By Adebayo Adebola

Between 2021 and 2025, Nigerian brands spent N161b buying influence. But in the same period, I have not seen a published report on how much was spent buying trust. That’s a huge gap.

Last year, Ijeoma Okereke-Adagba weighed in on the debate about influencers and journalists: how social media influencers seemed to have usurped the journalist’s role in society in terms of agenda setting, advocacy, and policy influence. She cited a prominent example involving social critic VeryDarkMan and well-known investigative journalist Fisayo Soyombo to buttress her argument.

Soyombo went undercover in a police cell and as an inmate in prison to expose the rot in the country’s correctional and law enforcement systems. The investigative story received a negligible reaction from the authorities. Years later, VDM published a scoop on the shenanigans in our prisons—he wasn’t personally involved like Soyombo and the authorities were beside themselves trying to clean up the mess: law enforcement personnel deemed culpable got suspended, and the National Assembly initiated a probe.

Influencers versus traditional PR
The VDM-Soyombo episode goes beyond journalism and raises a larger question about influence itself: who now has the power to make people pay attention, change their minds, and, ultimately, act? Brand managers have asked similar questions, and they see that influencers wield such power; hence the willingness to trust them with a substantial share of the communications budget. Traditional PR, meanwhile, struggles to justify its billings (see my 2021 article on brands’ reliance on influencer marketing: https://bizwatchnigeria.ng/influencer-marketing-may-be-nearing-its-sell-by-date/).

DottsMediaHouse’s recent Influencer Marketing Report estimated that brands spent over N161 billion between 2021 and 2025 to buy influence, with N59 billion spent in 2025. Many brand campaigns are now significantly influencer-led. Darling Nigeria’s 2019 relaunch, Indomie’s “Show Some Love to Mum,” CeraVe Nigeria’s “CerAwards 2026 – The CeramoVE Edition,” and Malta Guinness’ “Real in Every Way” are a few examples of influencer-led brand campaigns. It would appear that brands are becoming increasingly comfortable putting substantial sums behind influencer campaigns, even when they cannot clearly explain what those investments delivered beyond engagement, clicks, reach, likes, or impressions.

The real battle PR practitioners miss
Traditional PR is clearly facing significant challenges. But the real threat to PR is that agencies are increasingly being asked to build campaigns around influence rather than reputation.

To be sure, influencers are not taking PR’s briefs because they are inherently better communicators.

They are winning because they have packaged attention, audience access, relationships, and measurable activity into something that is easy for brands to understand and budget for. PR has historically struggled to package its value in similarly commercial terms.

Thus, the battle isn’t influencers versus PR as much as PR undercutting itself with outdated strategies.

While it is easy to see influencers as the enemy, the important question is: what exactly has PR failed to demonstrate or deliver?

The changing faces of influence
PR still holds the aces in the communications industry. It just needs to reimagine its playbook template. Digitisation has changed the scale, speed, and urgency of the perception landscape, and brands now seem to have a different definition of influence. Influence is now seen as access to a community. In the old communications playbook, influence is earned over time, and that equals authority. Now, influence is distribution or access. An Aproko Doctor or VDM, for instance, with millions of followers, has more influence and is considered more useful by brands than The Guardian or The Punch, which has built trust and credibility over decades.

Unfortunately, the PR industry has not evolved quickly enough to embrace the new thinking. Many practitioners still sell media placements, press conferences, and press releases as key solutions to brands that want speed to market, reach, measurable engagement, and perceived authenticity.

PR’s poor value communication
PR has also historically struggled, especially in Nigeria, to explain what it purchases with the budget brands give to it. For a long time, Advertising Value Equivalency was used as a measure of campaign success—many PR agencies still use AVE today. Unfortunately, AVE measures outputs: share of media voice, number of stories, quality of media mention, and reach. The International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication’s (AMEC’s) Barcelona Principles 3.0 in 2020, to which the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations is a signatory, sought to push PR measurement beyond output to include impact and outcomes, with metrics such as RepTrak, sales correlation, lead quality, share of search, and earned social amplification more conspicuously adopted.

Influencer marketing hasn’t solved the measurement problem. Like PR, it has generally measured outputs—how a brand performed in the cyberworld—like clicks, shares, likes, comments, etc. The key difference is that creators are better at explaining to the business managers what the money buys for the brand. They have mastered the art of easy reporting.

Really, Nigerian brands aren’t necessarily abandoning PR for influencers. They are increasingly reallocating attention and budgets towards channels that offer visibility, immediacy, and easily packaged results for business managers. PR must quickly evolve a reporting template that can show what changed as a result of the communication efforts and not what happened in the media.

The uncomfortable truth
The influencer economy has also exposed something uncomfortable about PR itself: many PR professionals are exceptionally good at building platforms as intermediaries for others while remaining invisible themselves. Creators have done the opposite. They have turned their personalities, opinions, communities, and relationships into media assets.

PR practitioners must know that marketing/communications managers are rewarded quarterly, so they choose speed, high visibility, followers, and engagement to justify their marketing communications budgets and earn their rewards. This is why a brand that asks for audited circulation for a N2m newspaper advert in Thisday will readily approve N30m for two TikTok creators on a WhatsApp voice note.

The influencer boom isn’t primarily a threat to PR. The industry should see it as a warning that PR has failed to make its own influence visible and commercially relevant. For an industry in the business of building trust, failing to earn confidence in its own value is a painful irony. Influencers have become very good at monetising attention. PR needs to become much better at monetising—and demonstrating—the value of credibility.

Adebola is a brands and marketing communications professional and can be reached via [email protected] or 08028594213.