- Goddie Ofose and Kate Oboho
The monsters invaded the Earth in an iLot Bet ad. A pot started dancing for Terragold. A phone grew a mouth for Elm Trade. A statue chased a man for BetKing. An alarm clock turned into a phone for Nasco Cornflakes. A sachet of Maggi unwrapped itself mid-air. Crystal turned into perfume for AZUR Fresh. Water splashed on a woman’s face from nowhere for Bournvita.
If you watched TV during the last Big Brother Naija, you saw them all. Almost 80% of the ads were AI-generated, practitioners estimate. Nigerians noticed. And they complained.
The commercials were fast, cheap, surreal – and strangely soulless. Foreign. Wrong.
Nigerian advertising is at a crossroads it never planned for. Television commercials that once took weeks of pre-production, casting, shoot days in Lekki, post-production, and ARCON vetting can now be generated in hours on a laptop. The technology arrived with speed, innovation, automation, and opportunity. But with everything new comes a flood of use before understanding.
That is the split today. One side sees the shortcut the industry always wanted. The other sees TVCs that are delivered on time and forgotten just as fast.
The question is no longer whether AI has come to Nigerian advertising. It has. The question is: Are brands now lazy?
Creativity vs Craft: Democratisation or Devaluation?
If we are being honest, it is devaluation. That is the blunt assessment of Esosa Osagiede, Group Creative Director at Insight Publicis, who has spent 21 years in the business.
“Yes, a young creative in Benin with no budget can now show an idea, not just pitch it. But when a film takes hours instead of weeks, clients stop paying for the weeks, and those weeks were where the craft lived,” she says.
Her verdict is stark: “On efficiency, AI wins. On effectiveness, not so much.
“The democratization argument is real, but it is the smaller half of the story. Lekan Akinyele, Founder of Think Like A Designer and now Design Ingenious, puts it differently: “The entry level into our industry now is very, very small. As a matter of fact, it is infinitesimal. If you have access to these tools and you have a brain to think, you can actually make things happen.
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“But that ease takes away intentionality in craftsmanship. Franklin Ozekhome, advertising and cultural strategist, argues the debate is misframed. AI does not democratise creativity; it democratises production.
“Being able to make something is not the same as having something worth making,” Ozekhome says. “As image generation, editing, voice synthesis, storyboarding and visual effects become faster and cheaper, the premium shifts elsewhere: towards imagination, judgement, originality, directing intelligence, cultural understanding and the ability to recognise an idea that deserves to exist.
“For the people behind the camera, the implications are brutal.
“Directors will be reduced to prompt-givers unless they remain the taste that decides what is good. DOPs will lose the thing they are hired for, the judgment of light, because a machine imitates a look without understanding why it works. Production designers may be the quietest casualty, since their work only shows when it is missing. Models will face the sharpest risk: a face can now be generated or borrowed without a casting call, a contract or a fee,” says Esosa.
Ayodeji Razaq, GMD of Red Media Africa, is more measured: “What is being devalued is not craft. It is mediocre execution that hid behind big budgets. Roles built purely on execution, such as stock-level modelling, basic post-production and some pre-viz work, will shrink. But directors, DOPs and production designers who understand light, performance and culture are the ones best placed to direct AI tools well.”
Emmanuel Adediran, Business Unit Director at Plus Acuity Ltd, brings data to the disruption. Citing the World Bank’s World Development Report 2026, he notes that the share of formal Nigerian firms using AI rose from under 5% in 2022 to about 40% in 2025, level with the United States.
“Crew and cast lists will get shorter. Volume work such as cutdowns, versioning and simple product shots will move to AI first. That work matters more than it looks: it is where most of our directors, DOPs and designers learned their craft,” Adediran warns.
Kayode Ebatamehi, Group Managing Director of Bluebird Holdings, captures the client pressure driving it: “While AI has democratised creativity, it has also created the risk of devaluing the craft behind great advertising. Some clients see AI mainly as a way to produce work faster and cheaper, and they pass that expectation on to their agencies. This can lead to more advertising being produced, but with less thought and depth.”
