AI Can’t Replace Local Insight, Babaeko Tells Nigeria’s Media Agencies

Nigeria’s advertising and media industry is entering a period where technology could take over many of the tasks agencies have traditionally been paid to perform, and advertising executive Steve Babaeko believes the industry's survival will depend on something technology cannot easily replicate: a deeper understanding of Nigerian consumers.

Speaking at the 2026 Annual General Meeting of the Media Independent Practitioners Association of Nigeria (MIPAN), the Chief Executive Officer of X3M Ideas challenged media agencies to rethink where their value lies as artificial intelligence, programmatic advertising and self-service platforms increasingly take over media planning, buying, targeting and measurement.

Babaeko's warning is straightforward. Global technology platforms are accumulating enormous amounts of audience data and giving advertisers increasingly sophisticated tools to plan campaigns, place advertisements and measure performance. As more of those functions become automated, agencies that depend heavily on buying media space risk finding that some of the services clients once paid for can now be performed by algorithms.

The challenge, therefore, is not to compete with technology at the things technology does best.

“You cannot out-run the algorithm at arithmetic,” Babaeko said, arguing that machines can process calculations and optimise campaigns far faster than humans. The opportunity for Nigerian agencies, he suggested, lies instead in interpreting what the numbers mean and understanding the people behind them.

That is where local intelligence becomes a potential competitive advantage.

A Nigerian consumer does not make purchasing decisions solely because an algorithm identified them as belonging to a particular demographic. Radio, neighbourhood relationships, markets, public transport, religious communities, WhatsApp groups and word-of-mouth recommendations can all influence what people buy and which brands they trust.

Much of that behaviour is difficult to capture through conventional digital dashboards.

Babaeko believes agencies should turn that gap into an asset by building their own audience intelligence and developing a stronger understanding of consumers across Nigeria. He argued that global platforms may possess enormous amounts of data, but they do not necessarily possess the cultural context required to interpret Nigerian behaviour.

That argument formed a major part of his keynote, titled “Whose Tomorrow Are We Monetizing?”, delivered under the AGM theme, “Monetizing Tomorrow: Outpacing Disruption, Capturing Growth in the Next Era of Media.”

For MIPAN, the issue is particularly important because the association represents agencies operating in a market where global technology companies increasingly occupy parts of the advertising value chain once controlled by traditional media businesses.

Babaeko called for agencies to collaborate in areas such as data, research, measurement and technology rather than attempting to build every capability independently. Collective investment, he suggested, could allow Nigerian practitioners to develop audience-measurement systems that individual agencies might struggle to finance on their own.

The bigger ambition is to create what he described as an indigenous “currency of attention”—a better understanding of where Nigerians actually spend their time and how attention translates into influence and purchasing decisions.

That could also force the industry to reconsider the way it values media.

Babaeko questioned the assumption that international digital platforms should automatically command greater value than Nigerian channels simply because their measurement systems are more sophisticated. Radio, for example, continues to reach large audiences across the country, while traditional and community-based channels remain important in markets that digital dashboards can sometimes overlook.

Artificial intelligence, meanwhile, should not necessarily be treated as the enemy.

Babaeko urged practitioners to make AI their “junior, not their replacement”, using it for repetitive calculations, optimisation and other routine tasks while allowing human professionals to concentrate on strategy, creativity, cultural interpretation and judgement.

That may ultimately be the most important message from his address.

The advertising industry is unlikely to stop becoming more automated. Media buying will continue to become faster, targeting will become more precise and AI will increasingly influence the way campaigns are planned and evaluated.

The agencies that survive that transition may therefore be those that stop trying to compete with machines on machine-like tasks and instead become better at understanding people.

For Nigeria's media industry, that means turning its knowledge of local culture, informal markets and everyday consumer behaviour into something measurable, valuable and commercially powerful.

The next era of advertising may belong to whoever has the most data. But Babaeko's challenge to Nigerian agencies is that data without context is only information—and the real competitive advantage may belong to those who understand what Nigerians do with it.