The Terrain.

By the Terrain desk. We have been here before. Nigerian regulators often move on the same ground without talking to each other, and businesses in the middle end up answering to two rulebooks that don't agree. Picture a child whose parents have separated and who is told to choose. Pick Dad and Mum is upset. Pick Mum and Dad is upset. Nobody wins, and the child ends up losing on both ends. The FCCPC's draft did not fall from the sky. For months, Nigerian regulators have been closing in on online promotions and ads from several directions at once. This year, ARCON, the Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria, has intensified enforcement of its pre-exposure vetting rule and stretched it to cover social media, influencer posts, sponsored content and even "unboxing"-style content. Fines of ₦1 million to ₦3 million per violation have landed on SMEs and agencies for unvetted Instagram and Facebook ads. The Advertisers Association of Nigeria (ADVAN) is not thrilled and has complained in an…

By the Terrain desk. It’s easy to blame creators when a marketing deal goes sideways. We’ve all heard the complaints about high prices, inflated metrics, or missed deadlines. But the real breakdown usually happens before any of that. It starts when brands and creators skip the most critical step: defining a clear strategy and setting actionable goals together. When we fix the foundation, everyone wins. Why the trend of Influencers Grew A decade ago, an influencer was just a person with a smartphone and a crowd. Today, that crowd moves billions, and money moves faster than the industry’s maturity. Nigeria’s influencer market has…

By the Terrain desk. For a decade, Nigerian business treated Instagram as the door into the market. It was the display window for the 10 million who had already arrived, while the rest of the country built a room of its own on TikTok, where nobody needs to know your name before you can be found. For about ten years, Nigerian businesses ran on a shared belief about Instagram, and almost nobody said it out loud because nobody needed to. Instagram was the market. If you wanted customers, you opened a page. If you wanted to be taken seriously, you made the page look like a real business, with a logo, a matching grid, and a shoot. If you had money, you paid an influencer to post you. The whole apparatus of Nigerian marketing- the agencies, the content houses, the influencer price lists, the "grow your page" courses- was built on the idea that the door into the Nigerian market had an Instagram logo on it, and that discovery, the moment a stranger first finds you, happened there. That is what we thought Instagram was. It is worth being honest about what it was actually meant to be, and what…

By the Terrain desk. The same companies laying off staff and citing AI are also the ones telling investors business is getting better. That is not a coincidence you should let slide. On 1 September, The Financial Times told the market that WPP intends to cut up to 1,000 more jobs by the end of the year. That adds to about 11,000 roles already removed since the start of 2025, bringing headcount to 97,388 as of 30 June. That same week, chief executive Cindy Rose told reporters WPP’s new business win rate had jumped compared to last year, highlighting retained clients like Huawei, Tesco and L’Oréal. Read that again. A company claiming to win more work is still letting a thousand more people go. That detail is the one almost everyone overlooked. Most coverage brushed off the cuts as routine cost-saving. But for agency leaders, this is not just another statistic; it is a test of vision: What kind of pressure drives a company to shrink its team while it is winning, not losing? What bold moves…

By the Terrain desk. In the UK, a business needs nobody's permission to run an ad, because the regulator says checking them all first would be impossible. South Africa is the same. Kenya asks up front only on gambling. In Nigeria every ad aimed at Nigerians is supposed to be approved before it runs, your boosted post included, and ARCON has built the enforcement without building a way in. Half the world is rewriting its advertising rules at the moment, and reading the drafts next to each other, what stands out is how little anybody argues about the order of operations. Start with the question a business actually asks, which is what…

By the Terrain desk. The data we have been presented with tells us Instagram is shrinking in Nigeria. But read properly, it says something quite different to what the industry has spent this year repeating, including me, who had come to the same conclusion. Almost every media plan, agency recommendation and confident post about Nigerian social media traces back to one document. It is called Digital 2026: Nigeria , put together by DataReportal with We Are Social and Meltwater, and for most people it is the only comprehensive free source that exists. It is free, it is sitting there, and you can open it in about a minute. Which means an entire industry is reading off a single sheet of paper. That is worth sitting with before we even get to what it says. Here is what it says. TikTok reaches 47.8 million Nigerian adults . Facebook 38 million. YouTube 30.5 million. Snapchat 23 million. LinkedIn 13 million. Instagram 10 million. X just under 7 million. Year on year, TikTok is up 43.4 percent, Snapchat up 30.2 percent, LinkedIn up 18.2 percent, YouTube up 13 percent, Facebook up 6.9 percent.…