Years ago we ran a promotion for Coca-Cola. Buy a Coke, get airtime. I thought we were running a promotion. I was wrong.
Today it sounds ordinary. At the time it was not. Promotions worked differently then — you collected crown corks, put them in an envelope, and waited weeks. Sometimes months. Then mobile phones changed everything.
Twenty million people took part. Not twenty million interactions. Twenty million people. At the time, Facebook in Nigeria had three and a half million users.
We were nearly six times the size of Facebook. And we were a bottle cap.
But that is not the part that matters. We were not running a promotion. We were helping millions of people adopt a completely new behaviour. The campaign ended. The behaviour remained.
A few years later we were working with Wema Bank. They had a USSD banking service, *945#. Nobody disliked it. Nobody remembered it. And you cannot advertise your way out of a memory problem.
So we built a game show. Except it was not on television — it went out on Facebook Live, every single night, at 9:45pm. Use *945# during the day, and at 9:45 that night you could win ₦90,000, ₦40,000 or ₦5,000.
Nine forty-five. Star nine four five hash. Ninety, forty, five.
I thought we were experimenting with a new platform. Looking back, we were training people to be comfortable banking on a phone — without a branch and without a banker. That behaviour became the foundation for ALAT, Nigeria's first fully digital bank.
We did not run a campaign that led to a bank. We built a behaviour that made a bank possible.
Both projects had the same thing in common. Neither was trying to sell. Both were trying to change behaviour. Which is when it struck me that we have quietly lived through three eras.
The first was marketing products — buy my drink, buy my car. The second was marketing experiences — journeys, communities, loyalty. I think the third is markets themselves: not persuading people to buy, but helping whole markets adopt something new.
Because markets do not emerge by accident. They emerge when enough people take part, and participation does not come from awareness. It comes from removing whatever is stopping people taking part.
There are five things that stop them. Understanding, Access, Trust, Momentum and Coordination. The interesting question is never all five — it is which one is holding this market back right now, because effort spent on the other four is waste.
For decades we built campaigns. Increasingly, we will be asked to build markets.
Campaigns influence decisions. Systems influence behaviour. Markets influence culture.