By Goddie Ofose
· Inside the MIPAN AGM 2026 debate on outpacing disruption, owning data, and capturing growth in the next era of media
The room at the Media Independent Practitioners Association of Nigeria [MIPAN] Annual General Meeting 2026 did not feel like a typical industry gathering. There were no victory laps. No forecasts dressed up as certainty.
Instead, there was a question, asked out loud by Steve Babaeko, Group CEO and Chief Creative Officer of X3M Ideas, and left to hang in the air for two hours:
“Whose tomorrow are we monetizing?”
The theme for the year was bold, even urgent: “Monetizing Tomorrow: Outpacing Disruption, Capturing Growth in the Next Era of Media.” But Babaeko’s keynote reframed it. Before we chase growth, he argued, we must decide if we are building a future we own, or renting one back from platforms built in Menlo Park.
What followed was not a eulogy for media buying. It was a blueprint for a second independence. And it drew sharp, pragmatic responses from three of the industry’s leading voices: Abisoye Oruye, Media Manager, Sub-Saharan Africa; Stephen Oluwatoyin Onaivi, MD, mediaReach OMD Nigeria, and newly elected VP MIPAN; and Emmanuel Adediran, Executive Director at Plus Acuity Ltd.
Together, their contributions at MIPAN 2026 sketched the contours of what Nigerian media must become if it intends to be alive, profitable, and relevant in ten years.
The end of the transaction era
Babaeko began with history, because history is where MIPAN’s courage lives.
Founded in 1999 by seven companies, MIPAN was born to turn media planning from “guesswork and long-table relationships” into a science. That was the first independence: independence from gut feeling. For 25 years, the industry built businesses on that discipline. On the buy. On negotiation, volume, relationships, and the placement.
That model paid for schools, cars, and offices.
But Babaeko was blunt about the second half of the story. “The transaction is being eaten,” he told the room. Programmatic took the first bite. Self-serve platforms took the second. Now, AI agents are taking the third: planning campaigns, choosing audiences, setting budgets, optimizing while you sleep.
“When the platform owns the road, the vehicle, and the driver, what exactly is the tollgate collecting for?” he asked.
If your business rests on being “the fastest, cheapest hand between the naira and the impression,” he warned, you are monetizing a shrinking thing. “You cannot outrun the algorithm at arithmetic. It does arithmetic for a living.”
Abisoye Oruye picked up the thread from the advertiser’s side. For her, the core problem is that we have been measuring the wrong thing.
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“Reach told us who saw the ad. It never told us who bought, who stayed, or who came back,” she said.
The panel she moderated at the AGM landed on a clear consensus: impressions are a proxy, not a result. In a fragmented world of TikTok, YouTube, and direct-to-fan channels, a single reach number is losing meaning. Advertisers are already reallocating budgets toward what converts. Disruption, she noted, “isn’t coming — it’s already reallocating budgets.”
Emmanuel Adediran put it even more directly: “The transactional era of media buying is dead, swallowed by global algorithms. If agency survival depends on playing middleman to Silicon Valley dashboards, the battle is already lost.”
The gap the machine cannot see
If the transaction is dying, what survives? Babaeko’s answer was unexpected and deeply Nigerian: the gap.
He asked the room to imagine the real consumer. The woman in Bodija market with a radio on tomatoes. The danfo conductor’s playlist. The WhatsApp broadcast list that moves an estate. The barber who is a one-man influencer network. The church announcement. The aunty who “saw it on TikTok.”
“Now go and open the global dashboard and try to find those people,” he said. “You will not find them. Not fully.”
He backed it with numbers. More than 57% of Nigeria’s GDP sits in the informal economy. Over 90% of jobs are informal. Roughly 40 million small enterprises trade largely in cash, making them largely invisible to attribution models. Yet by 2029, 84% of ad spend in Nigeria is projected to be digital — higher than the global average — chasing a view of Nigeria built on roughly 38 million social media identities.
“There are close to a hundred and eighty million active mobile lines in this country, and the platforms can only richly profile some thirty-odd millions of them,” Babaeko said. “We are pouring our budgets through the one window that shows us the smallest room in the house, and calling the view ‘insight.’”
That gap, he argued, is not a problem. It is the treasure. “The machine can only optimize what it can see. And there is an entire Nigeria it cannot see… and the only people on this earth who can read that map fluently are sitting in this room.”
Adediran agreed. “Algorithms deliver reach, but context drives conversion. That context cannot be outsourced to foreign platforms with zero understanding of the informal African economy.”
For Oruye, this is also a measurement problem. The industry must move from vanity metrics to outcome metrics that hold up “across a fractured media landscape.” Attribution, she said, “has to travel with the media plan, not sit outside it.”
The second independence — owning thought, not just the buy
Babaeko called for a “second independence.” The first was independence from guesswork in 1999. The second must be independence of thought.
“We Yoruba have a saying. A kì í fi ọwọ́ òsì júwe ilé baba ẹni. One does not point to the house of one’s own father with the left hand,” he said. “For too long we have been describing our own market with borrowed hands. Borrowed metrics. Borrowed definitions of what is ‘premium.’”
He termed it an “Original Africa orientation”: the idea that African cultural systems are not a rough draft of Western ones. They are architecturally different. And in an era when the machine has globalized transactions, local meaning becomes the last scarce thing on earth.
“The independent’s future is not in the insertion. It is in the interpretation. Not in the buy. In the meaning. Not in reach. In resonance,” Babaeko said.
