A 600-word personal story of a time I failed on a brand-related project/campaign.
What do a healthcare crisis in Nigeria with a nonchalant government, a dinosaur brand searching for relevance and brand awareness, and a rave-of-the-moment e-commerce platform all have in common?
The year was 2014, and His Excellency Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan GCFR GCON was the President of Nigeria. I was a social media manager for an employer that was- at the time- arguably the largest stockbroking company in Nigeria. A fall from grace ensued a few months later due to a seemingly weird determination to retain the status quo and robbed them of that title. Words like ‘influencer’, ‘sapa’, ‘sege’, ‘idan”, and “Hilda Baci” also did not yet exist in the subconscious of digitally mobile Nigerians.
Around this time, there was a growing consciousness in the minds of Nigerians about the realities of kidney diseases. Against this backdrop, some people- including my then-boss- came together to create a non-profit platform- which I will codename “FTK” for this article. The campaign was focused on health education, getting the attention of the government and other relevant stakeholders and generating funds to support patients with kidney diseases with trips to a particular Asian country that was popular for health tourism with Nigerians. My employer had enlisted as part of the sponsors alongside other brands who had also tagged along for the ride. We even had some celebrities join in to drive the conversation.
As part of the plan to drum up support and funds for the campaign, a novelty football match would be organised with certain notable players famous for bringing Nigeria glory and national pride at least 20 years ago. Beyond drafting and implementing a social media strategy for this project, driving conversations online and creating content, I would ensure that tickets to this match were sold and the stadium- the appointed venue- was packed. Around this time, organic engagement on Instagram and Facebook was still about 30 per cent and 4 per cent, respectively, which I hoped would be enough to sell some tickets, but as the saying goes- “hope is not a strategy”.
The first challenge quickly reared its head- it soon became apparent to me that organic engagements would not be enough to sell any tickets, and we would need to invest in digital ads. This uncovered the second challenge pretty quickly- as my boss put it, there was no plan or budget to “dash” Facebook any money, and my boss assumed I was incompetent and clueless and, thus, threw out my plans and strategy. Around this time, a particular e-commerce platform was the rave of the moment and particularly popular for deals. This caught my boss's attention, who quickly called them and offered them a deal. My boss prided himself on his ability to make deals with anyone, but in this case- as it would later turn out, he was clearly out of this depth. The e-commerce platform had plenty of analytics and reporting to prove that at least one million eyeballs had seen our tickets for sale, but only TWO tickets were sold altogether. Two things were clear: my plans had failed, and we were less than seventy-two hours before the event. My boss was severely disappointed, and all communication between him and me was broken down, so pitching other ideas to him to salvage the situation was out of the question.
We would eventually sell a few tickets, less than a hundred in total, and here is how we did it- we picked up the phone, called in favours from everyone on our contact list, and begged them to buy our tickets.
The end.