‘Lolu Akinwunmi, Founder/Group CEO of Prima Garnet Africa and former ARCON Chairman, strikes a middle ground: “I see AI as an opportunity to democratise creativity rather than devalue it. However, speed and cost efficiency must never become substitutes for originality and craftsmanship. The challenge for our industry is to adapt, retrain, and evolve.”
Authenticity: Why The Ads Feel Foreign
The loudest complaint from Nigerians is not about job losses. It is that the ads don’t feel Nigerian.
They are right. Nigerian textures, humour, and emotion are missing. The Red Bull ad touching cooked rice, the Terra tastemaker dancing pot, the Maggi star that unwraps itself – they look polished but culturally weightless.
“They are not complaining about pixels. They are complaining that the ad does not sound like them. Humour in Nigeria is not a joke format; it is timing, tone and who is allowed to say what. A machine trained on everyone’s data averages all of that into no one’s,” Esosa says.
“You spend millions of media to be on BBN only to put AI ads to connect with real humans voting for people in the house.”
Lekan Akinyele diagnoses the root cause: sameness and foreign infrastructure.
“What we are beginning to witness is sameness. You’re seeing thumbnails from different channels that look exactly the same. There is no differentiation anymore. The providers of AI tools — we don’t have Nigerian infrastructure. We all depend on foreign infrastructure, which basically means this infrastructure is fed by foreign data. They’re analyzed in a foreign context. There is no machine learning for Nigerians. So you see, some AI now can speak Yoruba, but those are the infrastructures that we need. We need to be able to build that infrastructure that would understand our local nuances.”
Franklin Ozekhome agrees, but reframes it: “Bad advertising was soulless long before generative AI arrived. The problem is sameness. When everybody has access to the same models, aesthetic references and prompting conventions, we begin to see the same faces, lighting, camera movements, emotional expressions and imagined versions of Africa. Nigeria is not merely a collection of skin tones, fabrics, accents and locations. Culture sits in timing, humour, body language, contradiction, aspiration, language, memory, social codes and the thousand small things Nigerians recognise without needing them explained. That is much harder to prompt.”
The data on trust is damning. Adediran cites a Google and Ipsos study: 88% of Nigerian adults used an AI chatbot in 2025, against a 62% global average. Some 80% say they are more excited than concerned. Yet Smartly’s 2025 study found 48% of consumers trust ads co-created by a person with AI support; only 13% trust ads made entirely by AI.
In Nigeria, the trust problem is sharper because AI is now linked to fraud. In September and October 2026 alone, ARCON flagged fake AI adverts using the President, the Finance Minister, and Aliko Dangote to sell an investment fund, and a fake drug advert featuring the Minister of Health. When consumers associate AI with fake, every brand using it inherits that suspicion.
But AI can connect when culture leads. Adediran points to the Indomie Mother’s Day execution where AI helped drive personalization at scale – because it was built on strong cultural insight first.
As Akinwunmi puts it: “AI may replicate images, voices and environments, but it cannot independently experience the cultural nuances, humour and emotions that define us as Nigerians. When technology takes precedence over consumer understanding, brands risk losing authenticity.”
Ethics and Regulation: The Urgent Line
With AI able to clone faces, voices, and create hyper-realistic but fake scenarios, where should the industry draw the ethical line?
Everyone agrees: urgently, and ARCON must lead – but with education, not just enforcement.
“Yes, they should, and urgently. But a regulator can only govern what it understands, so the first job is education, not enforcement. A framework written by people who have never sat through a prompt session will be outdated before it is gazetted,” Esosa argues.
His ethical line is simple: “Nobody’s face, voice or likeness should be cloned without consent, a contract and a fee. No fake scenario should be passed off as real, especially where it speaks to vulnerable audiences or carries a testimonial. If a consumer cannot tell whether a human was involved, they should be told. Brands declare artificial ingredients on their labels so people know what they are buying. AI should be no different.”
Lekan Akinyele is blunter about regulatory readiness: “These are big debates, even in Silicon Valley. The speed at which AI is evolving on a per-second basis is alarming. Here, I’m not too sure if we are ready. Regulators themselves must be properly schooled in how AI functions, the do’s, the don’ts, the advantages, the disadvantages. You cannot put regulation around something you don’t understand.”
