of the story are really basic PR but I think that there’s amazing stories to be told. And it’s just kind of extracting the stories in a kind of PR way and making sure that not only the local media is engaged with them, but also hopefully international media too. I think interestingly, as well, we’re working phenomenally, in some ways, quite a low-trust environment. And that’s why storytelling is quite important. So, peer to peer storytelling, case studies and so forth are really powerful ways of telling some of the more interesting stories that come from some of the companies as well, especially, again, in low-trust market. Like FinTech, for example. Again, people are still kind of weary, they’re still kind of like, if they can’t see where their money is going, which is where FinTech, which is what a FinTech does, is kind of making sure that you are kind of like building the brand, building the trust, engaging really closely with consumers trying to be as transparent as possible. So that’s one area that I think is also a challenge, but I see some really, really amazing companies doing some really excellent work in this area. And then you know, you’ve gone from having a low trust environment to you’ve got a kind of community of people who feel that they can’t live without a FinTech brand because the trust is so great. And then you’ve got the kind of got you know, peer to peer endorsement from there as well.
And I think another thing is kind of like money as well. Money is an issue in terms of paying for professional services in terms of investing long term in public relations as well. That’s going to continue. And also, as I alluded to previously paying journalists on the continent, for example, when we’re talking about traditional pay, media journalists aren’t traditionally paid that well on the continent as well. So, they often have to supplement their work and salary with paid work and paid kind of pay for play stuff, which again is not ideal. So that goes back to educating the market, it goes back to making sure we have amazing stories and working really hard behind the scenes to make sure that there’s some great stories on the continent. And again, not just like following the kind of like, you know, there’s a happy medium, I think between having interesting stories, but kind of not feeling the kind of like Africa, charity, famine, disease narrative as well. And that’s something Femi and I were talking about previously, and we can discuss a little bit further as well, because it’s like, yes, there are challenges, but the opportunities and the cool things happening on the continent far outweigh the challenges, I think.
Femi
Yeah. And speaking of the cool things happening, I think that that gets me excited. One of the biggest exports out of Nigeria specifically and I think a couple of African countries that even people in the UK can attest to is culture, entertainment, music, film, and all of that. And I think for communicators, that’s one thing that has always worked in entertainment works. It’s one of the best vehicles to transport a message and work with consumer brands with BH M with ID Africa. Over the past couple of years. We’ve learned how to master the art of telling stories that are entertaining, and I think looking at a much more global world now where a lot of African start-ups, like some of the ones that that Jessica work with, they are crossing borders, you know, intra Africa expansion international expansion beyond the continent, one of the vehicles that will help tell that story and we have a couple of examples from the same time is our music, you know, the so called Afro beats, that if you go to a typical African party, or let me say people, black People’s Party anywhere in the world, you hear the sound and a lot of that is West African music, South African music, this Iroko that Jessica worked with that she spoke about earlier, and they promote Nollywood, they sell Nollywood content across the world Nollywood is Nigeria’s film industry and the content from this. These sectors of the economy are consumed across the world and people can relate with it. And I think for communicators, it’s an opportunity to also use these vehicles, these channels and the people that are at the forefront of pushing the culture forward as spokespeople, as I don’t want to use the word influencers, but really to influence the rest of the world. People have accepted our music, people have accepted our fashion, people have accepted our film. I think we can also tell corporate stories, brand stories about products. To these channels, a couple of fintechs in Nigeria. I’ve started working with some of the biggest names like Burnout Boy, like Danny; you know, you can see them signing deals, you can see them selling CDs via some of this technology products, tunnels, and we’re speaking earlier about the this, this very interesting collaboration happening between technology and entertainment and pop culture. Do you see more of that happening in the next couple of years?
Jessica
Yeah, I think even more of that as well and actually thinking about it as well. If you think there’s, you know, kind of a relatively new app as well called a bag, and they sponsor Big Brother Nigeria. Which is wild, that you guys will know how much the fees are. Well, it will be embarrassing to do that and it was very, very sensible in the shoot investment. Yeah, it’s a complete change as well. And I think from what I can see as well in terms of the entertainment space and the communication spaces, is that you know, I think, previously, you know, the big kinds of music stars on the continent. Their main revenue stream was probably obviously concerts, not necessarily album sales, because obviously the music market was slightly different. So, concert tickets are kind of, you know, performing for governors. Governor’s wedding bands from brand brands, but now actually, it’s probably way more lucrative as well and, you know, an opportunity for them to connect to the tech community as well. And obviously, the tech community is not necessarily going to use the traditional routes to media as well to kind of connect with their audience. They’re using social media and you know, it’s the entire journey as well. It’s not just you know, an ad it’s not just YouTube, it’s kind of Instagram, Twitter, webinars, all sorts of things as well. So, there’s so many opportunities for this kind of growing space as well and the two are definitely going to collaborate even more over the years.
