While we celebrate agencies with a long history of ground breaking work, we equally recognize the impact of younger agencies that already showing signs of greatness. Adeptus Nigeria is one such agency to watch. They made their debut at the Pitcher Awards this year with a bronze winning film campaign called "Black Blood". This interesting chat by Creativity Week Africa with Dele Ariyo, MD/Chief Creative Officer of the agency is a confirmation that the agency is all fired up to make a positive difference in the advertising landscape in Nigeria.
As a young creative advertising and branding agency, kindly tell us your core values and what drives you ahead as an agency?
Our drive as an agency is the client’s fulfilment, which also makes us happy to see them achieving their business objective, that makes us a saviour of some sort. We love Magic but it’s equally important to not create purposelessly, I won’t approve that from my team. Is it producing a result and will it make the client happy to be in business with us? If yes, then that’s it for me.
Integrity, courage, professionalism and dedication to tasks are values we hold dear to heart.
After just 5 years of existence, what are the most successful campaigns the agency is proud of?
We’ve done a lot of campaigns that has put smiles on client’s face, which we are equally proud of and this fires us to create more good work for a consistent record of campaign successes. Like it’s always said, you are as a good as your last job so we bring our A-game to ensure all campaigns are very memorable.
One campaign we are mostly crazy about is us as an agency. That’s because it’s an asset that makes us more endearing to clients. We don’t want to be an agency that doesn’t have a suitable face out there, so we are a timeless campaign making sure we create awesome stuff and proactives, some of which are also award-winning.
Your agency always focuses on IDEAS for brands regardless of the terrain. Tell us more about idea generation with your team and how this has helped produce results for your clients.
Idea generation is built on insight, strong consumer insight I must say, Advertising is not like creating Artworks for fun. So, we research our consumer, understand their challenges, behavioural patterns and other peculiarities that will aid a communication that’s profitable to our client.
For every great ad you must have seen, the idea has been all up in your face, it just takes someone who can look differently with an ability to imagine possible scenarios that directly connects with the brand or product.
You could be using a broom to sweep, but the activity is probably inspiring something else to a creative, which is unknown to the user at that time. A creative is always conscious of the environment because the environment is always speaking whether in chaos or total silence. That’s what we do and it has never failed to produce the intended result for our clients.
"We look for the magical in the ordinary, and the ordinary in the magical". What should the audience understand from this statement on your website?
Life is enough source to draw inspiration from, nobody goes to heaven searching for how to market a product or service, you just have to look and sometimes look deeper and that’s where the fun is. Looking for the magical in the ordinary is us saying, nothing is too irrelevant to inspire great works and nothing is too Magical or mighty as it were that can’t be made so ordinarily understandable. All we do look.
In 2018, your agency won the Most Customer Driven Marketing Communications Agency of the Year/ Gold for Customer Service. What makes your customer service special and how do you reconcile this with a budget and deadline pressures from clients?
We see our clients as partners and we are both essential in the equation of business growth from their end, ideation and execution from our end. We are not exclusively driven by money, of course, every agency needs it and I can’t overemphasize its importance.
We are firstly about the impact and that drives us to look at the brand challenges and a suitable approach to go about solving its problem. Usually, we want to know your budget so we know how to approach the business, no budget is too small, it just requires being transparent and offering executions that fits that size. It’s useless to go all the way when we know the budget constraint of our client.
Trust is pivotal to us, it has given us a stronger bond with the small businesses we have and it’s surely bringing bigger ones. We also ensure to look beyond doing what’s in our jurisdiction by calling their consciousness to other profitable areas for their business even if it means it’s going to another service agency.
As part of your success in the 2020 Pitcher Awards, you won a Bronze in the Film category with your campaign titled "Black Blood". Kindly tell us how your agency received the award?
For me, it’s a sign that we are doing something great. The Agency had few entries and winning a bronze at the pitcher awards excites us to keep grinding harder and we look forward to more amazing work and we can only hope for an amazing next year.
How has your agency been coping during this pandemic?
The pandemic was very unexpected, we had high hopes and expectations for 2020, you know the most acclaimed vision 2020 finally came knocking which inspired a new year Ad (Time to blow) which we would have entered for the Pitcher Awards if not for the pandemic that seems to deflate the message.
Times are very different now, businesses are cutting down on budget and clients are not entirely meeting up with their commitment. But we are still ever crazy about the magic and standing strong through it all.
Working from home has had its restriction too, sharing ideas that randomly pop, network glitches and clients seemingly unfamiliarity with some of the virtual platforms. We are adapting well, but we hope the situation gets better.
What will be your advice to other young agencies at this time to enable them to survive this period?
Firstly, I congratulate you that you’re still standing, this isn’t the time to relax but to put in more work, trust your guts and be passionate about the success and impact of your clients brand, the money always comes after this.
I’ll like to add that optimism is very important too, when you feel discouraged, remember how bad you want to save the world with Advertising, it keeps your head in the game and that’s the kind of ruthless we need, whether there’s Covid or not. Please don’t throw in the towel, your big break might just be close. That’s a little advice form a young agency to a startup.
Where do you see Adeptus in the next 10 years?
It’s good to dream big and I don’t want to ever stop dreaming and in 10years to come, Adeptus will still be an Agency churning out great stuff, making profitable noise for several brands and of course making more money with plenty award on shelf.
See you till then. Thanks