Creative industry needs marketers —Actor Abeiku Sagoe to universities

VETERAN Ghanaian actor cum producer Abeiku Sagoe is urging tertiary educational institutions in the country to design professional marketing programmes to build professionals for the entertainment sector.

The thespian bemoaned that the creative industry space had not been well projected to the wider community due to a lack of marketers in the space and called for urgent attention and efforts to be made to address the space, starting with educational institutions to train professionals to close the gap.

Mr Sagoe made this submission at the just-ended third Graphic Showbiz hosted in collaboration with Multichoice Ghana in Accra and on the theme Future of Ghana Movie Industry: Bright or Bleak?

According to Mr Sagoe, there was very little interest in the marketing sector of the creative industry, even though it was a viable one and its practitioners could make equal gains when properly explored in addition to changing the fortunes of the entertainment industry.

"There are business schools training marketers. I believe what we can do is go to the university and talk to the authorities to see if they can add the entertainment industry to the training of other professionals.

“Many marketers are coming out, and all they come to do is to advertise tomatoes and rice. We need to introduce our sector to them as a viable area they need to look at and train some of these young ones to take over,” he stated.

According to him, more marketers focusing on the creative industry, particularly the movie industry, would put the sector in the spotlight; a move he said was long overdue.

"I'm convinced more people would get interested in what we are doing and that marketing professionals would profit as a result if we had enough marketers promoting the industry to the outside world."

Meanwhile, the Back Home from Justice producer asserted that Ghana's film industry had seen very little progress over a long period because filmmakers had not made an effort to pull resources to create a powerful industry front.

He suggested filmmakers needed to unite in these challenging times, identify the pressing issues that needed to be resolved, and pool resources to progress the film industry.

“Let us come together and build the industry. We have been in our individual spaces and we have achieved very little; it is difficult doing it alone. It’s like wanting to build a tomato manufacturing factory as an investor. You can’t do the job of the accountant, machine operator, human resource manager, etc. In other industries, they can learn and appreciate that it takes different professionals to come together to make a factory run,” he said.