What a mechanic in Lagos taught me about where value went
Ten thousand naira to look at the car, before he would open the bonnet.
I spent twenty years thinking I was in the marketing business. It took me twenty years to work out I was not. I was in the behaviour change business the whole time.
I have spent most of my career running national campaigns in Nigeria — for Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Diageo, MTN, Wema Bank and others — through Sponge, one of the country's first digital agencies.
The work I am proudest of was never really about selling anything. A Coca-Cola promotion that rewarded people with airtime turned out to be a lesson in how a country adopts a new behaviour. A nightly gameshow tied to a bank's USSD code turned out to be the groundwork for Nigeria's first digital bank. In both cases the campaign ended and the behaviour stayed, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to notice that this was the interesting part.
What changed my mind about the profession was not AI. It was the briefs. Clients stopped asking how to sell more and started asking how to get people investing, how to move customers to digital banking, how to get drivers to switch fuel. Those are adoption questions, not advertising questions, and the honest answer to most of them is that no campaign will fix it.
So I started writing down what does. That work became the Five Constraints of Market Formation, and Sponge became a company built to apply it — which meant separating the people who diagnose problems from the people who profit from the answer.
A discipline, and a company that is the institutional home of it — not the owner of it. Market design has existed in economics for forty years and has two Nobel Prizes behind it, but it has always assumed a market with participants already in it. Nobody has built the equivalent for the question upstream: what allows a market to emerge at all.
That question is not more interesting in Africa than anywhere else. It is just more visible here, because so many of our markets are still being formed. Which is a reasonable definition of an advantage.
Chief Executive of Sponge Media, which makes premium factual programming about Africa's transformation.
Speaks occasionally on market formation, adoption and where the value in marketing has moved. Most recently at the Tanzania Digital & Experience Marketing Summit.
WhatsApp — answered by an assistant, which will say so.
Ten thousand naira to look at the car, before he would open the bonnet.
Two projects I misunderstood at the time.