Elected President of the Angolan Association of Advertising and Marketing Companies (APM) in June of this year, Cláudio Chocolate assumes the leadership of the association with a programme based on ten concrete deliverables, from training to institutional representation, as well as professional ethics and the monitoring of public procurement. An advertising professional and director by training, Cláudio brings to the role an insight into the sector also shaped from the production side: he understands commercial pressures, budget constraints, and the gap that still separates Angola's creative potential from the consistent industry he aims to build.
Ten deliverables to turn potential into an industry
Upon taking office, Cláudio Chocolate defined as his core objective that “every member should experience, in practice, the value of belonging to APM”, a statement that sums up the rationale of his entire term. The ten announced deliverables range from training and promoting member companies to institutional representation and access to business opportunities, including instruments as varied as a new digital platform, the APM Academy, a Code of Ethics, and mechanisms to monitor public procurement and better understand the market.
“The mission of the Angolan Association of Advertising and Marketing Companies (APM) is to represent companies and contribute to organising, professionalising, and enhancing the value of the advertising and marketing industry in Angola. We need an organised voice before institutions and an association that is also useful in the day-to-day operations of businesses.” Cláudio Chocolate, President of APM.
The ambition is not limited to the association's internal scope: the programme also plans to create conditions for a collective presence of Angolan companies at major trade fairs, such as FILDA, and at specialised industry events, like FESTIPUB. “I would like to leave behind a more organised, participatory association capable of delivering continuous results”, states Chocolate. “The hallmark of this board must be fulfilling the commitments it made.”
His assessment of the sector upon taking office is, in his words, that of an industry with raw material but lacking the full structure needed to harness it. “We have talent, and companies with the capacity and will to do better”, he explains, adding that “the challenge is to create conditions to transform this potential into a more consistent and competitive industry”. To this end, he considers it urgent to “improve training, value specialised work, and make commercial relationships more balanced”, particularly because, he stresses, procurement criteria and adequate service remuneration “have direct consequences on companies' ability to invest and develop people”.
This lack of structured information about the sector is also, according to APM's new president, an obstacle in itself, and that is what the association's programme intends to begin addressing through an “Annual Communication Industry Report”, which will be designed to “help understand difficulties, identify trends, and substantiate decisions”.
An association to organise diverse interests
When asked about APM's mission in a transforming market, Chocolate is straightforward: “to represent companies and contribute to organising, professionalising, and enhancing the value of the advertising and marketing industry in Angola”. This mission implies, he explains, bringing together very different activities—agencies, production companies, outdoor advertising operators, market research firms, and other specialised services—around shared interests. “We need an organised voice before institutions and an association that is also useful in the day-to-day operations of businesses,” he says.
Today, APM brings together more than 60 member companies across different areas of advertising, marketing, and communication. Expanding this base is one of the goals of his term, and, according to Cláudio Chocolate, this involves demonstrating concrete value: the association's new digital platform includes a company directory, listings of tenders and opportunities, and the APM Showcase, dedicated to promoting projects, campaigns, and success stories from the members themselves. The programme also includes partnerships for access to specialised services on preferential terms. “The best way to attract and retain members is to demonstrate utility: helping companies gain visibility, develop skills, and find growth opportunities,” he summarizes.
Regulation, licensing, and the barriers weighing on the market
On the regulatory front, the executive argues that the legal framework for Angolan advertising activity “must keep pace with the sector's evolution and offer greater clarity to those investing and working in the industry”. APM's programme includes an organised participation in the debate on the revision of the Advertising Law and the inclusion of digital advertising in the legislation, through direct dialogue with ministries, regulators, and other bodies. “We want clear, enforceable rules capable of promoting accountability and fair competition,” he says.
Regarding the advertising licensing reform, an issue that has recently been on the sector's agenda, the association's stance is supportive. “APM is in favour of simplifying procedures and clarifying rules,” says the president, adding that the expected impact is “greater predictability and better conditions for carrying out business”, although this outcome depends, he admits, both on the rules themselves and on how they will be enforced by the competent authorities.
Regarding the main barriers to the healthy development of the market, Cláudio Chocolate points to a structural problem that runs through much of the discussion: the devaluation of specialised work. “When price becomes virtually the only selection criterion, strategy, creativity, and execution capability are devalued,” he states, a dynamic that, in his view, ultimately limits companies' own investment in their teams and production resources. To tackle this issue, APM's programme includes a Public Procurement Observatory, designed to monitor tenders, inform members, and support reasoned interventions whenever necessary. “We need clear criteria and commercial relationships that allow companies to work with quality and sustainability,” he concludes.
“We have talent, and companies with the capacity and will to do better. The challenge is to create conditions to transform this potential into a more consistent and competitive industry. To this end, we need to improve training, value specialised work, and make commercial relationships more balanced.” Cláudio Chocolate, President of APM
Ethics, competition, and the APM Seal
Professionalising the sector also involves, according to the official, more formal work on ethics and best practices. One of the mandate's deliverables is precisely the creation of a Code of Ethics and Conduct and an APM Seal, featuring voluntary adherence and an annual certification process whose criteria the association will still have to define clearly. The issues this tool aims to address are concrete: “respect for creative work, commercial transparency, responsibility for produced messages, and compliance with commitments to clients, professionals, and suppliers,” he lists. For the Seal to have credibility, he insists, it must be tied “to understandable commitments and consistent procedures,” and training alongside debate among members will, he believes, be equally important so that best practices become part of companies' daily operations.
