The One On Why Uganda Produces Shitty Ads

"How do you come up with ideas?" solicited the Damaging Director late into one of her forced and at the same time compulsory 'Happy Friday' training sessions, which in reality turned out to be nothing more than a poignantly agonising succession of hideously failed pre-weekend sundowners. Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster that they released us from work early for these first-Friday-of-the-month mid-afternoon festivities and served drinks and pizza, because they would have been entirely insufferable otherwise.

"Subconsciously," beamed a spontaneous retort in a droll Scouse drawl, delivered with the satisfaction and panache of a Cannes Palme d’Or winner. "I just leave them to ferment at the back of my mind.”

Copywriting 101: a Creative Director should never
release an ad like this for public consumption

That, dear reader, is the entirety of the cumulative knowledge of an 'Executive Creative Director' who, after "more than 25 years" in advertising (as he perpetually and dutifully recounts to anyone who even cares to listen), is still not capable of distinguishing between an idea and a concept. This then, being the peculiar quality of the captains of our industry, is it any mystery that Uganda produces the kind of advertising that we see all around and frequently recoil from?

My last post caused plenty of reverberations, truth be told, and elicited adequate (mostly positive, thankfully) commentary and, singularly, general acquiescence on the crux of the theme: incompetent and lazy Creative Directors. The next logical step, then, was always going to be the direct consequence—enduring legacy, if you may—of this 'Basket of Ineffectuals', to paraphrase Hilary Clinton. Fortunately, I’m in no danger of losing the election of my life here, so let’s just get right into it, shall we?

But first, I’ll get the housekeeping out of the way: this is not a mass assault on Creative Directors or the industry as a unit; far be it from me. It is, instead, a candid retrospective of the state of advertising in Uganda today. And from where I sit, the optics are dour. We have all experienced advertising seemingly intended to educe mass cringing. We have all witnessed the appalling art direction and atrocious design. We have all read the deplorable copy. We have all witnessed the empty, ineffective communication devoid of any iota of an idea. We have all collectively wanted to throw a shoe at the TV when those horrendous ads come on, or smash the radio to smithereens, or sought to deliberately drive into a billboard. So who bears the greatest responsibility for this travesty?

To put it another way, what is the prime function of a Creative Director? Many choose to politic, scheme, and elbow their way to the hot seat, obviously oblivious to the duties, roles, and responsibilities it requires or demands. Others, who I find the dippier ones, are clueless to the inconvenient truth that 'Creative Director' is not a Board position, but a job description, and the instructions are fairly uncomplicated – direct the bloody Creative! I know of one who raised a proper ruckus in one of my former agencies when a designer (also Art Director...go figure) failed to include the all-enchanted appellative ‘executive’ to the title on his call card. He was also notorious for unashamedly eschewing his role and instead preferred to traffic jobs and prepare PowerPoints, never mind that he could neither write nor design. These are the types who cannot find it in them to even attempt to understand the various audiences to which communication must necessarily appeal or speak and instead, armed with such vacant platitudes as "owning the category" and "there's this ad in the U.K.", persistently toddle through a miasma of meaningless, irrelevant, badly written and generally appalling campaigns. There’s one such who, when Client had had enough of his bizarre smorgasbord of 'concepts' from the U.K. and finally called bullshit on the lot, matter-of-factly countered with, "I’m not the target audience anyway." It is instructive to note here that he did not survive to see the next paycheck.

Then we have those that, blatantly and unrepentantly, pilfer international campaigns and pass them off as their own, even going as far as winning 'international awards' with these, some of which have been reproduced several times previously, and won other international awards. That should tell you all you need to know about these awards. One agency famously proclaimed itself "The Most Awarded Agency" at one such awards a couple of years ago, firmly on the back of numerous internationally recycled concepts. This is how low we have stooped as an industry, a blanket indictment on the collective ability and capacity of Ugandan advertising to innovate. Which partly explains why Uganda produces shitty ads.

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Starting with this post and for perpetuity, I am introducing a new segment, Thing 1 and Thing 2, where I shall tackle issues quite unrelated to the OP, and, much in the manner of a Fifth Columnist, subsequent issues arising from both my readers and myself. These, ideally, would be topics too pressing to wait for a new post, but urgent and all the same imperative. So, without further ado...

