MAD Conversations

Tecno ran the same phone twice. One campaign got five entries. The other got 200 million impressions. In Episode 5 of The Making, Abeiku takes on Part Six of Rules for the Marketing Communication Executive by Prof. Robert Ebo Hinson & Joel Nettey: Integrated Marketing Communications Strategy. If you've ever sat in a meeting where someone said "we need a TikTok strategy," this on...

You can change your logo, your name, your colours, and still keep every reason people stopped buying from you. In Episode 4 of The Making, Abeiku takes on Part Five of Rules for the Marketing Communication Executive by Prof. Robert Ebo Hinson & Joel Nettey: Branding Strategy, Positioning and Identity Systems. If you've ever sat in a meeting where "rebrand" was pitched as the fix...

The data said the campaign succeeded. The behaviour says otherwise. So what was the campaign actually testing? In Episode 3 of The Making, Abeiku takes on Part Four of Rules for the Marketing Communication Executive by Prof. Robert Ebo Hinson & Joel Nettey: Consumer Insight Development and Data Interpretation. If you've ever watched a campaign hit every metric and still wonder why nothing...

The consumer in your brief is not a real person. They are a clean funnel on a slide. Awareness, consideration, preference, purchase. But that is not how anyone in Accra actually buys anything. In Episode 2 of The Making, Abeiku takes on Parts Two and Three of Rules for the Marketing Communication Executive by Prof. Robert Ebo Hinson and Joel Nettey: Markets, Consumers and Segmentation. If you buil...

How do you make work that doesn't just sell, but stays? That was the question. This is where we start finding the answer. In this episode, I sat with a book written by two people who have spent decades inside the African marketing industry, not studying it from the outside, but building it. Prof. Robert Ebo Hinson and Joel Nettey put 150 rules on paper, so the next generation doesn't hav...

How did a few seconds of sound become decades of memory? That was the question. This is the answer. In eleven episodes, I sat across producers, artists, marketers, regulators, and consumers  each one holding a different piece of the same puzzle. Episode 11 is where I put it together. And here is what I found that none of them said out loud. Ghana doesn't use music in advertising; music is the...

Evans Kwofie has built brands inside some of the most competitive marketing environments in Ghana. From Diageo Ghana where he worked on Star Beer and Guinness, to Kasapreko where he ran marketing for Alomo Bitters, to Unilever, and now as Head of Marketing at Procus Ghana for Kivo, one thread has run through every campaign he has ever built. Music. In this episode of MAD Conversations, Evans break...

Three product-spec jingles. Three failures. Less than five people participated in the last one. And then one decision, to stop selling the phone and start selling the feeling produced 200 million impressions, 5,000 dance entries, and 240% of a sales target. In this episode of MAD Conversations, Awurakua, a marketer with an unlikely foundation in psychology, English, and theatre arts, sits down wit...

The rules of music in advertising have changed. The question is whether brands, agencies, and artists are ready. In this episode of MAD Conversations, Abeiku Dadson sits down with Eli-Daniel Wilson, a digital strategist and marketing leader whose career has taken him from building one of Ghana's first influencer marketing platforms to leading brand strategy across West Africa at Publicis Grou...

The Club Beer Pata Pata jingle has been in Ghanaian living rooms and airwaves for over three decades. It outlasted agencies, survived a legal dispute, was blocked by the FDA, and is still the first thing most Ghanaians think of when someone says the word beer. In this episode of MAD Conversations, Adman and Creative Director, Michael Gordon sits down with Abeiku Dadson to give the most detailed ac...

For five episodes, MAD Conversations has heard from the composers, the producers, the sound engineers, and the regulators. The people who built Ghana’s most iconic jingles and the people who approved or rejected them. This time, we hit to the streets. We stopped real Ghanaians and asked them one question: do you remember the jingle? Most did, some didn’t. And what they said on those streets led us...

Ghana's advertising industry generates billions each year and operates with almost no legal framework to protect brands, agencies, artists, or consumers. In this episode of MAD Conversations, Andrew Ackah, CEO of Dentsu Ghana and President of the Association of Advertisers in Ghana, breaks down everything the industry won't say out loud. The Ghana Advertising Bill that has been stuck sin...

Everyone in Ghana knows the Adonko jingle. Almost nobody knows the man who made it. Dr. Yaw Stone wrote Adonko Fa me kɔ as a love song in 2013, and it flopped. Three years later he received a call, and without a brief, a contract, and a label, he turned it into one of the most recognizable piece of music in Ghanaian advertising history. Then Ghana sang his song everywhere and forgot his face. In t...

Before the ad ends, a note has found you. Not by chance but by design. Behind every jingle that made you hum, buy, or believe, there was an engineer who understood that sound is not decoration, it is a science and strategy. For over four decades, that producer was Mr. Fred Kyei Mensah (Fredyma). 300+ jingles. A career most people experienced without ever knowing his name. In this episode, Abeiku D...

Before the hit record, before the brand anthem, before the ad that makes you stop scrolling, there was someone in a room, shaping every single sound you heard. In this episode, Abeiku Dadson sits down with Roger Ebo Quansah, sound engineer and music producer, to go behind the glass and into the craft that most people never see but everyone is affected by. The mix. The frequency. The silence betwee...

Before jingles, before radio, before television - there was the town crier. In this episode, Abeiku Dadson sits down with Dr. Eyram Fiagbedzi, a musicologist and traditional music scholar to trace the origins of advertising communication in Ghana all the way back to its roots. The gong, the talking drum, the market chant were not just instruments, they were Ghana's first media, Ghana's f...

Before the guests, the case studies, and the deep dives — this is where MAD Conversations begins. Season 1 is dedicated to one question: how has music shaped the way brands speak to Ghanaians? From the earliest radio jingles to the hiplife era to the sounds playing in your earbuds right now, music has always been doing something most marketers never fully understood. In this episode, Abeiku Dadson...