By Tunde Oso

Prince Joe Iyeke, MD/CEO of Grandeur Limited, speaks on his over 30 years evolution in brand management, his below-the-line marketing experience, pharmaceutical niche market expertise, state of the industry and forecast into the future, against the backdrop of emerging Artificial Intelligence, AI and robotics. Excerpts:

How are you able to, for a 60-year-old, adapt to the present day rigours of brand management?

How am I able to adapt? How am I able to metamorphose? You know, just get a handle on this thing. I employ a lot of young people, and these people they know what’s out there, being very young people, with very diverse knowledge about the social media things that are happening. I use my experience to control, to envision, to drive, to supervise, mentor, but basically, we all work as a team. So that’s how we’ve been able to run the company, to align it with the changes that are happening. And these changes will continue to come.

Describe the state of the marketing communications industry in Nigeria today in the face of the present economic realities

It’s in a deplorable state, let’s be honest, because clients have this tendency to always come after advertising and marketing budgets whenever anything goes wrong with the economy, so you find that a very tough nut to crack. Most advertising and marketing budgets in all the heavyweight companies have been slashed, and it keeps going down daily. So, the budget all of us are pursuing is so little these days. But beyond that, the impact of the social media is quite strong.

I remember one of the areas agencies used to make so much money from in those days, Christmas cards. Some clients used to print 25,000 or more copies of Christmas cards. Who produces Christmas cards nowadays? Even calendars, people don’t go for such things very much anymore.

Yes, the truth is everything about the consumer in Nigeria now is dictated by his disposable income. You know, the recent economic hardships Nigeria has faced has led to a depletion of the disposable income of nearly everybody out there. So, you’ll find a situation where choices are made in consideration to what’s available in your pocket and what you really need. If you have some extras, yeah, you can scrape and just make a random purchase choice. So, we often recommend to our clients to look towards one-on-one engagements. How do we reach the consumer in a way that we’re closer to him, we’re in his face, closest to him, and enter his consciousness, create empathy, and make him become loyal to our brand.

Continual budget cutting by clients when the economy is troubled, how have you managed?

Narrate your experience

You know, you don’t just, because something has happened in the economy, you just slash budgets. And you reduce the visibility of your brand. And at the end of the day, that brand may even become threatened. For a lot of brands, this may even be the best time for new entrants to come into the market because some brands have lost so much visibility that the new entrant that comes with a good strategy can just knock them by the wayside so that’s the wrong approach. Let the budget be there and let’s look for smarter ways for one-on-one connections with consumer segments and the brand will continue to gain prominence in the mind of the people. Yeah, you may argue that the disposable income of consumers has been depleted but they will always get those things that they need. Everything still boils down to the preferences you create them. Consumers will always go for brands that are uppermost in their scale. It’s as simple as that. So, they should stop tinkering with these budgets rather look for smarter ways of getting the consumer to buy and everybody will be fine. I’m not saying it because I’m a practitioner in the industry therefore I want us to be making money but that’s the logical thing to do. If you say because the economy is so bad you ask your family to stop eating, you ask them to stop going to school they must go to school somehow, they must eat somehow. So, it’s just for you to find smarter ways of getting the brand out there and that’s why below the line is always so key.

Talk about the impact of social media on the industry…

Looking at this issue of the social media some people have said that it has led to a higher rate of crime and a higher rate of obscenities, some things that you are not even supposed to see, you know what a media house will not publish Like a traditional media house will not publish a newspaper or a television station will not show visuals of a dead man but on the social media you see people displaying corpses, even people showing their pregnant wives almost naked. You know I’m talking about the negative impacts of the social media to an average person and why I’m talking about AI and robotics that they sort of deplete our humanity, sort of, and even the social media, the tech. I think the traditional media, they’ve had their own uses and they’ve been good at moderating society in a way, whereas the social media just presents the society as it is, like the good, bad and ugly. Sometimes, it does things brutally. That is why sometimes the traditional media has not helped in forging change here in Nigeria. You find them being dictated to, operating to the whims of somebody somewhere. The highest bidder gets what they want to get out. Whereas with the social media, you don’t have that kind of control. Things just shoot out from everywhere. I know the government of every country will try to have their own legislation and regulations to moderate what goes on there but still you cannot control the social media as much as the traditional media can be controlled. Let’s face the reality that’s just the way the world is nowadays You find in more advanced countries the freedom of choice of the individual I want to be a woman today they say it’s your choice tomorrow that same person says she is no longer a woman. In California, they will tell you that’s the person’s choice. Here in Africa, how do we react to, how have I tried to react to such things? I just let you be what you want to be. I just pray that my children do not come one day and present me such a thing. Because we all have kids. So, suppose your child comes today and tells you that I’m no longer a boy, I’m a girl now.