Femi
I’m just going to speak about Big Brother and just so many of us are familiar with the big brother franchise. I don’t know if you know this, but the Big Brother Nigeria franchise is the biggest big brother franchise anywhere in the world, which is massive. And interestingly, we worked with the producers of the show, and the numbers are really, really ridiculous. And this content is consumed far beyond even the continent of Africa. And as we speak right now, if you go on Twitter, and you check the video, the video is of one of the biggest music stars from Africa. We check his timeline, something is actually going on that I think there are a lot of PR lessons to pick from there. So, I don’t know what he was doing or why he did it. But he put out a tweet and said, people if you think I’ve made hits for you, so he writes songs for people he features on people’s songs and is is that loads of hits pre African artists of the past 10 years, and he says people should send him money and he sent his account number put it up on his timeline, and the numbers are growing at the last count. So, 73 million naira. Now I will do the conversion to pounds, but just understand that it’s hard to find a million naira right, and people are sending him money just because they love him. Now, this particular incident shows you the power and influence of pop culture on communication. And I can tell that a couple of brands started calling in. So as communicators in 2021 Going forward, I think this is a powerful tool through which you can actually tell stories, especially when it comes to consumer engagement and consumer products. Now looking at, at your experience working with some of the most successful tech brands in Africa, what do you think how do you think we can tell a better story of so as an African business, how do you think we can tell our stories better, such that we can get the attention of the world and and draw beyond the shores of our countries?
Jessica
So, I think interestingly, one of the main things is, especially for the Western media or Westerners, it’s really important to give people comparison points, because the trouble is the narrative around Africa if you’re a Westerner is kind of like this Oxfam narrative of, you know, famine. And charity and, you know, “give a guy a fish and he’ll eat for a week or teach him to fish and he’ll feed a family for life”; that kind of African narrative is, is kind of stale and not true. And it doesn’t show the kind of the vibrancy and the business and the hustle and entrepreneurship in the innovation of, again, an entire continent. And again, each country is slightly different. But I think so basically, it’s showing the business successes, and also giving people a comparison point and I’ll use once again, I’ll go back to Iroko. Whoa. So, when Iroko first launched and it really kind of blew up CNN referred to Iroko as the Netflix of Africa. So that was awesome for Iroko right? Because Iroko needed to open doors in the West. You know, the CEO if he wanted to have a meeting if he was in Silicon Valley and he wanted to have a meeting with someone. He wanted them to Google them and be like, okay, the BBC is covered them, you know, had that validation because, to be honest, 10 years ago, when we started on the Rocco journey, the West would literally like Western journalists would say, I do a really good pitch, even if I do say so myself. I’ve really strong pitch. and Western journalist’s tech business finance will just say, I’m not going to write about this Nigerian internet scammer. Like it was that blatant? I actually still have an email of someone emailing me that and this was even after they’d raised $3 million from Tiger global. So, we had this kind of really big corporate push to promote the CEO. So, if he landed in Silicon Valley, yeah, he could go and get an interview or meeting with investors with potential partners and so forth. So that was really important and the Netflix of Nollywood kind of named struggle. It was useful for a while; it was useful in the West; it was not in any way useful in Africa. Essentially, yeah, there was no such thing as Netflix, really. So, everyone’s like, okay, but you didn’t need to explain Nollywood. Because everyone on the continent like and again, we’re talking about Africa as a country, but you know, whilst Nollywood is very much Nigerian, it is everywhere on the continent. I once took Mamaji on tour in South Africa. We got mobbed at Heathrow, we got mobbed at Joburg airport. We’ve got mobbed everything we got mobbed in Soweto, you know the power of her again, as a celebrity as a face for African culture is massive. So, I think it’s really important to tell those stories as well. And to kind of give comparison points, but not to the extent where you’re then almost kind of positioning the African brand as secondary to what the Western one is as well, because now, if you look at Netflix, Netflix has finally entered the continent and is making moves and people like Wow, is this going to be the downfall of Morocco but if you look at the Nollywood content on Netflix, it’s like 50 hours or something. It’s not that much and it’s a different type of Nollywood. Audiences are different as well. So, it’s about knowing the audience. So, there’s space for lots of different brands and companies. But I think it’s very important when you’re trying to pitch African stories to the west to kind of give it a sort of context. The local context for the local context is so important because until you go to Nigeria until you go to Kenya until you go to South Africa until you go to Ethiopia. You don’t have any context other than what the Western media has shown you, which is usually this kind of Oxfam narrative as well, which is really lazy.
Femi
And speaking of trying to change the narrative, that’s what we’ve done at Blackhouse Media. In 2016, we started the Nigeria API reports, which was a labour of love out of the shortage or absence of data on the industry. So, we did that, trying to just solve a problem that we faced in the line of work. And over the years, we’ve also understood that some of the technologies that have been developed by the rest of the world for PR practitioners on the continent don’t really work well for us. So, for example, we try to get local insights or data or monitor or evaluate our campaigns. Most of the tools that are available internationally, don’t really, they are effective tools to an extent, but they would be better or more effective if they were built with the local context. In my mind, I mean when they were being developed, so this pushed us to the point where we had to invest in local technology, working with some of the people that Jessica works with in the tech space to build look out tools that will help us analyse campaigns or help us optimise our processes. And one of those products ended up becoming Plaqad is a company that’s within the BHM group that provides insights, local insights on the continent, especially focused on Nigeria for now. On digital, you know, Social Media Insights, analytics and stuff like that. And the next project we’re trying to build now is the press office, a digital press office, to try and age the work that PR people do. And we understand that some of these technologies are being developed in other markets across the world, but they do not necessarily solve the problem. For us locally. And I think at that point, those of us working in comms will have to work with the various offices when I do say that they are very successful now in Nigerian technology, Kenyan technology, space, South African technologies, like African tech. People are really doing well. And I think more of the collaboration between the tech guys and the technology I’m sorry, on the communicators will help us solve some of those problems. And that’s, that’s for us. That’s like the next mission for BHS to try and solve our own problems by ourselves. So that we can do a better job of telling the story of Africa.
