Babatunde Idowu Adedoyin, Managing Director/CEO, Mediaviews Ltd. marked his 60th birthday on 3 June 2015. In this interview with ADEMOLA ADEGBAMIGBE and FUNSHO AROGUNDADE (IDOWU OGUNLEYE snapped the photos), he told the story of his life and his business
You recently clocked 60 but you don’t look it. What is the secret?
I think it probably has to do with the way I take life. I try as much as possible not to stress myself. I go about my daily work in the most simple way I can. I have this belief that whenever a problem comes, we would solve it, and if I can’t solve it, I put it aside and look for a way out. So, I avoid stress. Also, I try to have an open mind. I remember when I attempted to get involved in partisan politics only to discover certain things that I can’t cope with, I just beat a retreat. And with that kind of lifestyle, I have been very free, and I think that’s part of what has kept me healthy.
Do you engage in any physical exercise to keep fit?
I try to exercise. I play table tennis in my house with my friends on weekends when they come around. Before, I used to play Squash at the Lagos Country Club, but in recent times because of the traffic in the evenings, I stopped going. But since I stopped playing Squash, I have been cycling in my estate. At times I wake up early and walk around the estate two or three times, have my shower and come to the office. That is the exercise I do for now.
You grew up being the one in the middle of a set of twins, one older and the other younger than you are. How has it been, sandwiched between the set of twins?
Yes, there are twins before me and twins after me. They used to call me “Two-Star General” because I am between the two. At times my younger brother, Kehinde is mistaken to be older than I am, because I am Idowu. But I always told people that he is my younger brother.
What about your parents?
My mum started as a teacher but she left teaching very early. She actually told us a story about how she left teaching when she had her first baby, that is my 76 years old sister, Mrs Bimpe Omoyinmi. Her husband, though late now, was the popular Barrister Omoyinmi that Ebenezer Obey sang his praise in one of his early albums. When she was born, my mother was on maternity leave (her mother, my granny, was a seamstress and before she married, she had acquired sewing skills) and she started sewing for students and people in the neighbourhood. Before she knew it, she was making triple what she was earning as a teacher. She said: “What’s the point of going to this school and teaching and by the end of the day, they pay me peanuts?”
She felt that instead of going back to teach, she should look for a big shop and establish a sewing business and start selling materials. That’s how she left teaching. But our father was a civil servant in the Western Region. He was with the Western Region Public Works Department and was posted to Civil Engineering Department. He retired as a principal technical officer.
How were you influenced by your parents to shape you into who you are today?
My parents are Christians and we were brought up in a proper African family home. We went to early morning prayers daily; by six in the morning, they would wake you up. You walked to the church and back home. Then, everyone was assigned a domestic chore to be done that same morning and like I said, my mum was a teacher and my dad was moving around because he was a civil servant. At a point he was in Lagos (GRA), at another time he was posted to Osogbo, and at a point he was in Akure. Whereever he was, he came home every Friday evening. My parents were humble. My mum is a disciplinarian, maybe because of her background. She would always tell you that there is nothing like hardwork. There is no other way. No shortcut. Just do it. She supervised us and ensured that our homework was done. It was all about discipline.
So, how was growing up?
Growing up was fun. I attended both St Benedict’s Catholic School and St Paul Comprehensive School, Igbore, Abeokuta.
Immediately after I finished my secondary school education, I took a job at the Corporate head office of Barclays Bank in Marina, Lagos. I was there for a year.
From there I went to Middlesex Polytechnic in the United Kingdom, where I read Marketing. I later sat for the final examination of Chartered Institute of Marketing. Immediately after that, I came back home. I did my national Youth Service at Berec in Isolo between 1982 and 1983. I was later employed as a marketing assistant. I was there for two years before I left for a Swedish computer company dealing in accounting machines. They bring the machines as Complete Knocked Down, CKD, assembled and then we sold. But the company had to stop operations when they had problems remitting money to their parent company which supplied them the CKD. From there, I moved to a firm, Advertising Campaign Services at Surulere. But before then, I was already planning to set up my own firm but needed some practical experience. When I joined the firm, I decided I would be there for two years, look at how things work, make some contacts myself and then set up my own firm.
When did you finally start your own company?
Well, the first company was Intermedia, which was a partnership with a cousin of mine. That was in 1987. I resigned from the company and went to the USA. But I started Mediaviews in 1995.
It didn’t take you so long before you set up your own agency. What inspired you to be your own man?
