Group Chief Executive Officer and Chief Creative Officer of X3M Ideas, Steve Babaeko, has warned that media agencies risk becoming increasingly irrelevant if they continue to depend largely on media buying and placement, urging industry players to shift their value proposition towards data ownership, strategic interpretation and deep understanding of African consumers.
Babaeko gave the warning while delivering the keynote address at the 2026 Annual General Meeting of the Media Independent Practitioners Association of Nigeria (MIPAN), where he challenged practitioners to rethink how they intend to monetise opportunities in an industry being rapidly transformed by automation and artificial intelligence.
Speaking on the theme, *“Monetizing Tomorrow: Outpacing Disruption, Capturing Growth in the Next Era of Media,”* Babaeko said the traditional media-buying model was under growing pressure as programmatic advertising, self-service platforms and AI-powered systems increasingly automate campaign planning, audience selection, budgeting and placement.
According to him, agencies cannot win a technological race by attempting to outperform machines at tasks that machines are designed to execute faster and more cheaply.
“If the race is who can execute the buy faster and cheaper, we have already lost,” he said, arguing that the industry’s response to disruption should not be to run faster on platforms’ “treadmill”, but to build capabilities and assets that the platforms do not own.
Babaeko identified deep knowledge of Nigerian and African consumers as one of the industry’s strongest competitive advantages, noting that global technology platforms may have extensive data and sophisticated algorithms but cannot fully capture the realities of Nigeria’s largely informal economy.
He pointed to consumers whose media habits extend beyond the conventional digital metrics captured by global platforms, citing market women listening to radio, young Nigerians influenced by conversations in commercial buses, WhatsApp networks, neighbourhood influencers, religious announcements and other community-based channels.
He argued that a significant portion of Nigerian economic activity remains outside the datasets and attribution models on which much of modern digital advertising depends.
“The machine can only optimise what it can see,” Babaeko said, describing the largely unmeasured portion of Nigeria’s consumer economy as an opportunity rather than a weakness.
He therefore called for what he described as a “second independence” for Nigeria’s media industry — an independence centred on owning local audience intelligence and developing indigenous approaches to measuring consumer behaviour rather than relying entirely on imported metrics and frameworks.
According to him, the first independence came when media planning evolved from guesswork into a specialised discipline, with MIPAN playing an important role in that transformation.
The next phase, he said, should be about independence of thought and the ability of Nigerian media practitioners to define value, audience and consumer behaviour on their own terms.
Babaeko urged MIPAN to lead the development of an African audience intelligence and measurement system that would enable practitioners to build a more comprehensive understanding of Nigerian consumers.
“Right now we make our decisions using a mirror the platforms hold up for us, and they decide what the mirror shows,” he said, stressing that the industry should develop “our own measurement” and “our own currency of attention.”
He also challenged agencies to reconsider how they charge clients, urging them to move away from pricing primarily for the execution of media transactions and instead place greater value on strategic judgement and interpretation.
“Stop pricing yourself as the hand that places the ad. Price yourself as the mind that decides it was worth placing at all,” he said.
On artificial intelligence, Babaeko said practitioners should regard the technology as an assistant rather than a replacement for human expertise.
He advised media professionals to deploy AI for arithmetic, optimisation and repetitive tasks while redirecting human talent towards understanding consumers, culture and context — areas where he argued machines remain limited.
He further cautioned against allowing global platforms to determine what constitutes “premium” media in Nigeria, arguing that local radio, street-level communication, indigenous languages and other traditional channels should not automatically be treated as inferior to digital inventory.
Babaeko urged media practitioners to recognise and properly value local media platforms based on their ability to influence real consumer behaviour.
He also called for greater collaboration among MIPAN members, noting that the industry’s real competition was increasingly coming from trillion-dollar technology platforms rather than from individual agencies.
He described collective action through MIPAN as a strategic advantage that could help practitioners build capabilities no single agency could easily finance independently.
Babaeko concluded by urging media practitioners to stop seeking permission to command premium value and instead build capabilities that global platforms cannot easily replicate.
“The next era belongs to whoever owns meaning in a world drowning in transaction,” he said, insisting that deep knowledge of the Nigerian and African consumer remains an asset that appreciates even as other aspects of media execution become increasingly automated.
