Group Chief Executive Officer and Chief Creative Officer of X3M Ideas, Steve Babaeko, has urged media agencies to move beyond traditional media buying and placement, warning that failure to adapt to artificial intelligence (AI) and automation could make them increasingly irrelevant.
Babaeko spoke at the 2026 Annual General Meeting of the Media Independent Practitioners Association of Nigeria (MIPAN), where he delivered a keynote address titled "Monetizing Tomorrow: Outpacing Disruption, Capturing Growth in the Next Era of Media."
He said the traditional media-buying model was under growing pressure as programmatic advertising, self-service platforms and AI-powered tools increasingly automate campaign planning, audience targeting, budgeting and placement.
According to him, agencies should not attempt to compete with machines on tasks that technology can perform faster and more cheaply.
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"If the race is who can execute the buy faster and cheaper, we have already lost," he said, urging practitioners to build capabilities that global technology platforms do not own.
Babaeko identified deep knowledge of Nigerian and African consumers as a major competitive advantage for local media agencies. He noted that global platforms may possess extensive data and sophisticated algorithms but often fail to capture the realities of Nigeria's largely informal economy.
He cited consumers whose media habits extend beyond conventional digital metrics, including market women who listen to radio, young Nigerians influenced by conversations in commercial buses, WhatsApp networks, neighbourhood influencers and religious announcements.
"The machine can only optimise what it can see," he said, describing Nigeria's largely unmeasured consumer economy as an opportunity for media practitioners.
Babaeko called for a "second independence" for Nigeria's media industry, centred on owning local audience intelligence and developing indigenous approaches to measuring consumer behaviour.
He urged MIPAN to lead the development of an African audience intelligence and measurement system that would provide a more comprehensive understanding of Nigerian consumers.
"Right now we make our decisions using a mirror the platforms hold up for us, and they decide what the mirror shows," he said, calling for "our own measurement" and "our own currency of attention."
The X3M Ideas CEO also challenged agencies to rethink their pricing models, urging them to charge for strategic insight and judgement rather than simply executing media transactions.
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"Stop pricing yourself as the hand that places the ad. Price yourself as the mind that decides it was worth placing at all," he said.
On AI, Babaeko advised practitioners to use the technology as an assistant rather than a replacement for human expertise. He recommended deploying AI for repetitive tasks, calculations and optimisation while allowing human professionals to focus on consumers, culture and context.
He further urged the industry to properly value local radio, indigenous languages, street-level communication and other traditional channels, arguing that digital platforms should not automatically define what constitutes premium media.
Babaeko also called for greater collaboration among MIPAN members, saying collective action could help agencies develop capabilities that individual firms might struggle to finance.
He concluded that the future of media would favour organisations that own consumer understanding and cultural insight.
"The next era belongs to whoever owns meaning in a world drowning in transaction," he said.
