To Excel, Industry Professionals Should Consciously Infuse Technology In Their Delivery, Says Victor Afolabi
The Group Managing Director of GDM, Victor Afolabi has called on marketing professionals to infuse technology consistently in their work because of its disruptive impact, and its capacity to deepen excellence.
Afolabi made the call during an exclusive chat with Brand Communicator recently. He said this was important because as we move into the future, whether we all like it or not, technology is coming like a bulldozer to disrupt the activities of traditional agency as we know it.
In his words, “I know that more technology is coming to disrupt the traditional trends, that’s why I’m saying that marketing communications and marketing/ commercial professionals should begin to see how technology can be infused in the way they work as a normal way of doing business going forward.”
“Whether we like it or not, technology will disrupt our industry the way it has disrupted the banking and media sector. For example, we are streaming today on different streaming platforms. We can see that technology is changing many things, even the telco sector, most of their revenue comes from data and it’s all about technology infrastructure.”
He stated that he foresaw these disruptions 15 years ago, while many were just speaking about it, hence he dared to be different when he started GDM.
His words, “So, we knew technology would affect marketing massively, and what we are doing then was like a person standing on the rooftop screaming- change is coming, adopt, adapt and transform- I doubt if it attracted the desired response”
Afolabi advised marketing communications agencies to be disruptive in their work, noting that technology brought a lot of opportunities on its wings.
He also revealed that in 2025 GDM would be transitioning from a traditional agency to a project consultancy firm.
His words, “When we started 15 years ago, we were talking about experiential projects but we’ve moved into bigger projects in marketing, we will look into bigger campaigns for marketing for B2B not just consumers facing activations which we started with.
” Right now, we are going into 360-degree campaigns for the public and private sectors, institutions, organizations, and developmental partners many of them are doing things around advocacy. And we’ve seen a lot of advocacy we are going to do.
“So, we are going to do a lot of marketing project consultancy. Also, we are going to a lot of technology consultancy under the GDM group; from our expertise we will begin to do projects like ERP, deploying enterprise solutions, changing work processes and building apps, building technology, field sales automation, building solutions that can help to connect with consumers or customers.
” Where one is heavy on technology because we can help people redesign their architecture, and build those things, we will do a lot of projects around these areas as a consultancy”, he concluded.