Like people talk a lot about Bobrisky and all that so I just pray that my own children don’t fall into it and I sympathise with those whose children have fallen into that category they can’t really help what’s happening but we just have to accept that that’s the changing reality of the world we live in today. People are exercising some weird choices and some governments are leaving them to fester because they talk about freedom of choice.

Tell us about the conception of Grandeur Limited?

When I left Media Plus, I didn’t have the capacity to set up an agency straight away. However, I always believed in one thing, that eventually, through some hard work, you know, the daring guy will always find his way. I always believed your own is your own and my own is my own. The market is big enough for everybody. With time, you’ll find your own accounts. So, at the time I left Media Plus, I just wanted to start afresh on my own. And so that was what I did. But survival at some point proved very difficult, you know. But I thank God leaving Mediaplus did happen, and it was to prepare me for a bigger role of managing my own. So, at the beginning I wasn’t getting advertising jobs, advertising jobs at that time meant above the line. Radio, TV, billboard, all of those.

Who would give a start up such a big job at that time? So, I wasn’t getting them. I now had no choice but to find my space in the below the line area. So, I learned how to do every form of below the line job: Get your materials, size it, cost it, produce it, you know, direct labour production. I am not talking about getting it and giving it to a third party to produce, no, produce it by yourself, deliver it by yourself, everything by yourself, invoice it by yourself and collect the money by yourself, hahahaha.
So, I had a friend, who jokingly started calling me a one-man and dog outfit because everything was being done by me. So, I learned all the production skills during that period. Of course, working in the advertising industry, you will always meet printers. Production people will come in to take jobs from your agency. So, if you were in client service, all you just had to do was let the production people know that the client has approved this design for this production, for this quantity. So, that was the much I knew about production. Going into below the line meant I had to learn the process of getting everything done by myself, which means if I had a job I would get somebody to design it; but at some point I had to get my own desktop computer, not laptop and even learnt designing on Corel Draw myself, do the FA myself, present it myself, get it approved, go to Mushin, buy paper, buy plates, take it to Shomolu, run the impression myself; do the finishing, package it and deliver, with my boy then Idowu, who still works with me till date. So, that period was very important for all this knowledge to be learned. All these skills to be learned; and how it did prove so useful! Eventually, when I had my break our first client was GlaxoSmithKline Pharma. Oh, yeah, it was big, yes; you know during that same period, my other mentor, Pharm Paul Enebeli introduced me to Uniben, where I was able to produce their calendar and their Christmas card for a particular year around 1998/1999. Eventually, all of those production skills that I had learned, added to my original advertising and marketing knowledge really proved instrumental to our success at Grandeur.

Describe the early days of Grandeur?

You don’t want to go into that. Okay. I will go into it. It’s very funny. I am somebody that likes music a lot. I listen to music a lot. Even up till now. My favourite brand of music… Is still Hip Hop. All this Nigerian stuff. You know. And… I had a… transistor radio… At that time. A cassette tape player. You know.The name of that cassette player… Was Grandeur and it was my constant companion. My friend… Barrister Charles Nmarkwe… I told him “O boy. I would like to have my own company.” For ease of… Anytime I had a private business to pursue because I was still working for other people. And he said, okay. He could incorporate it for me and asked. What name? I just thought about it. Instinctively I just said Grandeur and that was it. So I registered my first enterprise as Grandeur Ventures. What I wanted in profile and personality the name Grandeur fits. Ubong Nelson was my first operative when I was still working somewhere. We did some bit of running around with that same Grandeur Ventures, until I left Media Plus. And my friend, the same lawyer started telling me. It must become a limited liability company now for it to make sense, “If you’re planning to grow and all that”. So, it was then what metamorphosed into Grandeur Limited. It was incorporated in 1998 as Grandeur Limited and I started using it to… Move around. Move around. Until… I got my big break.