Ozekhome lists the real questions: Was someone’s face or voice used with permission? Was a real person made to appear to say or endorse something they never said? Does the audience have a reasonable chance of mistaking synthetic evidence for reality? Who owns the underlying creative material? Who is accountable when AI-generated advertising makes a false claim?
Ebatamehi adds another layer often missed: “What happens when a brand uses AI to create a scenario showing a product achieving something it cannot actually achieve, knowing full well that the depiction is unrealistic? Even if no one’s likeness is misused, the consumer is still being misled.”
The global precedents are already here. Adediran notes the EU AI Act’s deepfake disclosure rule has applied since August 2, 2026, with fines up to €15 million or 3% of global turnover. India’s ASCI issued risk-based labelling guidelines on September 29, 2026. Cannes Lions withdrew a 2025 Grand Prix after an agency’s case film used AI-manipulated footage, then introduced AI disclosure rules.
In Nigeria, there is a peculiar loophole. To grow local talent, ARCON bars foreign models and voice-over artists in Nigerian ads. But a synthetic face is not a foreign model. It is no one. Current practice still classifies and charges AI ads as foreign productions, and synthetic talent as foreign models – a move that penalises Nigerian-built models like N-ATLAS, the government-backed model for Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo and Nigerian-accented English, and YarnGPT, a home-grown voice model that speaks with a Nigerian accent.
Ayodeji Razaq reveals that ARCON and the Heads of Advertising Sectoral Groups have spent months jointly developing a regulatory model for AI and digital advertising, set to be unveiled at NAC 2026. “The line should be simple: never deceive the consumer about who is speaking, what is real, or whose likeness is being used.”
The Future: Both, But in the Right Order
Looking 2-3 years ahead, will Nigerian agencies that master AI storytelling gain a global competitive edge, or will agencies that double down on authentic, human-shot Nigerian storytelling win?
Every voice interviewed rejects the either/or.
“The agencies that win will not be the ones that master AI storytelling, or the ones that refuse it. They will be the ones that master the story and then use AI where it serves it. Anyone can learn the tools in a weekend. Nobody can learn Lagos in a weekend,” Esosa says.
The winning formula, according to her: Be human at the core and AI at the edges. Shoot the moments that need a real face, a real street, a real laugh. Use AI to explore, to sell the idea, to speed up, to test.
Franklin Ozekhome says, “I do not believe the agencies that choose AI will defeat the agencies that choose humans. Agencies that understand how to combine both will defeat agencies still treating them as opposing camps. In two to three years, access to generative AI will not be a competitive advantage. Everyone will have it. What becomes scarce again is taste. Cultural understanding. Original thinking. Human judgement.”
Lekan Akinyele, who has evolved from designer to art director to creative director to founder, says his competitive advantage is knowing the manual process before automating it: “You cannot automate something that you don’t know the manual process of. Those who have gone from analogue to digital to AI will be amazingly prepared for the future. The future belongs to those who have gone back to school just to understand what machine learning is.”
For Akinwunmi and Ebatamehi, Nigeria’s edge is its culture.
“Our culture, humour, ingenuity and ability to create meaning from everyday experiences are valuable creative assets. If we can combine that cultural intelligence with the effective use of AI, we have an opportunity to produce work that is not only relevant to Nigerian audiences but competitive on the global stage,” Ebatamehi says.
Ayodeji Razaq concludes: “AI alone is a commodity anyone in the world can buy. Nigerian cultural intelligence is the one thing nobody else can replicate. That is our export.”
Meanwhile, Adediran offers the most practical roadmap for smart agencies right now. Agencies that would succeed must map the portfolio by trust stakes and decide where AI leads and where humans must. Build consented, paid Nigerian voice and likeness assets instead of defaulting to generic synthetic talent.
He said agencies must reprice around ideas and outcomes, not crew days. Disclose AI use before regulation forces it. Ring-fence a share of production for human-crafted work, with apprentice roles built in, and pair every AI production team with a craft mentor.
His final warning should hang on every agency wall: “AI has collapsed the cost of making an ad, not the cost of being believed. The new winners will be the brands and agencies that can own the trust, and the premium that comes with it.”
The robot commercials are here. Whether they make Nigerian advertising lazy or legendary depends not on the machine, but on the taste behind it.
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