Alhaji Abdullahi Abdulrasaq is a big man in Nigeria’s Movie industry. He is one of the leading Movie Marketers in the country. He owns Corporate Pictures, a popular movie marketing company. He is also a Chartered Accountant who runs a flourishing accountancy school in Lagos.
He recently won a Special award at the just concluded 2021 City People Movie Awards held in Lagos.
Below, he takes a birds eye view of the industry and reveals what can be done to move the movie industry ahead.
How has it been so far, being a renowned Film Marketer?
I used to tell people that we are in the entertainment industry and it is an industry that will continue to thrive only that it will come in different methodology which we must all embrace. As far as I am concerned there is still nothing wrong with this industry, the industry is still doing well although some segments might have dropped a little bit as far as I am concerned from my own marketing angle we try to push movies out from 2 to 3 main areas. The first area is our VCD sales and as long as the movie is very good I can assure the VCD will still do better, we only need to put it on the policy of our production. Recently we just sold “President Kuti 1&2’’ and the movie is doing extremely well on VCD that shows that if a movie is good it will still do well. The 2nd segment is the online sales which can come up in the form of YouTube, website and so on. The 3rd segment is television sales so by the time you combine all of these you will still realize that the industry is still doing well.
What has been the staying power for Corporate Pictures?
We try to leverage on what our customers want and we have realised over the years that customers will always go for good production and we try to remain competitive. Anytime we want to distribute a movie we also ensure that it meets the aspiration of our customers. We make the customer our watchword and as much as we satisfy them they keep coming for more and that is why we are still competing in the industry.
How old is Corporate Pictures and has there been any time you wanted to give up?
Corporate Pictures has been in business for almost 3 decades now, maybe at the beginning because it was not working as expected and our customers have remained solidly behind us over the years and they have been our staying power.
What was the attraction going into the movie marketing?
It is basically about the interest I love watching Yoruba movies and that’s how it started. At that time I normally go to Idumota anytime new movies come out so at a point I realized I had a huge stock of videocassettes in my house. I thought about what to do so I decided to turn it into money so I set up a video club and I joined the video club owners Association of Nigeria and I set up a video club at 25 Kayode Street. We started as Video club owners at Onipan with the few stocks we had and started buying more. Later I saw that I was making money and decided to go into movie production and that was how I met the late Alade Awonire, Taiwo Hassan and Akeem Haruna Alhaja Jalingo. We shot 3 movies at a time with them when we released the first one we packaged it, it was a movie by Ajala Jalingo. We distributed that movie through 2 main marketers in Idumota that is Late Charles Tete video and SOS Nigeria Limited. We started gathering experience because we did almost everything like we dubbed the movie, did the jacket and just gave it to the 2 of them to sell for us on a commission basis. So after that, we registered with the association and became a member of the marketing institution in Idumota. That is when we started marketing our own movies ourselves.
Why did you call it Corporate Pictures?
It had to do with the mode of my dressing as of then because anytime I come to Idumota people refer to me as a corporate guy so I decided to make use of it and Almighty Allah blessed the name.
What do you think about the allegations placed on marketers sleeping with female producers and actresses?
It is an allegation that happens all over the world in all industries, giving people conditions before you help them is what I don’t tolerate. If two adults give each other a consensual agreement I don’t have anything against that but I don’t support blackmail. If you go to the educational, banking, medical sectors people get to meet who they like you can always tell the person as long as you did not force it.
How does the advent of social media affect your business?
There is nothing you can do about that, with our type of distribution we manage everything together and it has been going hand in hand. The online business has not affected our VCD line. We have different customers because the customers that will watch movies online will be different from those that watch on VCD. For instance, you cannot ask someone living in Shaki or Ibadan to watch movies on YouTube because they prefer VCD. If the VCD business is not doing well I would not want to invest in it as an accountant.
What is the effect of Cinemas on your business?
Unfortunately, we are yet to go into it, but it is where we plan on going in 2022 because in Corporate Pictures when we want to do something we do it big, so next year we will be very strong in cinema too. That is also another line because customers that will watch in the cinemas are different from those that will watch online or buy VCD.
What makes a good movie before it can be marketable?
For me, any movie that is celebrating nudity, lesbianism, gay relationships and all that might not be accepted by me. at Corporate Pictures we always try to do movies that kids can watch without their parents monitoring them, we have smart kids nowadays and they can watch movies when their parents are not home so if we do movies that are not compliant with their level it will impact negatively with the society in the long run. Whenever we do movies, they are targeted at all age groups so they can pick up one lesson or the other. I advise people going to production to ensure that there would be lessons learnt and the commercial value because when the movie is accepted it translates to more profit for you.
What is your advice to the government in terms of what they can do to help movie marketers?
It is in the area of finance, when I watch Hollywood movies I see the huge money they use in producing these movies. It is not like we can’t produce such movies but we do not have such financial leverage so if the government can come in to support us financially I can assure you we will take the industry to another level that you will be proud of us.
What do you have to say about piracy?
What I say is piracy is there, we cannot eliminate it but what we can do is to reduce it to the nearest minimum. We try to put control in place to ensure that their activities are reduced. Like a movie produced on Monday and it already has a pirated version on Wednesday as we are encoding some people are working on how to decode it. There are some tech gurus that decode what you have encoded so as long as people get the movie at the right time so we battle the pirates because people will prefer to buy the original even though theirs is cheaper because we try to add the cost of production, packaging and all of that but they don’t need all of that.
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