Regarding unfair competition and informality, Cláudio Chocolate seeks a balance. He maintains that the market “must provide space for new professionals and small businesses,” but also ensure balanced conditions for those who meet obligations and invest in teams and production capacity. In his view, APM can contribute through member guidance, the promotion of best practices, and dialogue with the relevant authorities, with the Code of Ethics and the Public Procurement Observatory being the instruments the board wants to develop to support this work. Any intervention by the association, he stresses, “must be based on facts, especially when potential irregularities are at stake.”
Angolan creativity: talent lacking structure
As an advertising professional and director, Cláudio Chocolate has his own take on the creative level of advertising produced in Angola compared to other African and Portuguese-speaking markets, and is essentially optimistic about the available raw material. “We have stories, cultural references, humour, and forms of expression that can bring tremendous strength to our advertising,” he states. “We need to better explore this wealth and work on it with high standards,” he notes.
However, the advertising executive rejects simplistic comparisons with other markets without considering the conditions under which local production takes place, such as training, budgets, work continuity, and exposure to international references. “Talent needs a structure that allows it to develop,” he emphasises. Speaking as a director, he adds that a good idea relies on several skill sets to properly reach the audience, requiring investment across that entire chain, as well as more opportunities for Angolan work to be showcased, evaluated, and compared against that of other professionals.
It is also to bridge this structural gap that the APM Academy was created, which he describes as one of the programme's main responses, providing an ongoing offering of workshops, masterclasses, mentoring, and technical sessions tailored to the specific needs of businesses and professionals. The association's internationalisation programme is expected to reinforce this training through partnerships with peer associations and exchanges with markets such as Portugal, Brazil, Mozambique, and Cape Verde. Yet Cláudio Chocolate is clear about the limits of what the association can achieve on its own: “retaining talent requires career prospects, adequate remuneration, and opportunities to work on demanding projects”. The association can bring people, knowledge, and opportunities together, he says, but companies themselves need the economic conditions to invest in their teams: “training and business sustainability are directly linked”.
Advertising expenditure: rigor before numbers
Asked about the evolution of advertising spending in Angola, Cláudio Chocolate takes a deliberately cautious stance. As he explains, it is MINTTICS, through the National Advertising Directorate, that gathers the most reliable data on the subject, in a collection process in which APM has collaborated. Since this involves corporate data with a high degree of confidentiality that is not widely available to the public, Chocolate prefers not to put forward figures or growth rates “without a consolidated and authorised baseline for disclosure”.
“I would like to leave behind a more organised, participatory association capable of delivering continuous results. The hallmark of this board must be fulfilling the commitments it made.” Cláudio Chocolate, President of APM.
This does not stop him from sharing a qualitative reading of the market. In his view, digital channels, content production, and the growing demand for measurable results should continue to influence advertiser decisions, although this shift in budget allocation does not, in itself, allow one to conclude whether the market is expanding or contracting. It is also to bridge this knowledge gap that the association plans to develop the aforementioned Annual Communication Industry Report, always, he assures, “respecting the confidentiality of corporate information”.
Advertising, country brand, and the place of artificial intelligence
For Cláudio Chocolate, Angolan advertising plays a role that transcends the immediate commercial goals of brands: it contributes, he argues, to building the country's own reputation. “Angola's reputation is also built through the experience that every person, Angolan or not, has with its brands, companies, products, and cultural expressions,” he states. Every communication piece circulating inside and outside Angola conveys, according to him, an idea about the capability, identity, and quality that the country can deliver, which is why he insists that the real experience delivered by products and services must match the promise made by advertising.
On the topic of artificial intelligence, Cláudio Chocolate avoids both uncritical enthusiasm and resistance. He describes the sector's adaptation as something that “happens at different paces”, with professionals and companies already integrating these tools into daily work, while others are still trying to understand how to use them. His own take is pragmatic: AI “can support research, speed up tasks, and expand production possibilities,” but this simultaneously heightens the importance of knowing how to define strategy, understand the cultural context, and assess the quality of the final output. That is also why the training planned at the APM Academy will track this technological transition, alongside a discussion that the executive considers necessary regarding rights, client data protection, and accountability for generated content. “Technology creates possibilities, but professional judgement is still required to decide what to communicate and how to do it,” he summarizes.
An agenda to outlast the term
Cláudio Chocolate's ultimate ambition for APM is, in his own words, one of continuity rather than rupture. He wants the association to have “a regular and useful presence in the life of companies”, supported by a concrete agenda already outlined by the ten deliverables (training, visibility, market information, ethics, commercial opportunities, and institutional representation). The programme also includes an events calendar, featuring a major annual gathering and debate forums that bring sector professionals together and allow them to discuss their challenges consistently rather than episodically.
For the industry as a whole, Chocolate's ambition is “more sustainable companies, better prepared professionals, and greater capacity to compete inside and outside Angola”. And he leaves a phrase that captures the essence of his leadership: “I would like this mandate to leave behind instruments that continue to serve members long after us. That is the point of strengthening an association: building collective capacity that lasts,” he concludes.
