Arrogance can be expensive — Konga vs Jumia part1

Bastian and I were heading on our way to the Konga offices in Yaba. It wasn’t a frequent thing, we had only been there a handful of times. We were trying to figure out how to buy billboards across Lagos as it was proving a challenge, so we needed some guidance from Sim and his marketing team. We used to do this a lot. It’s interesting how unsure of ourselves we were then. Not outwardly, of course. We were IROKO. We were crushing it. But that was to the media. Internally and collectively the general feeling was. We have money. Now WTF do we do? So whenever we had a problem at IROKO, we just reached out to Sim and Shola at Konga. Because those guys had all the answers right?

Back to billboards. The problem was a weird one. A supply issue. There was simply so little inventory around and any that was left just seemed so damn expensive. We were running billboard campaigns in London as part of our annual marketing budget of $600–700k/year. Decent. But for Lagos, it appeared insufficient based on the prices the media agencies were quoting. Our investors were pushing us to deploy capital more aggressively in a big marketing campaign to jumpstart growth of IROKOtv in Nigeria. We thought we were almost there product-wise, but the costs were just crazy. It literally made no sense. Before we got to the Konga offices, one of the media buyers called to let us know that Jumia was about to tie up every billboard in Nigeria so we had better decide that evening. Not tomorrow morning. That evening. Take it or leave it, he was no longer negotiating any bulk discounts. The price was the price. When we got to the office and met Sim, midway through introductions I just dropped that in. His eyes widened. There and then, he paused the greeting. I can’t recall who he called but 2–3 guys bound into the room. ‘Guys, we can’t be run out of our own town. Get me 30 billboards before the end of the day’, before Jumia gets everything locked down. I looked at Bastian, he looked at me. I turned to Sim. ‘Dude, that could’ve been a rumour. That media buyer could’ve just been trying to force me to close’. Sim looked at me. Or it could’ve been the truth. Thanks Jason, thanks for the intel. I can’t let those guys run us out of town.’ We really need to win. He smiled that Sim smile and started walking us through the marketing plans we should consider.

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