AFRICA HAS THE IDEAS, LACKS THE EXECUTION. The biggest challenge in our creative industry.

This for me is the greatest holdback for the African creative industry. Creative execution is a big global problem but more so for the African creative industry and this is shown through the number of creative awards received by African agencies on global award stages. To get to the next level, we need to have a thorough look at this problem of creative execution and address it accordingly. In this article I will discuss some of the reasons why we face this challenge and look to source "ideas" from you on how best we can translate our ideas into award winning executions.

1. Fancy or Baseless work. Inherent in the African culture is the desire to shine brighter than everyone else and in our quest to achieve this inherent wish to shine brighter, we have formed empty shining stones. Our industry is ridden with a lack of insightful work, it looks nice but it is meaningless and such works never win much, if anything at all. We need to start moving away from this fa?ade and start moving towards meaningful work, and that starts with the question "WHY?". "Why?", brings out the meaning of our creative efforts therefore anytime you struggle to answer this in your work, please know that you are about to waste money, time and effort on something that will pass on like it never existed in the first place.

2. Short term goals over long term gains. You Only Live Once is translated as You Only Live Once Now here and this mindset of seeking short term glory makes us lose out on actual long term goals when it comes to creative effectiveness. I would have to side with the creatives here and go against clients on this one. The pressure to once again impress has led to short term ineffective goals. As a creative, you have 3 months or less to prove your mettle or find the door. This short term cycle stalls business growth and halts creative effectiveness, so the ideas are there but the time to get them right is missing because the creatives are always running against the clock. Recently, I was working on a client's overall marketing brief but they wanted the executions even before they had seen the plan. This is a clear case in point when it comes to clients rushing the creative process to a fault. Dear clients/business owners, kindly take note, time is key in getting it right.

3. The Creative Processes is missing. I once interviewed for a Creative Director's role (which I shouldn't have in the first place considering that I am more into planning than creativity).I was asked about my creative process and I thought, "creative process?, what creative process?". I don't remember how I answered that question but I didn't get the role so clearly I didn't say anything sensible with regards to that but it's so important to know and understand the creative process; and very few creatives know it. This is core to having great executions in the creative industry. Now let me leave this caveat: Creativity is not a science, it is an art but there are fundamental processes to help us arrive at award winning work and that's what we need to start engraving in our work.

4. The budget! Oh this, this, this! I could leave this with the last "this" and would have written enough when it comes to the issue of budgets for creative work. This is where both clients and creatives fall short together. The biggest problem with budgets in my opinion is trust, clients not trusting creatives to cost their work logically and creatives not trusting clients to pay for the logical cost of the project and this needs to be addressed. The crust of this big issue is VALUE; what is the value both parties place on the work at hand? Recently, I engaged a firm, and this firm charges top dollar but produces some of their video content in low grade camera quality, and the keyword here for me is quality. My word to them was "customers pair quality with price". There is therefore the need to put out quality content regardless of the device because I won't pay $1000 for $10-dollar-looking content. So let me summarize my solution like this, as a client demand quality and as a creative give value for such.

There are so many other factors affecting the ideas-execution gap, and hopefully we can continue to have this discussion until we start seeing agencies from Africa regularly on the global award stages. This starts with a decision to do great work and I know how difficult it is with some of the reasons stated above but until we take that decision, we will stay where we are, winless and dead!

Thank you for reading and catch you on the next article.