Stephen Onaivi, speaking as the new VP of MIPAN, framed this as a leadership imperative. Nigerian agencies, he said, must “lead industry evolution rather than merely respond to disruption.” That starts with owning the local narrative and integrating AI “as a force multiplier” of human ingenuity, not a replacement.
Onaivi outlined three strategic imperatives:
Outpacing Disruption: Lead through innovation and local intelligence.
Monetizing Tomorrow: Shift from tactical execution to measurable business contribution — linking media to revenue, market share, and brand equity.
Capturing Growth: Balance immediate ROI with long-term investment in human capital, ecosystem collaboration, and evolved performance metrics.
“Agencies should operate as growth partners,” he said. “Sustainable growth depends on transparent, collaborative, and outcome-focused relationships.”
Five moves for Monday morning
Babaeko did not leave the room with philosophy alone. He gave a floor plan. Five concrete moves:
Own the data layer. “Right now we make our decisions using a mirror the platforms hold up for us,” he said. MIPAN, as a body, must aggregate African audience intelligence. Build our own measurement. Our own currency of attention. “The moment we can describe the Nigerian consumer better than Google can, the conversation changes, and so does the invoice.”
Move the fee from insertion to interpretation; Stop pricing the hand that places the ad. Price the mind that decides where, why, and how it lands in Warri versus Kano. “The machine will always undercut you on placement. It cannot undercut you on judgment, because it has none.”
Make the machine your junior; Use AI for arithmetic, optimization, and scale. Free humans to do what machines cannot: understand a people. “That is not a threat to jobs. That is a promotion for every media person in this room.”
Stop letting someone else define ‘premium.’ When platforms call their inventory premium and local radio “cheap,” that is a pricing strategy, not a fact. Babaeko cited radio ad revenue growing at over 30% a year. “The market woman’s radio moves more real product in this country than a lot of the premium we import. Price our own media honestly.”
Do it together. “In this new world, your competitor is a trillion-dollar platform that does not know your competitor’s name or yours. Against that, MIPAN itself is the moat. The unity is the asset.”
Adediran echoed the urgency around data sovereignty: “proprietary measurement systems and aggregated consumer insights built, owned, and controlled locally.” He also pushed for agencies to stop treating creators like billboards and start building micro-influencer networks that own distribution at the street level.
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Oruye added the advertiser’s mandate: treat media spend like a growth investment. “Constantly tested, tracked, and reallocated toward what converts.” Brands that build measurement in from day one, she said, are the ones who can defend budgets at renewal.
Capturing growth — from clicks to culture
If the transaction is commoditized, where does the money live? The panelists agreed: in business outcomes and cultural IP.
Onaivi called for agencies to anchor on business outcomes and capitalize on retail media networks — the fast-growing space where media meets the point of purchase. That, he said, “will unlock new revenue streams and strengthen the link between media investment and sales impact.”
Adediran went further. “Capturing growth demands building defensible cultural IP. Knowledge of the African consumer remains the most defensible asset in media.” He argued agencies must move “away from short-term client campaigns and focus on owning original formats, platforms, and culturally grounded intellectual property.” ROI, in this view, is not clicks. It is “deep cultural resonance and long-term brand equity.”
Oruye summarized the room’s mood: “Outpacing disruption isn’t about spending more. It’s about spending in a way that is evident in driving volumes and value.”
The confession and the charge
Babaeko closed with a personal story. In 2012, he was offered money to sell X3M Ideas. He said no. Not out of ego, he said, but because “they were trying to buy my tomorrow at yesterday’s price.”
That, he said, is what independence is: “A bet that the value you are about to build is worth more than the comfort somebody is offering you today to stop building it.”
It is the same bet MIPAN’s seven founders made in 1999. And it is the bet the industry must make again now — against the comfort of becoming “a cheap, efficient, forgettable pair of hands for the platforms.”
He ended with a proverb: “When a child falls, he looks ahead. When an elder falls, he looks back.
“Look back and see clearly what tripped the old model,” Babaeko said. “Then look forward, because the next era of media does not belong to whoever executes fastest. The machine already won that race.”
“The next era belongs to whoever owns meaning in a world drowning in transaction. And I will say this to you as plainly as I know how. Nobody on this planet understands the Nigerian consumer, the African consumer, better than the people in this hall. Nobody.”
Whose tomorrow?
MIPAN 2026 did not answer every question. But it asked the right one.
The consensus in Ogere was clear. The future will not be imported. It will be built.
It will be built on data we own, not rent. On judgment machines cannot replicate. On measurement tied to business, not just eyeballs. On media that reflects the Nigeria the dashboard cannot see — the 57% informal, the 40 million MSMEs, the radio in Bodija, the danfo playlist.
As Onaivi put it, MIPAN must “set the agenda for this transformation by fostering industry collaboration, building technical capability, and establishing progressive standards.”
As Oruye put it, advertisers must demand proof that media drives “sale, sign-up, or repeat customer.”
As Adediran put it, success belongs to “those who build sovereign data infrastructure, master local creator networks, and trade short-term ad placement for long-term ownership of cultural context.”
And as Babaeko put it, the question is not whether we can outpace disruption. It is whose tomorrow we choose to monetize.
“Ours. If we have the nerve to build it.”
In a world where algorithms can buy faster than any human, that may be the only moat left. And it lives right here.
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