January 5, 2021 | by Anyan
My first shoot was for a $10k commercial in Accra a few years back. I’m thinking about it now on a $500k set in Joburg and realizing how quickly time flies. Even though it’s my 9th time in Africa’s Valhalla of production, the attention to detail and slick techniques never gets lost on me. Travelling is something every young creative…
November 20, 2020 | by Anyan
You’ll be amazed the speed with which companies make decisions based on evidence that you are changing or will change your buying considerations. We pore through Brand Health Trackers (BHTs) and Consumer Reports looking for trends, connecting dots, decoding new developments in how you’re now choosing to spend your GHC 1. The Wazobia Effect The most significant learning, which has…
November 18, 2020 | by Anyan
Every now and then, someone posts a grainy ad from the 90s with great adulation. They arouse nostalgic feelings and everyone starts talking about the good old days when ads were so much better and more memorable. I think it could be because of these two reasons; The Media Landscape; Then vs Now. We’ve come from a non-24 hour one-tv…
October 18, 2020 | by Anyan
I love helping out SMEs, but it’s hard work. Hair-pulling work. Count 1-10 before answering work. What makes it worth though, is when there is willingness to understand. I recently did some work for a client who came back with his fourth round of reverts. As I took time to explain best practices, I saw how this could be beneficial…
October 18, 2020 | by Anyan
Many businesses looking for creative communication solutions act like caterers at a low budget Ghanaian wedding; so precious about the food with a false sense of omnipotence. “Answer this poorly written pitch brief in three working days. I’m not able to answer most of your questions in detail because it’s not my job to make your job easy and I don’t…
October 8, 2020 | by Anyan
In the beginning, it was just a cool way of letting someone know that you enjoyed their post. Aggregated, it has become proof that a person is indeed popular. The people who need this most are ‘Influencers’ who make a ton of money because brands believe they have the ears of their precious consumers. The fact that more than 75% of…
October 2, 2020 | by Anyan
The biggest advertisers in Ghana are Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) companies, followed by telcos. Even FMCGs that don’t spend on advertising agencies have huge media budgets. There is a much greater desire to reach consumers than to reach them with effective creative communication. Also the professional association for advertising agencies (AAG) doesn’t have the power to regulate the quality…
September 18, 2020 | by Anyan
We have a rich heritage of storytelling. Before behavioral change became a thing, we cracked that code, leveraging the insight of superstition to create ‘taboos’ that compel desirable behavior. This kind of background should have been the unfair advantage that made it easy for our advertising to gain global recognition, and yet a creative work from Ghana is yet to…
September 9, 2020 | by Anyan
I’m paid to use creativity in solving business issues. To be creative is to be empathetic and emotional. It’s much easier to create compelling work when you can feel what it’s like to be your target consumer. Certainly, this emotional disposition also makes you vulnerable. Couple that with advertising as a high-pressure terrain dominated by ridiculous timelines, impossible clients, frequent blunt –and…
September 2, 2020 | by Anyan
I am in a weird position; benefitting from a system many friends are frustrated by. I’ve been given opportunities by the same management they are disappointed in. And for a few years now I’ve been part of management teams and also great friends to people who distrust management more than a shattered romantic distrusts her silver-tongued ex. It is uncomfortable, but…
August 25, 2020 | by Anyan
Last week, I was part of a meeting discussing major advertising activities my client should invest in across the region for the rest of the year. It was an important meeting with key stakeholders in attendance; one was a new management team member who had just joined from another region on the continent. When the client announced she doesn’t plan…
July 28, 2020 | by Anyan
I have an unpopular opinion on the use of influencers in advertising campaigns; they are overrated and often killers of creativity. Give me a moment, I can explain. Influencer marketing has been around for as long as there’ve been influencers, probably dating back to Biblical times when Mordecai asked Esther to leverage her influence in the campaign to reverse a…
July 21, 2020 | by Anyan
Ghana is built on the back of great storytelling. This truth is obscured by descriptives like hospitable, morally conservative, religiously tolerant and culturally rich, but a forensic audit will trace everything back to the ability of a people to tell compelling stories. When our ancestors sought to create a moral framework and achieve behavioral change, they used taboos. Taboos are little…
