What Jumia, Publicis and Meta Taught Me That No MBA Could

I did not set out to work on three sides of the commercial ecosystem. It was not a career strategy. At each stage, it became clear there was something essential I did not yet understand, and understanding it required being on the other side of the table. ## What the Agency Side Taught Me I spent years on the agency side, working across some of the largest consumer brands on the continent. Publicis Groupe exposed me to the architecture of how big brands build themselves — not the finished product, but the scaffolding. The agency relationship teaches you something business schools rarely make explicit: clients do not always know what they need. They know what they want. The job of the agency, when doing its best work, is to see past the stated problem to the real one. I also learned the limits of the agency relationship. You are always, in the end, a vendor. Your continuity depends on results measured on timelines that often do not reflect the actual dynamics of brand-building. ## What the Platform Side Taught Me Moving to Meta changed everything. Platforms occupy a unique structural position: they know more about the ecosystem than any participant in it. At Meta, I had visibility into how brands were actually performing — not just their own reporting, but relative to competitors and regional benchmarks. I could see the gap between what agencies told clients and what the data showed. Platform-side thinking is fundamentally different from agency thinking. Agencies optimise for the client relationship. Platforms optimise for the ecosystem. The platform perspective is usually the more structurally honest one. ## What the Client Side Taught Me Running commercial operations at Jumia and later leading digital across Aleph SSA was the closest thing to a full education in commercial reality. When you are on the client side, you are the one bearing all the risk and accountability. Suddenly you see that most of the sophistication of the agency and platform worlds is largely irrelevant to the fundamental question every business needs to answer: are we growing, and why or why not? ## The View From All Three Agencies have creativity and process. They lack commercial accountability. Platforms have data and scale. They lack intimacy with specific business challenges. Clients have accountability and context. They often lack outside perspective to see their own patterns clearly. The synthesis of all three is what I bring to the work I do now. Not as a theoretical framework. As twenty years of practical experience. --- ## Let's Talk If what you have read here connects with where your business is right now, I would like to hear from you. I work with a small number of clients at any one time. Email me at [me@martins.com.ng](mailto:me@martins.com.ng) or connect with me on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/stanmartins).