What happened was that since when I was in school, I had started designing letterhead for myself since we did copy writing. So, when I came back I had a close relationship with the advertising community because of the school I attended in the UK. A lot of them who graduated from the school I attended were already big guys in the industry, working for agencies like Grants, Lintas, OBM, and once in a while, there was this particular hangout in Surulere where these advertising gurus met every Friday. I also went there, even though I was in the marketing department of a company.
Why did you choose Outdoor Advertising?
In the past what we had under the advertising agency were the media department, creative department, copywriting department and of course you had outdoor company separately. This is because when you look at an outdoor company, you are like a media owner. You own your billboards. It is your property. So based on that, I looked and said this is a better investment. Even at that time, when you considered the cost of establishing an agency, it was ten times more than establishing an outdoor company. So, I was looking for an investment that was safe and which, in the future I might decide to sell, not the name but something physical like the billboard. Those were the reasons I opted for Outdoor.
What have been the challenges since you started this business?
Like I said earlier, I have this philosophy of doing things at my pace. I have never been in a hurry to do anything in my life. So, when I started, I knew it was going to be steady and like I tell people, in your business, you need credibility. You have to be very humane in dealing with people, and keep your promises. We try to do our best in our professional ability. Let me tell you a story. When Rothmans first came to Nigeria in 1996 or thereabout, TBWA was their main agency. The company wanted to have about 500 billboards nationwide. Fortunately I was very close to the MD of TBWA who is more or less like a brother. When I was in England, I was actually living with him. I was invited as one of the outdoor agencies that would handle that brief, myself, Medialink, Abiok and I think Colour Image. And out of the four, my company was the smallest. When we got to the meeting and allocations were made, they gave me about 100 sites and they were ready to pre-pay. I collected the order. Our office was at Mushin and I called my guys and said to them that would be the biggest challenge we would face and they should come up with plans on how we are going to execute the job?
And there was a deadline too. After I had weighed everything, I told my staff that I would go back to that agency and tell them to reduce the sites to 40 because we did not have the manpower to do the job in two months. My staff tried to persuade me to leave things the way it was and let us continue the job. But that night, I went back to the agency and told the MD that I couldn’t handle that job because it was too much for me. He asked me how many I could do and I said 40, so he asked his staff to rewrite their own order. But one thing I want to point out is that, with the two months given to us, we were the only company that delivered. Others could not meet up. We ended up doing an additional 120 sites because when we finished the 40, they recalled 20 from Abiok, 20 from Colour Image, they gave me the 40 and asked how many days can I could do it and I said one month, because we already had the template. I finished it on time and they gave me 40 more sites. So you see, I would have taken 100, disappoint them and then have a bad record. Up till now Mr. Olukoya believes me if I tell him anything. In essence, in the history of our firm, we never had any case of fallen billboard because I don’t cut corners. If it is one that I can do, let’s do it up to a standard. That has been my philosophy.
You have the largest billboard in Africa on location somewhere along Third Mainland Bridge.
Yes, it is the largest.
How did you manage to get to that isolated island?
Well, there is a road path through Oworonshoki. When we first got to the site, all those houses nearby were not there. There were some churches by the bridge. That site has been there for 14 years. We started that site with Coca-cola.
What inspired the choice of that location?
Actually it was the idea of Coca-Cola. About 14 years ago, it was in a December, the company’s marketing director, a white guy gave us a brief that he wanted a larger than life billboard on a terrain that is isolated. He said his budget is open and didn’t care how much we would do it. Even though we were small then, we started looking for a location. With a friend, Lanre Faseun who was then the media head of STB McCann, we started combing Lagos. We were coming from Epe and it was on the Third Mainland Bridge that I noticed the site and I said aah look at the place – can we get there? If we can, that is a good location. So we started inquiring how to get there. We were told we could access the place through Oworonshoki. In fact, that place was so bad, we had to park our car, roll our trousers.
Who owned the site?
We heard a man Georgous Cole, a Sierra Leonean–Nigerian, owned the site. According to what we heard, from that Oworonshoki to Ikeja, it was Georgeous Cole’s farm. And that house there was his farm house. But Western Region later took the place from him and that was when he left the place for Ebute-Metta where he build another house, where he lived until he died.
We learnt that your ancestors were from Ekiti?