So how did you manage your first client?

For years, GSK was the sole brand we had for many years. Eventually from GSKPharma. We started working with GSK Consumer. You know there was a consumer health arm of GSK. So, there were so many brands. So many brands to deal with. Oh, it only blossomed and fetched us some good referrals. We showed a lot of competence,we could give on-the-job value in the diverse areas of brand management. Their brand brief will come in, the communication would be well understood. The execution well aligned with the client’s expectations. And the production, if it was a production end job, everything was in line, aligning with the client’s expectations. Of course, clients always want it speedily, and with some measure of good creativity, at the right price. So, we were meeting all of these technical standards and expectations of our clients. And you know GSK at that time was a multi-brand outfit. So many brands. So, if you did well with one brand, automatically, you just moved on to the next basically, and so on and so forth.

So, eventually, did you use it to boost your corporate profile, to expand your clientele base?

Well, that’s eventually what happened. Because eventually people would move from GSK to other organisations and take us along. We already established a measure of competence that they trusted. They would call us and trust us with good briefs from their new organisations. So, I don’t know how to describe this now, because if you remain in one particular industry. It will appear as though that’s the only place you are good at one’s niche market, like that’s the only place you are showing competence. So, to move to other industries also needs a lot of work and grace even when you have shown enough capacity and competence to work in a particular industry. If you try to go to other industries prospective clients will want to limit you to say no, your competence is in this area. And for years we were struggling to accept that. Yeah, of course we have other clients from other sectors, outside of pharmaceuticals. But eventually, we had to accept that; we are masters in pharmaceutical marketing. Why don’t we just niche it and make it our own territory. As a company let me just be honest with you there’s really nothing in communication that we don’t offer so every assignment we take on we take it as a complete package and let the client go to sleep while we deliver.

Make a forecast into the industry; with the advent of AI and robotics, is the industry not threatened?

For me, the future remains very, very bright. There’s nothing you are going to produce in future that will not need to be advertised. There’s nothing. It’s an industry that will even go better with the changes that are happening globally. Advertising is part of mankind. It’s part of our lifestyle. You go back to the basics. There’s a saying in our industry that you can’t wink and expect people to know what you are doing. So that’s the way it is. People must know about things. And the only way to bring them to know about brands is by giving out that information. And brands will continue to come up. If Coca-Cola dies today, something will come to replace Coca-Cola. It may be negative, it may be positive, but something will come to replace it. So, advertising can never go extinct. It can never die. What will only happen is evolution. It will evolve from one type to the other, one thing to the other.

Let’s go back to the beginning, you seem to be a prince. I can see beads in your hand…

I am from Igbodo in Delta State. Fortunately, my family, the Iyeke family, is the ruling family of that kingdom. So, my brother presently is the King (called Obi) of the village, although he elected not to go by the name Iyeke. Osedume is the name he has chosen for his reign. So, I am a Prince of Igbodo Kingdom in Delta State. Igbodo is just on your way from Agbor/Umunede towards Asaba/Onitsha.
Igbodo is a prominent town in Delta State, predominantly of farmers, especially tomato farming, entrepreneurs and scholars.

Are you of the Isoko or Urhobo stock in Delta?

No, we speak Aniocha, Ibo language.

Can you give a narrative of your entry into brand management and the integrated marketing communications industry?

It started way back in 1988, when I graduated from the University of Benin. I was posted to Enugu, where I had my NYSC. Somehow, while growing up through novels and. Just maybe talking a lot with my peers, I stumbled into the advertising profession. And I just got to like it, even though I didn’t have any experience of it or have anybody around us at that time practising it.

You graduated from Uniben?

I graduated from the faculty of Arts in Uniben in 1988. At that time, when one was in Uniben, it was a glorious time. The quality of education at that time was very, very high. Maybe what also helped was the fact that I passed through the HSC. The HSC scheme at that time, the quality of the teaching was very, very immense. Very high. So, one came out from school with a lot of ambition, but also a lot of knowledge because we were well taught at that time. So… Going over to Enugu, where I was posted to serve… I tried to immediately come into the advertising profession. I had you know, that love and passion for it. And… I served at Richland Communications. Our MD at that time was, Ike Mordibelu.

A PR firm?

