'Innovation has rendered traditional marketing less effective’
Adim Isiakpona, a marketing and brand specialist who has over 17 years’ experience cutting across different verticals of the business ecosystem currently sits atop as Co-Founder/Group CEO of The People
Adim Isiakpona, a marketing and brand specialist who has over 17 years' experience cutting across different verticals of the business ecosystem currently sits atop as Co-Founder/Group CEO of The People Company, Capital Film Productions. In this interview with Ibrahim Apekhade Yusuf he shares interesting insights on the ever-changing world of branding and marketing with the convergence of technology and innovation at the centre of it all. Excerpts:
What does it really take for a brand to become part of culture today?
Becoming part of culture is not the same as being present in culture. Most brands are present. Very few are part of it. The difference is whether the audience picks the brand up and takes it forward without being paid or asked to. We call that “being carried,” and I treat it as the only metric in marketing that actually matters. In my experience, three things decide whether a brand gets carried. The first is the truth. The brand has to start from a real human reality the audience already lives, not from what the brand wishes it could project. The audience can detect the gap between those two within seconds, and they reward the first while ignoring the second. When my team works on a brief, we push back hardest at this stage. If the campaign cannot be reduced to a real human truth in plain language, we do not ship it.
The second is cultural authority, not borrowed celebrity. There is a difference between a creator who has an audience and a creator who has authority within a community. Authority is built on truth the community already recognises. You cannot rent it. The brands that try to buy it cheaply usually become the punchline. The third is craft. Sloppy work tells the audience exactly what the brand thinks of them. The work that gets carried is almost always work that respects the audience enough to be genuinely well-made. A useful test, one year after a campaign ends: is anyone still using a phrase from it? Wearing it? Quoting it? Most marketing fails this test. The work that does not fail is what we mean by being part of culture.
Why do you think traditional marketing metrics like reach are no longer enough?
Reach was useful in a world where attention was scarce. Today, attention is the most abundant commodity on the internet. There is no shortage of impressions. There is a shortage of meaning. Three things broke the traditional model. First, math stopped working at the unit-economics level. The cost of an impression has fallen for over a decade and the floor has not been found. But the cost of changing a single behaviour, which is ultimately the only thing that matters to a brand, has moved in the opposite direction. The two used to track each other. They no longer do. Reach is still measurable. It is just less and less correlated with whether a brand actually moved anyone. Second, the audience changed. Younger consumers, in Africa especially, are not waiting to be told what is cool by brands or by foreign templates of what cool looks like. They build their own taste in public, often in real time. A media plan that assumes a captive audience will get a non-captive audience instead, and a non-captive audience scrolls past anything that arrives shouting. Third, the platforms now reward different signals. The most valuable cultural signals today happen in places that are mostly invisible to traditional measurement. A meaningful share of culturally relevant content travels through group chats, WhatsApp statuses, voice notes, screenshots, and direct messages, not through the open web. None of those signals show up cleanly on a campaign dashboard. They are messier, harder to attribute, and more meaningful, all at once.
There is also a generational story underneath all of this. The marketers who built their careers when reach was the master metric are still in senior seats at most brand organisations. The audiences they are trying to reach are not the audiences they came up with. That gap is closing in some places and widening in others. The brands that close it earliest will define the next decade. The right question is no longer “did the work land?” It is “did the work last?”
Can you expatiate on the “Truth, People, Cultural Engagement” framework?
Yes. We call it Truth OS. It is the operating system The People Company runs on, and the lens we apply to every piece of work across the four businesses in the group: Riques a for experience design and events production, Duolibra for digital marketing and influencer engagement, Flipside Marketing for creative production and design, and Solv, our freelance platform for the creative, marketing and hospitality economy. The framework has three lines. Built on Truth. Every piece of work starts here. Truth is not the truth a brand wants to tell about itself. It is the truth the audience is already living. We define it as a function: people's lived reality, multiplied by insight that extracts meaning, equals Truth. If a campaign cannot be reduced to a real human truth in plain language, we do not ship it. The discipline this enforces is uncomfortable. It kills work that looks beautiful but rests on a false premise. That is the point.
