Growing up in Nigeria between the late ’90s and early 2000s meant you had a front-row seat to what could, in hindsight, be seen as the nation’s golden age of advertising, in iMax. You can almost feel nostalgia graze your memory as you recall the TV commercials that shaped that era: the Baba Blue’s, MTN's Saka, Milo's clap jingles, even Peak's Papilo.
Nigeria’s advertising golden age was vibrant, and of course beyond just TV.
It lived in the magazines stacked under our uncles’ coffee tables, the pages of dad’s newspapers, and the catchy radio jingles on the way to school. Almost every corporate business, from new-age banks to FMCGs to Telco giants, seemed intent on winning the nation’s attention. And, for a time, the advertising industry held the keys to it.
Those years suggest something worth paying attention to: an industry in Nigeria can seize its moment, dominate public imagination, and shape the tone of business and culture. Advertising had its golden age. Which raises the question: could Nigerian design have its own?
What a golden age might look like
Elsewhere, design has arguably had its golden moment. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what set off the domino effect in the West, but a famous turning point came in 1956 when IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Jr. declared, “Good design is good business” after taking over from his father. He brought in genius designers like Eliot Noyes and Paul Rand to rethink everything, from mainframe consoles to packaging. At the time, IBM was a corporate colossus, pulling in roughly $8 billion in revenue and employing over 270,000 people. Such a bold pivot by a corporate giant gave design a new kind of legitimacy across corporate America.
Then came 1984. Apple launched the Macintosh, and Steve Jobs built the company on the belief that design was more than how things looked, but how they worked, and how they felt. Apple became a poster child for what can happen when design sits at the center of business strategy. Today, the company is worth over $2.8 trillion. Proof, perhaps, that Watson’s was right, and that “good design is good business”.
In both cases, a powerful player placed design at the heart of its business, and the ripple effects from its success reshaped how design was valued. But in Nigeria, design never had that catalytic event, or at least, not at that scale. Till date, no company of relative scale has yet declared, “Design is core to our business” and backed it up in a way that transforms the market. Without that, it’s hard to replicate such success in our own environment.
The miniature golden age we’ve had
This would have remained the status quo indefinitely, if not for the Nigerian tech boom from 2014 onward. The rise of digital products, where good UX was a baseline expectation, created a sudden demand for design talent.
This has created something that could be described as a miniature golden age, but one confined to tech’s sandbox. It’s shown that Nigerian design can flourish locally when the right conditions are in place. But the risk lies in mistaking this smaller, more contained success for a full-scale golden age. After all, a golden age rarely lives inside a box.
The bottleneck that could be holding us back
Breaking out of that sandbox isn’t simply a question of talent or creativity — both are already in abundance. The obstacle seems to be more structural: the power to shape mainstream business still sits largely with a generation that hasn’t always viewed design as central to commercial success.
Unlike the younger generation, where most of today’s design talent sits, this older generation controls much of Nigeria’s wealth, influence, and corporate decision-making. Hence their values still define much of corporate Nigeria: the systems, the tastes, the decision-making metrics. So even when design proves its worth in tech, it still faces gates controlled by people whose mental models were formed long before design entered the conversation. And unless that gap is bridged, design risks staying a subculture rather than a mainstream force. And without mainstream adoption, any golden age would remain out of reach.
What it might take
If Nigerian design is to see its golden age, it may need to do what advertising did in the late ’90s — break into the mainstream, not just as a craft but as a proven driver of business value. It will likely have to speak the language of local commerce, win trust in the boardrooms that still hold the keys, and make its case in terms that resonate with current decision-makers.
We’ve already seen that an industry can move from the margins to the center of national life. We’ve seen global companies turn design into trillion-dollar brand equity. We’ve had our miniature breakthrough inside tech.
And as such, the precedent exists. The proof exists, or at least strong hints of it. The only question left is whether we will create ours.
