Nigerian PR firms are suffering, and there are a number of reasons why. One leading Nigerian PR firm, BlackHouse Media is reported late in their staff payments for the first time in years. And this is not even a faltering agency. BlackHouse Media, a member of BHM Groups, works for two multi-national firms, it has a digital advantage over its competitors in the market and works for media giants.
In 2014, BlackHouse Media launched the country's first PR application, recording over 1 billion social media impressions for client campaigns. The following year it launched ID Africa, the company's digital agency. Yet, cash flow is a problem.
Many agencies in Nigeria are in the same, if not worse, predicament. They struggle to pay staff and contractors while creative agencies, media independents, and digital marketing companies flourish.
What is the root cause of this?
It is widely believed this is a result of PR agencies not charging as much, resulting in low budgets and the failure to obtain retainers. Therefore, great talents flee, usually to the advertising agencies or direct client work. This migration is at an all- time high, with most agencies in a 2015 survey losing senior consultants in the preceding year.
And there are other reasons. When government or management plans and strategies, PR is seldom consulted; except to manage press events or for traditional media relations. On the client side, they do not receive value, nor any appreciable help handling social media. And they lack creativity in storytelling and community management as well.
On the agencies' side, they share their frustration at low pay levels and not being allowed to work with top management. Even Nigeria's government hires unqualified PR people. And numerous private, as well as public, organizations hire unregulated agencies for their PR work in Nigeria. As a result, many big agencies cannot compete with the salaries and have owed employees up to three months wages. Even creative and media agencies are suffering from these practices. But PR agencies are suffering the most.
What can be done on the part of PR agencies to turn this around? Something other than their normal approaches. As of 2015, Nigeria had a population of mostly young people in rural, semi-urban, and urban areas, estimated at 200 million. And there were an estimated 195 million active mobile phones in Nigeria. With a GSM subscriber base of almost 150,000,000, it had the highest internet penetration rate in Africa at an annual growth of about 4 million.
The market has already proven it can execute at the highest level — Nigerian PR has run high-stakes, internationally visible work, including a Nigerian PR campaign against ISIS that drew global attention. The capability is there. The economics have to catch up.
With this kind of wide open market and creative ideas, skillful PR marketing, and expertise, what more potential could one want?
Update — June 2026
The structural problems documented in this 2015 piece — low retainers, talent flight to advertising and creative agencies, government hiring unregulated operators, agencies owed months of wages — have evolved but not resolved. Three things have changed the picture.
The Lagos tech ecosystem rewrote the buyer. More than $7 billion in startup capital raised since 2019 per Briter Bridges. Flutterwave, Paystack (acquired by Stripe), Andela, Interswitch, OPay, Kuda, and Moniepoint built communications operations that bypassed the traditional agency model — founder-led media, trade press in TechCabal and Disrupt Africa, international coverage in TechCrunch and the FT. The best Nigerian PR talent followed the budgets.
The Tinubu reform era reset the corporate communications brief. The May 2023 inauguration, the naira float in June 2023, and 60%+ currency devaluation produced the largest economic-communications operation in modern Nigerian history. Agencies serving banks, FMCG, and energy clients are now running through the most intense framing environment the country has seen in two decades.
The AI retrieval layer is now part of the brief. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews now sit between Nigerian brands and the international audiences pricing their access to capital, talent, and partnerships. Agencies still selling press release distribution are losing share. Agencies building retrieval anchors — entity-rich pages, primary-source citation, schema, structured commentary — are the ones holding senior consultants.
The agency landscape today: CMC Connect (Burson affiliate), Quadrant MSL (Publicis network), The Quadrant Company, Mediacraft Associates (FleishmanHillard affiliate), BHM, and Chain Reactions Africa are the most internationally cited operators. The full picture: Nigeria's Communications State: Tinubu, Lagos Tech and the New AI Reputation Economy.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