Once you have the Truth, you have to translate it into connection. We use a three-channel link: story (what we say), experience (what we make people feel), and utility (what we help them do). The hierarchy matters. People remember stories. They live with utilities. The brands that get carried are almost always the ones that ship all three. A campaign that has only a story is a flyer. One that has only experience is an event. The integrated three is rare, and it is what we are building toward across every account in the group. Measured by cultural engagement is one area where most marketing teams flinch, because it forces a different scoreboard. We track participation, adoption, conversation, carry-through, and cultural presence. None of these collapsed to a single dashboard number, and that is the point. Reach tells you who saw. Cultural Engagement tells you who took it forward. We still track reach. We just refuse to make decisions based on it alone.
The framework is meant to do real work, not decorate a deck. Its test is whether it changes how the work gets staffed, scoped, made, and judged. If those four do not change, the framework is wallpaper.
In practical terms, what does it mean for a brand to be “carried”?
Carry is operational, not poetic. A brand is carried when the audience does the brand's work for it without being paid or prompted. What that looks like, concretely. A phrase from the campaign shows up in group chats and voice notes a week after the campaign ends. The brand gets referenced in a meme or a post the brand did not commission and did not amplify. A young person changes a behaviour because of the brand: buys differently, spends differently, recommends differently. The brand gets mentioned in a context that has nothing to do with marketing: a wedding speech, a comedy set, a song lyric, a Sunday lunch table. Industry peers and competitors start to use the language the brand introduced. You can feel each of these without measuring them. But you can also track them. The signals we look at include unprompted public mentions, share-through into private channels, search volume on brand-adjacent terms a month after a campaign closes, repeat purchase among first-time buyers, and qualitative reads of sentiment on platforms where the brand has no paid presence. Two reference points beyond any single brand make the idea concrete.
Afrobeats is a culturally carried product. Nobody is paid to play it at a wedding in Lagos, a barbecue in Houston, or a club in London. It travels because it is true to a real human moment, performed with craft, and rewards the people who carry it with social capital. Brand work that gets carried operates by the same logic, just at a different scale.
Nigerian cinema is showing the same dynamic. Through Capital Film Productions, we have backed and produced a slate of Nigerian blockbusters across streaming and theatrical release. The films that travelled, that got carried into conversations far past their release windows, were the ones built on a recognisable human truth and produced with craft. The films that did not travel had bigger marketing budgets in many cases. Carry was uncorrelated with spend.
The opposite of carry is also instructive. Most large campaigns get a wave of paid attention, then disappear from cultural conversation within seventy-two hours. Reach was healthy. Carry was zero. The brand spent meaningfully to be visible for three days.
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The mental shift is from “we ran a campaign” to “we left something behind.” If nothing has been left behind, no carry happened, regardless of what the dashboard says.
What advice would you give brands trying to stay relevant in today's market?
Find the truth before you find the message. Most marketing problems are misdiagnosed at this step. Teams skip ahead to messaging because messaging is what they get paid to deliver. The truth, when you do the work to find it, is often uncomfortable. It contradicts the brand's preferred self-image. Sit with it anyway. Build outward from there. Let people lead, even when it costs you control. The brands getting carried right now are the ones that hand authorship to their communities. That is hard for marketing teams trained to control messages. The trade is real: you give up control and gain reach you could not have bought. The brands that cannot make this trade are dying slowly, regardless of their budgets.
Build for participation, not impression. Ask of every piece of work: what does this give the audience to do? If the answer is “watch it,” the work is undercooked. People do not carry things they cannot participate in. Story alone is not participation. Experience and utility, when designed properly, are. Make the work good enough that it would feel like a loss if it disappeared. This is a craft test. Most marketing today is forgettable in the literal sense: if it disappeared overnight, no one would notice. The work that gets carried tends to be work the audience would feel the loss of. That is a high bar. It is also the only bar that matters.
Then check, six months later, whether anyone is carrying it. Most brands evaluate work in the week of release, when paid amplification is still in market and signals are inflated. The real check happens in month six. Did the language survive? Did the brand association deepen or dilute? Did anyone change their behaviour? If the answer is no, the work did not work, regardless of how it looked at launch. These five are not a framework. They are instructions. Carry is the only metric that matters. The rest of marketing is bookkeeping.
