The Group Chief Executive of X3M Ideas, Steve Babaeko, has warned that media agencies risk becoming increasingly irrelevant if they continue to depend largely on media buying and placement, urging industry players to shift their value proposition towards data ownership, strategic interpretation and deep understanding of African consumers.
Babaeko, who is also the company’s chief creative officer, gave the warning in a keynote address at the 2026 Annual General Meeting of the Media Independent Practitioners Association of Nigeria (MIPAN), where he challenged practitioners to rethink how they intend to monetise opportunities in an industry being rapidly transformed by automation and artificial intelligence.
Speaking on the theme, “Monetising Tomorrow: Outpacing Disruption, Capturing Growth in the Next Era of Media,” Babaeko said the traditional media-buying model was under growing pressure as programmatic advertising, self-service platforms and AI-powered systems increasingly automate campaign planning, audience selection, budgeting and placement.
According to him, agencies cannot win a technological race by attempting to outperform machines at tasks that machines are designed to execute faster and more cheaply.
“If the race is who can execute the buy faster and cheaper, we have already lost,” he said, arguing that the industry’s response to disruption should not be to run faster on platforms’ “treadmill”, but to build capabilities and assets that the platforms do not own.
Babaeko identified deep knowledge of Nigerian and African consumers as one of the industry’s strongest competitive advantages, noting that global technology platforms may have extensive data and sophisticated algorithms but cannot fully capture the realities of Nigeria’s largely informal economy.
He pointed to consumers whose media habits extend beyond the conventional digital metrics captured by the global platforms, citing market women listening to radio, young Nigerians influenced by conversations in commercial buses, WhatsApp networks, neighbourhood influencers, religious announcements and other community-based channels.
He argued that a significant portion of Nigerian economic activities remain outside the datasets and attribution models on which much of modern digital advertising depends.
Describing the largely unmeasured portion of Nigeria’s consumer economy as an opportunity rather than a weakness, Babaeko said “the machine can only optimise what it can see.”
Therefore, he called for a “second independence” for Nigeria’s media industry – one centred on owning local audience intelligence and developing indigenous approaches to measuring consumer behaviour rather than relying entirely on imported metrics and frameworks.
The next phase of independence, he said, should be about independence of thought and the ability of Nigerian media practitioners to define value, audience and consumer behaviour on their own terms.
Consequently, Babaeko urged MIPAN to lead the development of an African audience intelligence and measurement system that would enable practitioners build a more comprehensive understanding of the country’s consumers.
“Right now, we make our decisions using a mirror that the platforms hold up for us, and they decide what the mirror shows,” he said, stressing rather that the industry should develop its own measurement and own currency of attention.
He further challenged agencies to reconsider how they charge clients, urging them to move away from pricing primarily for the execution of media transactions to placing greater value on strategic judgement and interpretation.
On artificial intelligence, Babaeko said practitioners should regard the technology as an assistant rather than a replacement for human expertise. He advised media professionals to deploy AI for arithmetic, optimisation and repetitive tasks while redirecting human talent towards understanding consumers, culture and context – areas he argued machines remain limited.
He further cautioned against allowing global platforms to determine what constitutes “premium” media in Nigeria, arguing that local radio, street-level communication, indigenous languages and other traditional channels should not automatically be treated as inferior to digital inventory.
He also called for greater collaboration among MIPAN members, noting that the industry’s real competition was increasingly coming from trillion-dollar technology platforms rather than from individual agencies.
