To mark its 10th anniversary, pan-African creative communications company, X3M Ideas pulled off a 10-week-long celebration.
The events kicked off on June 1 with teaser videos that featured key leaders from within the company such as its Founder and CEO Steve Babaeko; Executive Creative Director, Michael Miller; Senior Strategy Manager, Obaro Obiuwevbi; Deputy Director of Brand Management, Vivian Obiano; General Manager, Southern Africa, Adenike Odutola; Director of HR and Admin, Olasunanmi Atolagbe; and Director of Finance, Folahan Salam.
A content platform created by X3M called Xstream was launched as a potpourri of sports, fashion, games/comedy, and talk shows as well as the sale of NFTs to support mental health causes.
Quite expectedly, the X3M Ideas hosted a challenge tagged ‘Idea Hackathon’, where individuals or teams from across the marketing communications industry identified existing problems relating to the industry and pitched scalable ideas/solutions to combat these problems. Nigerian Digital Strategist, Abiola Waltz Tosin emerged the winner and went home with a one million Naira cash prize.
X3M Ideas’ ten-year journey began on August 1, 2012, when Nigerian music executive and creative director, Steve Babaeko decided to help businesses cut through the clutter in marketing communications.
His deep consumer insight is traceable to his 23-year-old advertising career starting from various leading advertising firms such as Mc&A Saatchi & Saatchi and later, Prima Garnet Ogilvy. The Theatre Arts graduate then set the stage for a new chapter in his career in advertising.
For this, X3M Ideas was born. To find the ‘X’, the agency would identify the business problem from the consumer’s perspective, identify white spaces within the context of the market and competitors and then probe a brand’s genetic makeup to discover the intrinsic elements true to the brand to secure the brand constant. From being an indigenous grown advertising agency, X3M has since grown to become a Pan-African brand, securing offices in Kenya, Congo Brazzaville South Africa and Zambia. The company also recently opened up in the Middle East with operations in Dubai.
Raheem Akingbolu, a Senior Correspondent at THISDAY Newspapers with a speciality in brands and marketing, wrote glowingly about X3M’s performance in the past year which amounts to a testimonial in resilience, sating,
“In 2021, X3M Ideas didn’t only grow stronger but won new clients as well as ticking all the right boxes. The agency also consolidated its reputation as the emerging creative powerhouse on the African continent with the quality of pan-African campaigns becoming the first agency outside South Africa to pull off such a feat.”
Reflecting on the 10-year journey replete with dogged ambition and unparalleled insights into African markets, the Founder and CEO, Steve Babaeko says:
“Our journey of success in the first ten years has been a rollercoaster of hard work, resilience and reinvention. As we open new chapters in our corporate existence and symbolise this celebration with a new logo, we are determined to keep pushing forward the floodgate of future possibilities to help brands of the future find their X.’’