Jessica
That’s really, I think that’s really useful because what you say about some of the Western kind of like PR tech, kind of support services, you know, news wires they useless for Africa, like completely useless or if there’s any references, PR Newswire a session or anything else but like, we used to pay for one and I hustled them down price, but like the Africa list will woeful they maybe had like 200 Journalists for the whole continent. Most of them were out of date. A lot of them are like info at so when I complained, I said right, we’re going to stop using it because we actually maintained better lists in house they will, what you could do is you can upload your contacts into what so there’s actually no use for us any of these kind of the PR databases, but they’re not built for Africa at all. No one’s really contact-focused on that area yet. And even the ones that say they are focusing on it, they’re really not focusing on it well enough. So that’s the first piece but even the news wires are not very good. There are a couple, and I won’t name them. But they’re just kind of you getting the results back and it’s just all the spam bot stuff. And they’re really not, they don’t ever produce any results. The only time we would use a newswire service is if we’re distributing a release, and it’s got to go to places like Zambia or Malawi or somewhere where we don’t have much of a presence. Everything else is like one-on-one personal relationships. And again, we still use technology, but our technology is WhatsApp.
Femi
And that’s another example of the difference between how we do PR back home and how the rest of the world’s PRD tools are different. Some of them may appear crude, but I think I just mentioned something very critical. The human part and one on one people are still very, this there’s a human touch that I think is at the core of what PR is originally but even though technology can help us amplify a few things on the continent, you know, the news wires don’t work because the journalists want to see you, they want to shake you. You have to understand their plight, you have to understand their needs. And I think that goes a long way in summarising the points that the technology that will solve or that will improve the practice of communications or PR back in Africa will be homegrown. Just like how we are building our own. We had to build our own PayPal, you know, we are building our own. Whatever you want to buy across FinTech or homegrown technology products. are going to solve the problem. And I think that’s what we are going to have to do in comms as well. And hopefully, we’ll get there pretty quickly.
Jessica
So that’s a really good point. And I think you’re right, it’s just building for a certain market as well. And I know you know, in terms of say pitching journalists, for example, most of it is done. We might send an email but it’s always back and forth following up on WhatsApp whereas in the UK, like most journalists, like don’t call me definitely don’t WhatsApp me like they just really don’t like it’s all whereas most of the time, I might send an email out of courtesy but also if even like some really top like BBC, for example, some BBC journalists are still like WhatsApp them first, and there’ll be way more responsive. So again, that goes back to understanding your market, understanding how people like to do business, understanding, like the rules of engagement are completely different. And I think that that extends to, we were talking about it previously. So, I work with a lot of tech founders, CEOs, everything is still very personal. They’re building their business and its blood, sweat and tears, and it’s business, business, business, and it’s hardcore. So almost, you know, as with a lot of PRS, you are kind of like the counsel in terms of support and discussing things and being creative and all those types of things. But for the start-up founders, I especially think that they need someone who really cares. No, there’s a lot of what I would say is non billable hours, just listening and caring and chatting through ideas because you’re on that early-stage business journey with them. And then the PR is obviously an element of that but you kind of get drawn into it. And that’s good, because it’s interesting and access to entrepreneurs is amazing. And you know, it’s inspiring, but it’s kind of hardcore as well, but that’s with a smaller start-up. You know, maybe companies that have, say, 100 people, you work with bigger corporations, African international brands like what’s the relationship they’re with you kind of point people?
Femi
Yeah, it’s actually similar. So, I think over the last 10 years, one of the industry battles will be fought to get to have more access to some to the executives and the big decision makers. And I think we’ve gotten to the point where we’ve discovered that the real need they have is someone that will advise them on their general business needs. They don’t want somebody to help them with the story in the press. They know you can do that. But that’s like the least of what they want. They want advice. They want guidance. They want a listening ear, and I think at this point to succeed whether it’s in I think this is even a global trend that clients now need more advice than they need PR tactics or PR strategies. So, I think business advisory is at the core of it is something that is the way it is with the tech founders in the same way it is with the CEO of the multinationals that we advise in communications. So, I think we’ve done enough to paint the picture.
Jessica
Yes, we painted the picture. I hope that we have focused more on the opportunity rather than the challenges because there are plenty of other people who will tell you about the challenges in Africa. The opportunities are in abundance there. It’s quite exciting and it’s actually quite fun working in this.