By Tomilola Adesanya, Head of Business & Tolla Okodugha, Head of Production — Flipside Marketing
Ask anyone who has spent real time on a Nigerian film or TV set and they will tell you the same thing in different words: that talent was never the problem and what has held this industry back is everything that surrounds the talent. The systems, the training pipelines, the money, the equipment and the patience to let people grow into their craft rather than throwing them into the deep end because a project needs a body on set by Monday.
At Flipside, honesty is the only register we know how to work by, because you cannot fix what you can’t figure a name for.
So let us name it.
What Nigeria gets right
Nigerian actors carry scenes with an instinct for emotional truth that keeps surprising international audiences. That instinct is not an accident. It comes from an industry that has produced more content, faster, for longer than almost anywhere else on the continent.
Directing has caught up fast. The directors actually moving the craft forward right now are mostly the ones who came up outside the traditional Nollywood pipeline — through advertising, music videos, self-funded shorts. That background gave them a visual literacy the older system, built for speed over polish, never prioritized.
When it comes to writing stories, emotion is not the problem but rather a structural gap: too much Nigerian television is still built without a real writers’ room, with one or two people shouldering an entire season by themselves. The individual talent is there but the collaborative infrastructure is not.
Where the real work needs to happen
Tolla: We have never suffered from a creative deficit in Nigeria. We suffer from an infrastructural deficit. When a shoot goes off the rails it is rarely because the director lacked vision. It happens because the operational architecture was not built to support them.
Sound is the single most underinvested department in Nigerian production. Full stop. This is not a talent gap — it is a training and equipment gap. Sound design as a specialized craft barely exists as an institution here. At Flipside we bring sound into the brief from week one. Not as a post-production afterthought. As a creative department that shapes the project from the beginning.
Production management is the gap nobody talks about publicly but everyone complains about privately.
Tolla: We have to stop treating line producers and production managers like glorified admins. Untrained production management is exactly where budgets bleed, schedules collapse, and crew burnout happens. If you do not master the boring administrative details of running a set, your creative vision will die long before it gets to the screen which is why for us at Flipside, production management is not a support function. It is a creative function. We prioritize it and treat it that way on every project.
What this means right now
Tomilola: The question is not whether Nigerian production can deliver at a world class level. It can. The question is whether you are giving it the conditions to do so — realistic budgets, proper pre-production time, and investment in the departments that are easy to undervalue until you see what undervaluing them produces on screen.
Tolla: Our audiences are streaming Hollywood-grade content on their phones every single day. Their eyes are trained to spot cheap, rushed work. When we give our sound engineers, colourists, and line producers the same rigorous mentorship and financial respect that our front-facing talent gets, Nigerian production will not just compete globally. We will set the standard.
That gap won’t close in a single leap — it closes production by production, each one done properly and we’re committed to doing exactly that, again and again.
Tomilola Adesanya is Head of Business and Tolla Okodugha is Head of Production at Flipside Marketing — the media production company within The People Company Group, handling the full lifecycle of every brand’s creative expression.
