Odili Tony Ujubuonu is the CEO, Anambra State Signage and Advertisement Agency (ANSAA). In this interview with Chinwendu Uzoatu and Blessing Nnabuife, he spoke on how the agency has been repositioned to become progress partners in Anambra businesses among others.
Excepts:
Q. How has it been with ANSAA?
A. It has been a great challenge but a pleasant experience, and I am ready to work for ndi Anambra to achieve a livable, prosperous, smart mega city.
Q. How is the agency keying into the state government’s plan of making the state a liveable and prosperous homeland?
When I came into ANSAA, it was a different environment for me; a government organization. We are an autonomous agency; the agency runs without any government subversion. It is from what we make that we pay our salaries and improve on our services.
When I came into office, I had to think of how to help the governor achieve his vision of livable, prosperous, smart mega city . The first steps that we took were going to our industries, talking to our stakeholders in advertising in Anambra. Quite a number of them supported us; some industries renewed their registration fees and with that we were able to start putting all the vehicles that were not working in order, work out the ANSAA documents, where we want to go to and how we can align with the new administration’s vision of making Anambra a livable, prosperous and digitally driven enconomy .
From our own personal research, we realised that Anambra is actually supposed to be having a lot of advertising activities given its population, geographical location and given the commercial activities that take place in the three major areas in the state but we were not getting that much. So we started looking for what the challenges are and we started dealing with them one after the other but we have not surmounted the problems. We are putting in place some strategies that help us.
There is a program we’re planning by the end of the year that we call ‘Stakeholders Summit and Advertising in Anambra’. We will be bringing in most of the advertising stakeholders in Nigeria to Anambra.
We started by restructuring the system by having an internal audit to know who are our staff , how do we make them change their attitude to work, think differently, re-engineer the place.
We started with restructuring the office entirely. It is not the way it was operating before that it’s operating now. We have created eight asset classes. These asset classes are the ones that are managing the businesses of ANSAA in Anambra and each is managed by an asset manager.
We have out of home assets; those persons in that class are in charge of managing our billboards. We have the first party agent who are in charge of the signages that you see. We also have the special first party asset. They manage signages that are in fuel stations, urban markets, among others.
We have the mobile asset; they manage things like products activation, T-shirts, political permit, rally, branding of vehicles, among others. We have the community asset; those people in charge manage the A 1 system marketing like Afor, Oye, Nkwo and Eke, sign location signboards, among others.
We have those who manage the road furniture asset, like street lamps that’s owned by the government but we use it to advertise. That is how the assets are being shared in its different key areas and in these new key areas, the workers will first of all have new responsibilities and we set targets and measure their key performances in the areas that we set for them.
We are trying to run the organisation as if it is a non-governmental agency because it is a profit making regulatory agency and you don’t have to run it like the government system that one will come to work anyhow he wants.
We considered the peculiarity of our culture, for example, in Anambra, we love trading and we want to re-engineer the mind of our customers who see us as tax collectors which means that we are coming to them to collect money. But we want to let them know that we are your progress partners in that business that you are doing.
We changed our slogan to ” your progress partners in business”. There’s need for all to partner with us . If you build a billboard and put in your house, ANSAA will not come but the very moment you decide to put it outside, you’re calling everyone to see your products.
We rebranded ANSAA vehicles which is why you see them moving around with different colors. When you’re coming to our office, it looks different, inside the office looks different.
Ndi Anambra are very understanding, when they pay you money and come back to see that the money they paid you have been used for its purpose, they will have more need to invest again.
Anambra Signage and Advertising Agency is the agency that is empowered by law to regulate out door advertising that is not on radio, television stations, internet and newspapers, but this type of adverts are bills on structures for people to see.