Thing 1

The bottom feeders are once again on the prowl. They will arrive for the festivities armed with brown envelopes stashed with neatly ordered, freshly withdrawn UGX 50,000 banknotes. I’s dotted and T’s crossed in advance, they will attempt to buy passage into the hallowéd, plush halls of corporate Uganda. The stakes in this zero-sum game have risen steeply in the last couple of years and with them sheer audacity, as its authors belatedly identify the palpable shortfalls of simple anonymous envelopes and instead gravitate towards bagfuls of hard currency because, why push a tentative, perishable envelope whilst minions can be dispatched with recyclable backpacks full of cash, up to UGX 150,000,000 a pop? The clueless, conversely, will turn up with empty hands and meticulously prepared and carefully stacked tomes of bid documents. In quintuplicate. Mkono mtupu haulambwi, goes one Kiswahili maxim, and surely someone ought to have warned them? At the very least, should they not have by now learnt the niceties of the game?

It is pitch season in Uganda, ladies and gentlemen, and Small Fish are not invited. The game long ago changed; advertising is no longer open to all. But is it?

The downside, I find, in this atypical arrangement of bribing one’s way to 'prestigious' accounts, is the sheer short-sightedness of the whole affair. Granted, one might 'reimburse' a backpack-full of kickbacks to clinch an account, but almost always, the same people perpetuating the vice are left short-handed to prop up the account in any meaningful way with the necessary resources because they are either too voracious to care, or the funds to hire the requisite staff have long been spent. After all, the scheme is based on "making more money". So either way, the bought account ends up suffering and in the end necessitates such inconveniences as general audits, which eventually lead to a massive shortfall in projected income, and then salaries don't get paid on time, and employees are forced to become accustomed to half salaries for months on end, and December salaries get paid in mid-January, and media remains unpaid for successive months, and rent arrears balloon to obscene amounts, and the accounts department is forced to disburse bouncing cheques...you get the drift. The worst of it is that the quality of actual work out of the agency also plummets because, hell, "we" have paid it off and will pay off at the next pitch, so why bother putting in any half-decent piece of effort at all, right?

Thing 2

The week ending 29^th January 2017 was cataclysmic and came fraught with unprecedented upheavals in the Ugandan advertising industry, and agencies in particular. For it wss during that week that we heard that MetropolitanRepublic had lost the MTN account. Now, the level of overconfidence regarding their retaining of that account bordered on sheer arrogance as illustrated by an anecdote I heard about one former employee who happened to swing by during the week. This particular employee had previously been "posted" to South Sudan to handle their operations there, posted being in quotes because he never really had a say in the matter. The decision was made at gunpoint – migrate to SS or we fire you. Anyway, he did his tour with diligence, upon which he returned to Uganda, and promptly resigned. Fast forward to a couple of months later, and he’s visiting his former agency, and the arrogant plonkers, on top of seeing him again, assume–wrongly–that he’s back for a second tour in South Sudan, and proceed to even ask him the same. Mind you, this was before the pitch announcement was made. To cut a long story short, it turns out that he had actually won the South Sudan MTN account and Metro, along with the rest of us, only heard the news much later in the week.

Meanwhile, over at The Brand House, we heard about the untimely demise of the DStv account. Now, I’m not certain whether the decision to be dropped had anything to do with that star-crossed Anne Kansiime campaign, but what is clear is that it was a huge blow. This is because TBH (formerly Moringa Ogilvy) was built on the back of that account, what with DStv being their first-ever acquisition. The history is thick on this one. As if that were not enough of a setback, unconfirmed reports indicate that TBH has now been acquired by ScanGroup. I mention this only because of the ironic value, as rumours of a similar acquisition of the then-Moringa Ogilvy by the same ScanGroup surfaced almost four years ago, but the proprietors personally disconfirmed them to me. The reason they rebuffed ScanAd's advances, I believed at the time, was the prospect of a bigger payday, and my suspicions were confirmed when I later learnt that Dentsu had made a strong bid. But just as suddenly and as mysteriously as Dentsu had materialised, the deal quickly came a cropper. It is now clear that their change of heart is directly proportional to the rate at which TBH is haemorrhaging clients.

Just down the road at Fideli Management Company Advertising Agency Limited, the rubber met the road on Friday afternoon. This is when staff were assembled to the boardroom for a big announcement, the long and short of which was that the agency has been going through a particularly rough patch since August, and they were now expected to take pay cuts, taking one for the team as it were. I am yet to confirm if the cuts also extend to the directors, but also off the menu going forward will be the free lunches.

These bouleversements, though in no way limited to just these agencies, bring to sharp focus the way agencies are being run, and in particular, being managed. It is very clear that the current model is no longer sustainable, and brave, revolutionary approaches are desperately needed if agencies are to stay above the water. What Ugandan advertising urgently needs is visionaries, not charlatans.

The agency is dead. Long live the agency!