Our reduced rates attracted compliance — LASAA boss

In  a chat with the Chief Executive of the Lagos State Signage and Advertising Agency, LASAA, Mr.  George Noah, he discussed several issues in the signage industry and the effort of the agency at making sure practitioners in the Out-of-Home, OOH industry and signage users are not strangled by its regulation, thereby providing a level playing ground for the parties Princewill Ekwujuru records.
Compliance level

In compliance when you feel that perhaps things are too expensive then it is always very difficult for people to comply on their own. Secondly, our rates are now competitive with those of the states around us. I think we are even cheaper than Ogun State. Before now, people used to go to Ogun State and other neighbouring states to register their vehicles.

And you know for vehicle branding, the law states that if you brand in any state, you are allowed to drive your car anywhere in the federation.   So we have to be competitive. So there was no need for anybody to go Oyo State or to Delta State to go and register their vehicles.

When in actual fact we are as competitive as any other.    And so, we reduced and at the same time there was a lot of compliance, and so we were able to increase our revenue by 300 per cent.

Mobile ad revenue  growth
I think it’s explanatory enough. If I tell you that we increase our revenues by 300 per cent, and if you take just the average value of what our rates are, about N3000, I think you can compute that. We increased our revenues by 300 per cent by even dropping our rates.

Political era and posters removal

We  are working on a project now where we would have designated areas where you can paste posters and nobody would remove them. It is something that has been tried in Holland, some parts of China and so on, where you designate specific areas and you are allowed to do that, and beyond that the enforcement will come after you.

So that’s one of the things we are working on. In  the  57 Local Council Development Areas, LCDAs, we are going to deploy in all the local councils now, anybody that wants to paste posters, you are allowed to do that in that place. We did the pilot scheme in Surulere. So we are going to deploy I all the local governments now.

Review and compliance

What we’ve decided is that we would have people that will manage those things themselves. And there would be a token,   remove and paint and all sorts, but there will be no special fees for pasting posters in those areas other than what the group decides is enough to maintain that particular place.

We don’t want to make any revenue from that. It is just for us to make sure we have sanity within the environment. But with politics it becomes quite very difficult. We have posters and things like that everywhere, but we are hoping to have a meeting with all the political parties and brief them on how we want this to be done, and I hope they will comply.

Regulator and operator

We have about 25 billboards from a total of about 950 in the state. These we use mainly to propagate what the state government does. Once in a while you might find a few things here and there, it is those who have helped the state in one form or the other, and I don’t see how that can be competition. If you go and look at all the billboards that we have 99 percent of them are mainly state government stuff.

Dedicated billboards

When people do projects with the state, and the need to create awareness or they are partnering with the state, we have a dedicated billboards they can use for such purposes. I’ve had this said many times that we are not competing with practitioners, the fact remains that we don’t charge, we don’t take money from anybody for using the boards.

So I don’t know where the competition comes from. It is the practitioners that tend to use this word as if we are taking business away from them. And that is not true.

Relationship with OAAN

We have a very good relationship with the Outdoor Advertising Agency of Nigeria, OAAN. I work very closely with the President of OAAN, when we have things that we need to discuss, we sit down and discuss.

As a result of the conference and exhibiton that we did, I had the opportunity of visiting different stakeholders, Advetisers Association of Nigeria, ADVAN, Media Independent Association of Nigewria MIPAN, CIPON  all those who have something to do with outdoor, I went out and for the first time, made contact with each and every one of them, and my refrain was we need to work together to ensure that we do our jobs very well.

Culled from www.vanguardngr.com