Culture as the New Infrastructure: T2Mobile CEO Challenges Brands to Pivot from Campaigns to Conversations
By Azeez Disu
At the 2026 ADVAN African Awards for Marketing Excellence, T2Mobile CEO Obafemi Banigbe declared that traditional marketing is dead, urging brands to embrace culture as the new foundation for engagement. Addressing industry leaders at the MUSON Centre in Lagos while delivering his keynote address, Banigbe challenged companies to shift their focus from one-off campaigns to fostering authentic conversations within the creator-driven culture that now dominates Africa.
Banigbe posited that the historical model of brand dominance where companies controlled the narrative and pushed messages to a passive audience has been “flipped upside down”. He asserted that “marketing as we know it today has changed forever” because control has become fragmented, attention has been decentralised, and influence has been thoroughly democratised. In this new reality, a piece of content created by an individual with a smartphone can achieve higher conversion rates and more significant viral impact than a multi-million-naira agency-led campaign.
Central to Banigbe’s charge was the concept of culture as the “new infrastructure” for brand interaction. He illustrated this shift by citing the example of a young man, his nephew, who used a drone and a smartphone to capture the Ojude Oba Festival, creating a video that garnered millions of views globally and elevated the festival’s status more effectively than any official organisers could. For Banigbe, this proved that “the most powerful marketing today will no longer be created in the boardroom, it is going to be born in culture”.
However, the T2Mobile CEO highlighted a critical disconnect in the Nigerian market: while creativity is abundant, the systems for capturing value are broken. He noted that many creators with millions of views suffer from inconsistent income and a lack of intellectual property protection. Consequently, he challenged brand owners to take on a new responsibility: “We must retain our roles as not just storytellers; we must see ourselves as ecosystem builders”. He urged brands to stop merely sponsoring creators for one-off campaigns and instead build the distribution and monetization infrastructure necessary for the creative industry’s sustainability.
Banigbe concluded by reminding marketing professionals that the modern customer is no longer a passive consumer but a co-creator and an amplifier. “The media is no longer the print newspaper. The media is the people. The media is culture,” he declared. He insisted that the brands poised to win the next decade are those that prioritise the localised creative economy and focus on building genuine communities. In his view, the future of African marketing will not be defined by agencies alone, but by creators powered by platforms and enabled by visionary companies that understand that “culture is the strategy”.