NAC 2026: Things That Will Never Change Despite AI, Disruptions, Industry Veterans Akinwunmi, Enang Anchor Industry On Enduring Principles
Advertising industry veterans, Lolu Akinwunmi, Group Managing Director of Prima Garnet Africa, and Idorenyen Enang, Managing Director of Corporate Shepherds, have said that despite the sweeping changes brought by artificial intelligence and technological disruption, the fundamentals of marketing communications remain unchanged.
Speaking today at the 2026 National Advertising Conference (NAC) in Abuja, the pair delivered a session titled “Some Things Will Never Change – Enduring Principles,” arguing that consumer understanding, differentiation, creativity, trust and human partnership will outlast any technological shift.
The session, held on the main conference floor at the Abuja Continental Hotel, came as the industry grapples with mounting anxiety over automation, media fragmentation and the rise of client-side capabilities that threaten the traditional agency model. Akinwunmi and Enang used the platform to map both the forces reshaping the business and the principles they believe must survive them.
Akinwunmi opened by cataloguing the present moment. Artificial intelligence, he said, is the first marker of where the industry stands, a development whose full impact is not yet understood, even as it transforms marketing strategies, campaigns and content. “Everybody in this room can now develop a campaign on your telephone,” he observed. Alongside AI sits technological disruption more broadly with constantly changing tools, platforms and processes, many of which did not exist three or four years ago. Media fragmentation followed, with audiences dispersed across platforms in ways that make the old challenges of planning across Nigeria’s languages look simple by comparison. Changing consumer behaviour, the democratisation of creativity, the rise of data and automation, the change in the agency model and intensifying competition, including competition from clients themselves.
But it was in the second half of his presentation, where Akinwunmi turned to what would not change, that the session found its argumentative centre. His most striking claim was a demystification of AI where he recounted asking one of the large language models to tell him about himself, and being presented with a startlingly detailed profile including his blood pressure, his blood group and his medication for gastritis. The experience, he said, was initially shocking. But on reflection, there was no magic in it. Everything the system produced had been fed to it, often through casual conversation the model had prompted and stored. AI, in other words, is an extraordinary retrieval and synthesis engine, not a mind. It does not understand people. It cannot do consumer behaviour.
This was the pivot on which the session turned. Akinwunmi argued that the consumer will always come first and that marketing exists because consumers exist, and that the industry’s fundamental investment in understanding people’s needs, wants, motivations and behaviours is not threatened by technology but enabled by it. Data and technology are useful, he conceded, but understanding the human mind is something AI cannot do. It can only begin to approximate it when humans feed it information.
From that foundation, Akinwunmi laid out a set of enduring principles. Advertising must solve a problem or satisfy a need, even as needs themselves evolve. Differentiation remains the heartbeat of the business. Creativity…original thinking, the richness of imagination that can influence purchasing remains essential, because without it business would not exist. Consistency builds brands, as his anecdote about recognising a familiar bottle of Coca-Cola at a Ghanaian border showed. Familiarity and reliability are commercial assets. Strategy remains the thinking part of creativity, no matter how many AI tools are available. And ethics and integrity, he noted, had already been covered earlier in the conference.
Akinwunmi’s analysis of the agency model was particularly sharp, drawn from experience. When he joined Lintas in 1982, he recalled, the business ran on seven or eight key departments including client service, media, production and others. Today, an agency can function with three or four. If the service has shrunk, the remuneration model must follow. Clients paying for less have a right to negotiate, and the likely outcome is smaller, leaner, more efficient agencies. The old binary of fixed fee or commission has given way to performance benchmarks, incentive packages and bonus structures. And competition has intensified, not just among agencies but between agencies and their clients, some of whom have set up full-service operations and are buying and negotiating media themselves, practices that Akinwunmi described as both unprofessional and contrary to the law. He noted that multinational clients in South Africa and Europe still rely on agencies and still brief them while the Nigerian market, he implied, has drifted from that standard.
Enang picked up the thread with an anecdote about the relationship that first brought the two men together. As a young account executive working on Satzenbrau more than three decades ago, he had organised a pitch at the National Theatre in which LTC, Campaign Palace, Insight and Prima Garnet competed. Prima Garnet won. Years later, at Cadbury, Enang found all the brands consolidated in one agency and insisted on opening up the business to competition. Again, Lolu’s agency won. “If I had compromised, you would not want to share this stage with me,” he said, to applause.
The first was that chemistry builds great work and honest agency partnership. Behind every iconic campaign, Enang argued, sits a great client who writes an honest brief where such briefs are still written and an empowered agency partner willing and able to push back. Automation may streamline workflows and media buying, but it cannot replace mutual respect. If clients treat agencies as vendors and agencies behave as order-takers, “no amount of AI will save the work.” His second principle was that trust and integrity are non-negotiable currency. A broken product promise cannot be advertised out of existence and a brand without credibility is just making noise.
The panel established with unusual clarity, the fact that the industry’s anxiety about AI is partly misplaced. The technology is not the threat. The threat is an industry that forgets what it is for, one that that confuses execution with understanding, speed with insight, and visibility with trust.
