How 11 Years Of Culture-driven Creative Solutions Led To Africa’s Most Ambitious Entertainment Gathering
As the year draws to a close, Africa’s cultural hubs pulse with festivals, concerts, and gatherings. While these events appear to arrive with the seasonal tide, the success of the continent’s most ambitious new platform, Entertainment Week Africa (EWA), is the culmination of a deliberate, decade-long strategy.
For Livespot, the journey to launching this multi-vertical platform was rooted in a quiet, rigorous endeavor: 11 years of sustained delivery of innovative, culture-driven creative solutions.
Livespot’s enduring success is built on an understanding that great ideas require flawless execution. According to Livespot Group CEO, Deola Art Alade, this begins with an “obsessive attention to detail.”
“Our success is not only about the big, innovative ideas; it’s also rooted in the rigor of execution, in how and why we pay attention to the tiniest detail.
Every single touchpoint, from the uninterrupted digital experience to the cultural resonance of a moment and the palpable energy of a live show, contributes to the overall feeling of trust and quality. We’re not just creating and executing projects; we’re building a reputation, and that is earned in the small things.”
This commitment to rigor, forged over years of executing high-profile brand projects and live shows, has guided a major strategic shift.
The company’s 2025 audience insights report noted a clear trend: “the rules of engagement have shifted.” Audiences now demand “relevance, resonance, and a real reason to care.”
Livespot is giving them exactly that in the world of experiential marketing and creative solutions.
Innovating Through Economic Headwinds (EWL 2024)
The 2024 “Detty December” season provided the ultimate stress test. With cautious consumer spending and brand investments due to a tightening macroeconomic landscape, Livespot had to innovate rather than retreat.
The organization used Entertainment Week Lagos (EWL) as a canvas for reinvention. By integrating diverse verticals, from film and fashion to music and tech, into a “seamless, high-engagement cultural moment,” Livespot proved that a purpose-driven, integrated model could thrive where traditional approaches might falter.
The success of EWL 2024 provided a compelling case for this strategy:
10,000+ attendees.
₦300 million in PR value.
A tangible economic impact of ₦111.5 billion in revenue across Lagos’s tourism and entertainment sectors.
The Three Core Pillars of Engagement
Livespot’s strategy is built on a deep, data-informed understanding of its audience, highlighting three core pillars:
1. Cultural Fluency & Authentic Engagement
The company moved away from “overly branded narratives” in favor of real-time, unscripted content that genuinely reflects local identity. This focus on “cultural relevance” and “purpose-led storytelling” led to initiatives like “Gen Z Republik,” which amplifies youth voices through pop culture, ensuring authenticity over pure promotion.
2. Digital and Hybrid Innovation
Technology is embraced as a necessity, not a novelty. Livespot links offline experiences to digital narratives, using AI for personalization and digital tools to enable hybrid participation. Innovations like the EWL customer-friendly Robot guide – LIBO – illustrate this commitment to creating a seamless, interconnected experience.
3. Community-Centric Purpose
The most significant insight is that audiences “want more than ‘fun.’ They want meaning, memory, and momentum.” Recognizing the “widening skills gap” in Nigeria’s creative sector, Livespot launched Labspot Creative Skills & Enterprise Development (CSED). This program, which includes a “Deal Room” to facilitate investor engagement, aims to transform “creative brain drain into an unstoppable brain gain” by empowering 250,000 youth by 2029.
By providing masterclasses with global leaders like Emmy-nominated cinematographer Nausheen Dadabhoy and Nollywood icon Funke Akindele, EWL was successfully positioned as a “non-stop ecosystem of learning, networking, ideation, and expression.”
The Culmination: The Dawn of Entertainment Week Africa
The evolution from a successful city-focused event to the continent-wide Entertainment Week Africa (EWA) is the logical next step. It is the formalization of a model built on over a decade of understanding what audiences want and what the creative industry needs.
EWA is a direct response to the fragmentation of the African creative landscape, providing a singular, centralized hub where talent, capital, and opportunity can converge.
This model proves that building a powerful brand and a profitable business does not have to be at odds with building a strong, empowered community. For investors, EWA represents a new kind of opportunity: a stake in a platform that is not just showcasing culture but actively shaping it, bridging the gap between local brilliance and global opportunity.