What Publicis, Jumia and Meta Taught Me

I did not plan to work on three sides of the same table. It was never a career strategy. At each stage I realised there was something I did not yet understand, and the only way to learn it was to sit on the other side. ## The agency side I spent twelve years at Publicis, leaving as Head of Digital Business, working on some of the biggest consumer brands on the continent. Agency life shows you how big brands are built from the inside. The scaffolding nobody outside ever sees. It also teaches something business schools rarely say plainly. An agency at its best sees past the brief to the real problem. And it shows you the limits. However good the work, the agency is a supplier, judged on timelines that rarely match how brands actually grow. ## The client side At Jumia I was the client. As Head of Growth Marketing and Partnerships, reporting to the Managing Director, I managed one of the largest digital advertising budgets in the country and carried the number. Then, as Head of Advertising, I ran the other side of it, selling advertising to the same kind of client I had spent years serving. On the client side you carry the risk and the accountability. You find out quickly that much of what looked sophisticated from the agency and platform seats matters far less than the one question every business has to answer. Are we growing, and why or why not? ## The platform side At Meta I was Agency Partner for Sub-Saharan Africa, working with the agencies and partners that sell Meta across the region. At Aleph I was Regional Meta Director, then Managing Director for West Africa, and in March 2026 I became Managing Director for Sub-Saharan Africa. From there you see the market from the seat with the widest view. A platform sees how brands perform against competitors and against the region, well beyond what any one advertiser or agency reports. That view makes you honest about the gap between what clients are told and what the data shows. An agency is built around the client relationship. A platform is built around the whole ecosystem. ## What all three taught me together Agencies bring creativity and process, and rarely carry commercial accountability. Platforms bring data and scale, and rarely know the detail of any single business. Clients carry the accountability and hold the context, and often cannot see their own patterns from the inside. I have sat in each of those seats. That is what I bring to the work I do now: twenty years of having been the person on the other side of the conversation. --- ## Working Together If this is close to where your business is right now, I would like to hear about it. I work with a small number of clients at a time and I read every message myself. Email [me@martins.com.ng](mailto:me@martins.com.ng), read [how I work](/work-with-me), or connect with me on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/stanmartins).