X3M Ideas CEO urges MIPAN to develop African audience intelligence, redefine value in the AI era

Mercy Iheoma Ihedigbo

Media agencies in Nigeria and across Africa must urgently move beyond traditional media buying and placement if they are to remain relevant and profitable in an industry increasingly transformed by automation and artificial intelligence, Group Chief Executive Officer and Chief Creative Officer of X3M Ideas, Steve Babaeko, has warned.

Babaeko made the call while delivering the keynote address at the 2026 Annual General Meeting of the Media Independent Practitioners Association of Nigeria (MIPAN), where he challenged media practitioners to rethink their business models and identify new ways of creating and monetising value in the rapidly changing media ecosystem.

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 increasing pressure as programmatic advertising, self-service platforms and artificial intelligence-powered systems continued to automate campaign planning, audience selection, budgeting and media placement.

According to him, agencies would struggle to compete if their primary value proposition remained the ability to execute media transactions faster or cheaper than technology platforms.

“If the race is who can execute the buy faster and cheaper, we have already lost,” Babaeko declared.

He argued that the industry’s response to technological disruption should not be to compete with machines at tasks machines were specifically designed to perform, but to develop assets and capabilities that global technology platforms do not possess.

Babaeko identified deep knowledge of Nigerian and African consumers as one of the strongest competitive advantages available to local media practitioners.

He noted that although global technology platforms possess sophisticated algorithms and enormous volumes of data, they do not necessarily capture the full complexity of consumer behaviour in Nigeria, particularly within the country’s large informal economy.

He cited the diverse ways Nigerians consume information and make purchasing decisions, including market women listening to radio, young people influenced by conversations in commercial buses, WhatsApp networks, neighbourhood influencers, religious announcements and other community-based communication channels.

According to him, a substantial portion of economic activity and consumer behaviour in Nigeria remains outside the datasets and attribution models used by many global digital advertising platforms.

“The machine can only optimise what it can see,” he said, describing the unmeasured segment of Nigeria’s consumer economy as a major opportunity for local media agencies.

‘Nigeria Needs a Second Independence’
Babaeko called for what he described as a “second independence” for Nigeria’s media industry, centred on local ownership of audience intelligence and the development of indigenous systems for measuring consumer behaviour.

He explained that Nigeria’s first independence in media planning came when the industry moved from largely speculative decisions to specialised media planning, with MIPAN playing an important role in that transformation.

The next stage, he said, should involve independence of thought, measurement and the ability of Nigerian media practitioners to define audiences, value and consumer behaviour based on local realities.

He challenged MIPAN to take the lead in developing an African audience intelligence and measurement system capable of providing a more comprehensive picture of Nigerian and African 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.

Babaeko insisted that the industry needed to develop “our own measurement” and “our own currency of attention” if Nigerian agencies were to negotiate from a position of strength in the future.

Agencies Must Rethink Pricing
The X3M Ideas boss also challenged media agencies to reconsider the way they charge clients, arguing that agencies should place greater financial value on strategic thinking, interpretation and professional judgement rather than merely executing media transactions.

He urged practitioners to stop presenting themselves to clients as intermediaries whose primary role was to place advertisements and instead position themselves as strategic partners capable of determining whether a media investment was worthwhile.

“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.

He argued that strategic interpretation would become increasingly important as technology takes over repetitive and transactional aspects of media buying.

AI should be an assistant, not a replacement

Addressing the growing influence of artificial intelligence, Babaeko advised media professionals to see AI as a powerful assistant rather than an outright replacement for human expertise.

He encouraged practitioners to deploy AI for tasks such as arithmetic, optimisation, data processing and other repetitive functions, while directing human talent towards understanding consumers, culture, emotions and context.

According to him, these human dimensions of communication remain areas where technology has significant limitations.

He stressed that agencies that embrace AI strategically would be better positioned to increase efficiency while preserving the human insight that gives advertising and media strategy its meaning.

Don’t let global platforms define premium media

Babaeko further warned Nigerian media practitioners against allowing global technology platforms to determine what should automatically be regarded as premium media inventory in the Nigerian market.

He argued that local radio, street-level communication, indigenous languages and traditional community-based channels should not be regarded as inferior simply because they do not fit neatly into digital advertising metrics.

According to him, the real measure of a media platform should be its ability to influence consumers and drive behaviour.
He therefore urged practitioners to develop better ways of measuring and demonstrating the value of traditional and local media platforms.

Collaboration key to survival

The advertising executive also called for stronger collaboration among MIPAN members, noting that the industry’s biggest emerging competitors were no longer necessarily individual agencies but powerful global technology platforms backed by enormous financial and technological resources.

He described collective action through MIPAN as a strategic advantage that could enable Nigerian media agencies to develop research, measurement and audience intelligence capabilities that individual companies might find difficult or expensive to build alone.

Babaeko maintained that collaboration could strengthen the industry’s bargaining power, improve the quality of local data and help practitioners develop indigenous solutions to problems that global platforms may not fully understand.

He urged media agencies to stop waiting for external validation before charging premium prices for their expertise.
Rather, he said, agencies should invest in capabilities that make their services indispensable to clients.

Babaeko concluded by urging media practitioners to focus on owning meaning, consumer intelligence and strategic interpretation in an industry where technological systems are increasingly taking over transactions.

“The next era belongs to whoever owns meaning in a world drowning in transaction,” he said.

He maintained that deep knowledge of the Nigerian and African consumer would remain one of the industry’s most valuable assets, even as artificial intelligence and automation continued to transform the way media was planned, bought, measured and delivered.