Riley: Augmented Reality Becoming a Big Part of Brand Advertising
This Week In Tech
In this interview, the Chief Executive Officer, Ad Dynamo by Aleph, Sean Riley, Speaks on Digital Advertising Space, New technologies, and its latest education program in Nigeria. Nosa Alekhuogie presents the excerpts:
Can you talk about the acquisition by Aleph and the free digital ad expert training that has kicked off in Nigeria?
We are very excited to be part of the Aleph family, and I would say that one of the important points to note is that we’ve known the leadership team at Aleph for many years, interacting at global training sessions and conferences hosted by our partners. Aleph is very passionate about global education and feels that is what is really going to accelerate growth across all major markets, closing the gap of skills available by introducing more career opportunities to young individuals across all major markets, which Nigeria is really into. I guess that explains how important Nigeria is to Aleph worldwide in terms of extending its training programme and Digital Ad Experts.
Nigeria is the first market where an English version of a product has been made available. Aleph began where its roots are in Latin America, but as you know, Nigeria is the first market outside of Latin America where we’ve opened it up for local candidates, and that’s very exciting. I think the website is being refined a little to make the opportunity clearer to individuals. There is a lot of free training available on the site that anyone can just register and complete free of charge at any time, you can slowly but surely complete a comprehensive set of courses in digital advertising.
We have the digital online Ad degree, which is a more formal process that takes three months, we take waves of students, and the first wave is about to close in Nigeria, which is a peer-to-peer learning, and there is a dedicated instructor who guides all local Nigerian students through the process. The goal there is to do waves of 500 at a time, so there are two different elements. One is what I would call everyday opportunities where you can log on online and just complete courses, and the other one is the online ad degree.
As an expert that understands the Digital space, what are your views about the Nigerian market in terms of digital advertising, and what gap are you trying to bridge in the market?
I think what we’ve seen entering the Nigerian market is development, and I think it would be arrogant to say that Aleph is going to come and close a skills gap in any market. Aleph just wants to be part of scaling up more resources in the local market. But even without Aleph and without our efforts on digital ads, we’ve observed rapid income in skillsets, and the digital advertising role is all about the skills available.
Anyone can load a hundred dollars on any platform and spend it but optimising that and holding great creatives are all critical attributes to achieving performance. We’ve seen that skillset develop very quickly in Nigeria, and I think the easiest way of accessing that skill set is by accessing the Calibre of people that we basically hire. The Calibre of people we are finding on the ground has been exceptional. About 10 years ago till today, we feel that the team we have in Nigeria is focused and can hold its own against any other market. I think for a lot of markets, we might put a lot of pros on what we do, but we are a sales business. We are here to generate revenue for ourselves and our business.
What is your target audience, and what criteria were used in selecting the 500 people in the academy?
I would say that the only criterion is the willingness to learn. Obviously, I believe that most young school leavers are our target audience, but at the same time, someone could be in their early forties or at any stage of life deciding that they want to have a more comprehensive sense of knowledge about digital marketing. So, I would say that the criterion in terms of demographic is anyone with an appetite, and we measure that appetite by asking candidates that register to complete a very short bit of pre-work and their ability to devise an hour to a bit of pre-work, to pass that demonstrative attitude and appetite to make the commitment through the three-month period. That is how we’ve gone about that.
The social media space has evolved. Where do you see social media and brand advertising in two to three years?
In terms of social evolution and where we see brand advertising going, I’ll say Augmented Reality (AR). It is becoming such a big part of brand advertising, and it’s incredibly engaging. When we talk about Snapchat, we talk about a pastime, you know, with the lens, it’s not a banner that somebody sold by accident, it’s a lens that somebody chose to engage in, make a video of himself, share with friends on Snap, off Snap, and it’s the same with TikTok as well.
In Nigeria, for example, we talk about pay time. A brand with a lens typically generates two years of paid time in a single day which is a lot when you start comparing that matrix to Tv views, YouTube, or any other video. So, I think AR is a very big part of the future, but I think at the same time, it is really important to say that different brands have different target audiences and different objectives, and I am a big believer in the fact that each brand has to go and hunt for its sweet spots and based on your audiences even in your purchase circle, what you are trying to achieve in terms of the influence of purchase decisions if you ask me, I’ll probably say brands are going to choose less social platforms, they are going to try to excel at them.
Expensive data and poor internet coverage are major problems in Nigeria. What are you doing to tackle this challenge?
On the line of data, expensive data is such a challenge in so many markets. Nigeria, believe it or not, is comparatively cheap to many other African territories, but something that all our partners such as Twitter, Snapchat and Spotify have done in the past with local telcos is to do zero-rated bills where we pick up the data cost on behalf of the user, but a lot of those deals haven’t worked. The main reason being that we haven’t been promoted well enough to the local market. We haven’t told Nigerians that you can use Twitter free of charge on this network or that you can use Spotify without paying for any data on this network, and that is something that we can definitely be better at, and we recognise as an ongoing challenge.
Partnerships with the telcos have been in place for many years in Nigeria, but they just haven’t been very well promoted to mobile users. So, we do have the challenge that Twitter can go and negotiate a deal with a telco, but we are very dependent on the Telco to make the users aware that Twitter is free to use, and that has been one of the fundamental breakdowns over the past few years. I’d need to check how much of those deals are still in place. I’m aware of quite a few telcos having deals in place for at least five to six years.
What are your plans concerning expansion in Nigeria, and what new technology should we expect in the digital marketing space?
Aleph represents many partners that Ad dynamo does not in many other markets. So, we are also looking to bring a few of those to Nigeria. What I would say is that you would be seeing, over the next six months a large portfolio giving brands access to a local representation of great partners. Part of our model for operating is that we would never have an employee representing more than one platform, so our goal is to represent Twitter at the same standard that Twitter would represent itself, and the only way we can achieve that is to have a dedicated Twitter team.
For each partner we represent in Nigeria, we have built a dedicated sales team that only sells to specific partners. It’s quite a big investment for us as we’ll be bringing a new partner, and we must build an entirely new team for that partner. There will be an increased portfolio of different partners being represented.
In terms of new technology, you know that I mentioned earlier that AR is big, and we do a lot of assisting brands and agencies in Nigeria. We also have plans to introduce a level of self-service to small businesses. We can’t justify a dedicated account manager for clients of all sizes, so that is a big challenge for us. How do we give a level of service to clients of all sizes no matter what they spend? A self-service of some sort is something we’d like to bring to the market to extend our offering to smaller clients.
