By Archibong Jeremiah
The Cross River State Government is making moves to regulate content of adverts as well as review its outdoor exposure rates for next year.
The disclosure was made by the State Signage and Advertisement Agency Director General, Mr. Stanley Nsemo-Livingstone recently where he said his Agency shares part of the blame for the damage of the free public bill boards that were constructed around the state capital, Calabar.
According to him, “Right now we are working with the Advertisers Practitioners Council of Nigeria (APCON) to regulate what you see; we have gone beyond regulation of bill, the board itself which we’ve commenced. We are also trying to regulate the content so that all these messages that you see that are false do not hit the public sector, do not hit the public airwaves”.
Furthermore, he said: “I must confess it’s quite a hectic challenge, we have put ourselves to it and we’ll succeed. Also we are going to the end of the year and we are rounding up our collections and we are realizing that the tariff regime we had last year and early this year are unsustainable because they are very high so we are hoping to start our town halls meeting again. December we will start to ascertain what tariff will be best to allow the government collect comfortably and allow the public grow comfortably”.
His words: “We launched public notice boards and they were destroyed all around where we placed them, so obviously we need to do more. We partly blame ourselves, we’ve learnt a lot of things from that, one the structure, two the frame and we need to educate the public more on usage and three we need to spend more time on monitoring and evaluation of those boards so that as we put them out they don’t get destroyed quickly”.
Concluding he said, “We are learning, we are trying things that have not been tried in Nigeria, free public advertisement has never been done in Nigeria”.
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