Yes. Our great grandfather came from Ekiti during the missionary era. Ijan-Ekiti, very close to Ado-Ekiti, to be precise. The man came to Abeokuta with missionaries. The history had it that my great grandfather was always abused in the village then that he was a lazy man, and that he was following the missionaries and had abandoned his farmland. They taunted him that he couldn’t farm or he didn’t want to work at all. That was why he follow the missionaries during their evangelism. But while with the missionaries, they taught him how to read and write, and he was reading the Bible and assisted the missionaries. When they were leaving, he followed them.
He had only one brother and took him along to Abeokuta. After three or four years, the brother said he was homesick and wanted to go back home. His brother then gave him money to go back home. Unfortunately two years after he returned to Ekiti, he died. So my great grandfather decided he was not going back home again since his only brother that would have made him visit Ekiti was no more. He then married in Abeokuta and trained as a catechist while he was doing some little farming behind his house.
Tell us about your friends. When you were in school, we learnt you had a group of friends, eleven in number including Mr Olusola Ladipo-Ajayi, the Lasaco boss. Tell us about this group of friends.
Like I said, in Abeokuta, we lived in a very close community. We lived in Ibara, a middle class area. Most guys working for the government lived there and most of us attended the same church, which was an Anglican church. Although, we also have Baptist Church which was not very popular then and also Catholic Church. But of all the three, it was the Anglican Church that was very popular. My friends and I were like age mates. We virtually went out together and our parents were also friends. The parents drank together and also belonged to the same group in the church. We also were in choir together. We encouraged each other. All of us, in our chosen career, were able to achieve one thing or the other for ourselves. And our friendship of 50 to 60 years is still waxing stonger. Even while I was in England I kept writing and they kept replying. When I was in the Barclays Bank, two of us were in Marina – Olumide and myself at 40 Marina, Shola Ajayi was at 132 Marina at the Sun Insurance and we always went for lunch together and also to Kingsway Stores. I discovered that our friendship was enduring and we were doing fine. We encouraged and supported each other. There was no envy at all.
Obviously, he was the closest to you among your friends.
The first time Shola Ajayi was to come to England I was the one that told him that I would soon come back to Nigeria, so he must come before I leave and he came. His history is even unique. Before he entered insurance profession at the age of 16 – 17, he actually wanted to be a journalist. The only school then that was offering Mass Communication was University of Nigeria, Nsukka and they didn’t offer him admission. And one of his bosses then advised him to focus on Insurance instead of wasting time pursuing admission to study journalism. Reluctantly, he registered with the Chartered Insurance Institute of London, passed their examination and he was thereafter transferred to Ibadan as the branch manager. While in Ibadan, he went to University of Ibadan where he registered for the Master of Fianance and Banking.
Being a branch manager, he was able to sneak out of office to attend classes. By the time he finished his Masters programme, they transferred him to Lagos. When he came back to Lagos, he went straight to Lagos State University and registered for Law. Most of his certificates were earned while working.
We learnt that your mom has a soft spot for him to the extent that she warned both of you not to allow women or money to come between two of you. Is there a time such a thing almost strained your relationship?
Well, I will first of all answer the first question. The truth is that my mom had a special love for his mom. I don’t know the reason. Even the day my mom was about to die, she sent for his mom. When Shola’s mom came, she sat with my mom with one of my sisters, They were together, four of them. They ate amala together. So you can see the intimacy between them. I am saying this to let you know the closeness between my mom and Shola’s mom. But very importantly, Shola was very gentle while growing up. While we were a little bit rascally, he was on the quiet side. As for money, we didn’t have that problem. And for women, it never happened. We were too close, no woman could break us.
But between his wife and mine, there was a rancour and we just decided to ignore them totally. If I told my wife that I was going to Ajayi’s house, she would not answer me. I would just take my car key and drive off and the same applied to Shola.
After some time, Shola’s wife phoned and said ‘Bunmi, no more fighting. Let us not fight again’. We looked at them and said it’s really good.
What is your view on the state of the marketing communication industry now?
We are in a serious recession now. The reason being that a lot of our clients are not doing very well. Take Guinness Nigeria for example, they have been recording loss for the past three years and they have been cutting their budget.
You mean in spite of Orijin’s success?
Orijin is trying to shoot up their balance sheet but we don’t know what will happen this year. But in the last three years, they have not been doing very well. Look at Nigerian Breweries, they have been doing very well, because they have been doing a lot of investments, buying up all the small breweries all over the world. Telecommunications are also cutting budgets, they are making money but they feel with or without advertising people will always talk.