CEO of Big Cabal Media, Tomiwa Aladekomo, has urged Nigerian media practitioners and entertainers to take note of modern tech trends.
Aladekomo noted this during an engaging panel session at the eighth edition of the Nigerian Entertainment Conference (NECLive), where he talked about how tech trends are changing media & entertainment, and what that meant for entertainment practitioners.
“More people are jumping on the internet, here in Africa and all over the world”, he explained. “That’s a big trend. Now the question is, in two years are we going to have 50 percent more people on the internet, or 200 percent more people on the internet? As a creator, the long-term direction is that there are more people on the internet, which means that there are more opportunities for you to make money on the internet. When you think about trends, you have to figure out what long-term trend you have to prepare for and what you can build towards, but try not to get caught in predicting where the trend is going to hit, because as last year showed, it’s very hard to predict what is coming. Last year was an accelerator for a lot of digital trends and a lot of tech trends. The coronavirus forced a lot more people online, and so it accelerated things like the number of people online, number of merchants online, and the rate at which people pushed onto the big platforms.”
At #NECLive8, Tomiwa Aladekomo also made elaborate points on the success of the tech industry’s current engagement models, and how the same could be applied to the Nigerian entertainment space. He hinted at the level of engagement achieved by platforms like Zikoko, and the need for today’s entertainers to leverage tech and media in creating relatable content that would reach wider audiences.
“Another interesting big trend is that on a global basis, people are moving to more subscription models”, he stated. “Advertising is undergoing a very interesting thing where it is now more difficult to monetise content, especially because the big platforms eat up a chunk of that. If you advertise independently, it’s become a lot more difficult, and so people are shifting increasingly to subscription models. How do you own your audience? At Zikoko, we have a huge audience, but along the line, we began to think, ‘how do we make that audience stay with us even if Facebook and Twitter change their rules’? So we started rolling out newsletters so that every day, we’re in your inbox. Email platforms are less likely to change their rules than a social media platform would, so that’s one way for us to own the audience.”
In stressing the need for entertainers to create relatable content, he added, “In terms of big changes that are also coming over the next few years, penetration will deepen. You’ve got good internet at the moment in big cities across Africa. If you are looking at Nigeria, cities like Lagos, Abuja, Ibadan and Rivers currently have the best connectivity, but over the next few years, we will see that really deepen. Last year, a lot of states dropped their right of way so that broadband providers can get broadband into smaller cities at cheaper rates. It’s a coming wave. You don’t want to get stuck trying to predict when that wave is going to hit, but this is something that is going to happen, and even in smaller cities, there will be a lot more people online. Now you have to ask yourself, what are you going to sell to them? How are they going to be entertained? What kind of content are they going to consume?”
For more on Tomiwa Aladekomo’s engaging panel session at #NECLive8, watch the video below:
You can still catch up on all the action, excitement, and key movements from #NECLive8. All you have to do is visit the NECLive page.
