What a mechanic in Lagos taught me about where value went

A few years ago I bought a car I had wanted for a very long time. Fast, rare in Nigeria, and — if I am honest — the kind of car you enjoy being seen in.

It kept overheating.

There are few things less dignified than standing at the side of the road with the bonnet up, next to a very expensive car that refuses to move.

I took it from workshop to workshop. Nobody could find the problem. The brand was too rare; nobody knew it. Until my brother, who works in the automotive industry, told me there was one man in Lagos who understood this particular marque.

“They call him the guru,” he said.

So I called him, desperate, and described the problem. And before he agreed to even look at the car, he said something that surprised me.

“Ten thousand naira.” Not to fix it. To look at it.

I paid. Of course I paid.

Do you know what the problem was? A washer. Inside the radiator cap. The part was worth almost nothing.

I did not pay him for the washer. I paid him for knowing it was the washer.

And here is the part I keep returning to. Charging me before he touched the car did not offend me, and it did not damage the relationship. It created it. From that day, nobody else has touched that car.

Where the value moved

For years our industry was rewarded for execution. Making the commercial. Building the website. Running the media. Producing the campaign. Today AI can do more of that work than most of us imagined possible even three years ago.

Which is why I do not think marketing is changing because of AI. I think marketing is changing because the problems we are being asked to solve have changed.

Twenty years ago clients asked us how to sell more. Increasingly they ask how to get people investing, how to move customers onto digital banking, how to get drivers to switch to electric or CNG.

Those are not advertising questions. They are adoption questions. And adoption does not start with execution. It starts with diagnosis.

Every one of us has a client who has been to four agencies with the same problem. They do not need another agency that can make things. They need the person who knows which washer.