No. An advertising firm in Enugu, at that time. And from there, I began to have my first experience of the industry. I saw what the structure of agencies… Was like. The media department. You know the traditional advertising agency. Media department. Creative department. Embodying the copy… And strategy today. We were not calling it strategy at that time. Just copy and art. There was research. The accounts and admin, you know, as a support unit of the creative work we were doing. Also, the production unit. And… Having my service in an ad agency actually gave me an idea of what I was coming into. And I liked it even more. So, immediately the service year was over I went back to… Agbor, where I grew up and just rested for a few weeks with my family. And thought… What was the next step? Obviously, the next step was to give myself the best opportunity. Lagos provided the best opportunity for advertising practice, even now. Lagos was like our japa destination back then. So, I immediately came over to Lagos, to join the industry. I was lucky to join a small agency at that time- St. George’s Publicity. I worked there briefly. St. George’s Publicity was at Onipanu-Palmgrove axis, Lagos. I don’t think many people remember it;the agency doesn’t exist right now. But I was there for a few months. And we had some good accounts including Dunlop, Society for Family Health and all that. But my stay there didn’t last long because the agency kind of lost its way and had to do some retrenching and some of us who just joined were pencilled down for retrenchment.
But I quickly joined Adtech in Surulere, which was then run by Funso Abiri and my advertising journey was progressing. It was even at St. George’s I met Sola Lawson later of UB40 and some other very bright people that have come to become my associates in the industry.
From St. George’s Publicity to Adtech Advertising in Surulere the knowledge, experience in the industry was growing. However, it was at SAAL Advertising: Steve Alaran and Associates, where I really proved my mettle. In terms of real-time experience, because back at all these other agencies- From Richland to St. George’s, to Adtech I was involved in every task available. From Production, Art, Client Service, Copy, even Messenger work, Media work- Everything! There was this compulsion I had to really soak in the knowledge. But it was at SAAL that I began to put all these experience to greater use. We had more prestigious and challenging accounts especially in the banking and financial services industry. I did very well at SAAL, in the Client Service Department; eventually becoming the Head of the Client Service Unit, before leaving.
At SAAL Advertising, most of all the bank brands were working with us: From International Merchant Bank. IMB then, to FCMB all the banks; except maybe GTB. Even Zenith. I know I handled the annual report for Zenith for one or two years on behalf of my agency. That was where I even met Ubong Nelson for the first time. Because he was representing… Permetad an advertising agency then in Surulere owned by Peter Emetenjo of blessed memory. Peter was a friend of Jim Ovia, back from Agbor. It was a collaboration between SAAL and Permetad. My 60th birthday party is today, September 29th. So, one has really been around in the industry. You know, Nigeria is full of so, much noise. A lot of people, once N1 million enters their pocket, noise starts; and all those kinds of things… Sometimes, I find them unnecessary. Just do your thing quietly and go away, though I recognise the advertising industry is on the opposite end, they want you to shout, shout and make noise. So, from SAAL Advertising, I moved on to Media Plus, and there I had a full team, because my title at that place was General Manager. So, I had everybody reporting to me and I was reporting to the MD.
Though SAAL Advertising provided me with all the skills and knowledge I needed, in terms of technical grounding: to manage brands, handle clients, grow accounts; Media Plus provided the finishing touch; because I had the MD at that time… Patrick Okebie, a man I call my mentor, a very smart guy, full of wisdom, full of wit, a very brave guy, ambitious to learn from. A great guy who had a lot of creativity in everything he did. That was where… The finishing touch to my own leadership and management style was done. I learned a lot working under him. And for the number of years, I was there… Everything I needed to run my own outfit was acquired.

How many years did you spend there?

Maybe three years, at the most or thereabouts. I don’t have all these things in my head anymore. Maybe three years or so. But man… I learned a lot from him. The experience to lead a team. Mentor some people. Face… Criticism. Handle a diverse group of people that you had to manage. Top end tactics of how to manage clients… So, it was… It was big at Mediaplus. Media Plus, they are still existing somewhere in Oniru, in their own plaza. Although they have diversified a lot into other business lines now. I think they own Office Depot and some other furniture enterprises. And they are doing quite well.
Still being managed by the old man, Patrick Okebie. Still being managed by him. Who, I am sure now maybe around 70 years. So, it’s been an exciting journey.