BY  Princewill Ekwujuru
Creativity has been lagging in the advertising industry, particularly in Nigeria, this reason has been advanced as responsible for not any Nigeria company being able to win the Cannes award, a yearly advertising festival award that holds in France.

And for these reason also, the Advertising Agencies Association of Nigeria (AAAN) organizers of the yearly Lagos Idea Advertising Festival (LAIF), following the footstep of Cannes, had in previous editions, prelude to the award proper had craved the indulgency of Nigerian advertising agencies to be creative in their works, during meltdown era, because that will only enable them to get additional jobs and remain relevant in the eyes of their clients, without the client not minding the economic meltdown.

In this respect, many Nigerian creative agencies have re-invented their creative prowess, to, at least measure to the standard of winning Nigeria’s own Cannes; that is the LAIF, but yet in the just concluded award, winning Gold was hard to by, which invariably means that their efforts are not hard enough and may be, the creative ingenuity of the contending agencies may not have been good enough.

But one  thing  an agency did this year was to invest in the personal development of its creative staff where they were engaged for 10 weeks  in a creative school conducted by Miami art school.

Taking a glimpse at Cannes awards, Big clients Ad does not actually win awards, but awards are won through small clients, accounts, however, some of the Nigerian agencies base on winning Gold in LAIF with creative from big clients.

In the 2011 LAIF, it could be noticed that it was only a handful of agencies that could scoop Gold in the award; agencies like Rosabel, Lowe Lintas, and TBWA exhibited some creative craftiness that saw them win some Gold. The largest hull of awards was received by DDB Casers, which had three  Gold, seven Silver and five bronze medals.

According to Ikechi Odigbo, Managing Director, DDB Casers, “our achievement in LAIF this year, even though  we had very few entries that won Gold, we are privileged to have won probably the largest hull of Gold with three Gold not just with our major client, which is MTN. We are able to win Gold with GT assure, which is relatively a new account.”

Continuing, he said, “We also won Gold with Ikedi Ohakim’s political campaign. Our awards spread across our clients, this is something we are really appreciative of, we really appreciate the fact that we are paying equal attention to our big and small clients, and we are delivering value to clients across food and beverages, across government institutions, across the telecom  space, well  had almost all our clients winning Awards, from Fidelity bank to May&Baker, to GTAssure, Imo State, MTN and Dulux, that is even FMCG.

“In personal care we were able to win with the entries we put in. The first is because we have been able to build the right work culture within our agency, the culture that fosters merit, creativity without all the divisions of politics, we have tried as much as possible to keep politics at bay within our culture.”

We have been able to build a culture of creativity, the second reason, a culture of freedom to express themselves  (staff) and also a culture of merit within our agency. That is why we have been able to maintain consistency , and this is because of our people.

Our people are the reason we are here, from the most junior executive to the most senior, we believe we have some of the best and most talented people  within the industry and what we have tried to do is to ensure the  continuity and to keep the team together as much as possible by making sure they have a sense that whatever aspiration they have, in terms of the professional development is met by the agency .