Producer of Supermom, Sola Fajobi, explores another area of the entertainment industry, CHUX OHAI writes
Judging from the manner in which the
Managing Director of Digital Interactive Media, Sola Fajobi, has been
carrying on in the last few months, it was easy to guess that he might
be cooking up something new – most likely to be another revolutionary
idea or project aimed at further enriching the entertainment industry.
Indeed, in an interview with our
correspondent on Tuesday, Fajobi admitted that – like an egg about to
hatch a chick – in the last six months, he had been busy working on a
plan to transform the entertainment industry in a way that no Nigerian
had ever imagined.
Although he owns two television
stations, runs two annual reality TV shows, three popular drama series
and other content platforms, he is planning alongside a few partners to
inaugurate two new projects in the next two or three weeks.
Describing the planned introduction of
the projects as a turning point for the entertainment industry, Fajobi
gave a hint of what he intends to do. He said, “Imagine that there are
about 180 million Nigerian viewers and most movies produced in Nollywood
are not selling more than 20,000 or 30,000 copies. The ones that are
selling more than such films are either pirated or dumped with others in
DVDs or VCDs and sold in the streets. Most of the money realised from
the sales goes to pirates. Where does it leave the financiers and
producers of the films?
“Also, we found out that in the last
three years a lot of brands have been trying to get involved with
Nollywood and the entertainment industry, but they don’t have the right
data to back them up. I have been involved with a couple of brands that
are very much interested in Nollywood and we held several meetings.
Along the line, we found that most producers cannot even authoritatively
announce what figures that they are selling and be able to prove it.
“It goes beyond claiming that you sell
100,000 copies of a movie. The question is how do you sell 100,000
copies and what channel has helped to sell that number of copies of the
movie? What company printed the DVDs so that we can confirm the actual
figures? And so on. Those were the issues that we looked at and we came
up with a mega distribution company in the entertainment industry that
will look at the physical distribution of DVDs, especially from the
online perspective. It will also look at the international aspect of
distribution.”
To make this happen, Fajobi and his
unnamed partners have established a company, focusing on marketing and
distribution. It is called E-Force – more like Entertainment Force.
Already the team has opened warehouses in different towns and cities. Each of them will serve about 1,000 outlets at once.
“So far, we have set up centres in about
15 locations across the country. In each centre we have a sales manager
and staff, as well as mini vans and motorcycles for the delivery of our
entertainment products every week.We have been on this project for the
past six months. Although the project is estimated to cost N1bn, we have
invested about N500m in it, so far,” he said.
He said that such an ambitious project
had been in the pipeline for the past seven or eight years. But he
needed to wait for the right time to implement.
“Before now, I used to hope that some
people will come from abroad with big money and set up an effective
distribution system in Nigeria. Distribution is such a big deal that
what we are doing now does not even scratch it. To tackle distribution
in Nigeria, you need more than N10bn,” he explained.
To support E-Force, Fajobi has
established another company known as Nollywood Reloaded, which he
described as basically the biggest movie studio in the country.
“Its job is to produce the movies that
we want to sell. Already we have shot about 15 movies. But we were
unable to release them for want of an effective distribution channel. E-Force will come into full operation by the end of August,” he said. Source: Punch
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