Companies that fail to invest in data aggregation and interpretation—especially in today’s rapidly evolving era—risk falling behind in innovation and customer satisfaction, making them increasingly vulnerable to collapse as they will also lack insight.
This was the summation of speakers at this year’s Experiential Marketers Association of Nigeria, (EXMAN), Brand Experience Summit with the theme “Personalization at Scale: From Insights to Impact in a Data-Driven, Immersive World”.
Lekan Fadolapo, Director General of Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria, ARCON elaborated it clearly when he said “any economy or sector that is not investing in data, knowledge, capacity building, will wake up one day and discover that they are nowhere”.
He believed that AI will not cause loss of jobs but however said , “if you don’t embrace technology, if you are not a step ahead of the industry, if you don’t seek knowledge in a data-driven advertising industry, either in above the line or below the line, you will just find that one day your business will collapse”.
He said for ARCON as a regulator, “we consciously, intentionally attend seminars on this issue because it is expected of us as a regulator to be a step ahead of the regulated or operators”. He challenged marketers to open their minds.
He challenged EXMAN members to always take proactive steps. “Let’s open our minds to learn as we grow the industry. We cannot grow the industry with the current education and capacity that we have. We need to continuously challenge the knowledge”, he said.
Feyi Olubodun, founder and managing partner of Open Squares Africa, a strategy and marketing consulting firm whose speech focused on the intersection of data and storytelling for building brand experiences said if a client wants to build brand experiences, the client needs to go to the level of customization with data in particular.
He said that fortunately, today there is abundance of data and there are tools that can aggregate data but what is lacking is interpretative skills of data and the ability to see patterns and extract actionable insights from data.
He said aggregation of data and interpretation is where clients and agencies need to build more capability so that they can then use that to design the kind of brand experiences that engage consumers deeply, that build brand loyalty.
Olubodun who authored “The Villager: How Africans Consume Brands,” further explained how artificial intelligence can help marketers on this journey in a way that is faster, that is more cost efficient and that is also at scale. He also said there are key ways how marketers can use AIs to create persona out of data.
On why it is difficult to aggregate and interpret data in an environment of abundance of data, Feyi, said it is because marketers and clients don’t invest enough in that skill.
“We don’t invest enough. There should be investment in interpreting it. Most organizations are sitting on quite a lot of data. They get data every year. But it would be good if they begin to invest in-house into business intelligence, into analytics”.
“And if they can’t invest in-house, they can partner and collaborate externally. But developing capabilities in analytics, in intelligence skill sets and all of that, that’s where we need to be, so that we can then begin to extract the value from the data”.
Another way to get value from data, he said is to collaborate across industries. He said some industries such as tech industry, fintech have that capability at a very high level.
Uchenna Uzo of Lagos Business School who presented a 2024/2025 Industry Report on Experiential Marketing Trends and Consumer Behavior developed by the school in collaboration with industry leaders said brands must deliver experience if they want to build loyalists.
Emphasizing that future of experiential marketing will depend on how brand loyalty is managed, Uzo said ordinarily, consumers will forget what you said, or what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel.
Earlier, the Tolulope Apinke Medebem, EXMAN’s President stated that this year’s summit theme “Personalization at Scale: From Insights to Impact in a Data-Driven, Immersive World” is not only timely but transformational. She said “we are not only to reach the audience but resonate with them”.
