Q&A: Vikas Mehta on Agility, Innovation, and Reinventing Ogilvy Africa for Advertising’s Next Wave in Sub-Saharan Africa

We sat down with Vikas Mehta, Regional CEO of Ogilvy Africa, which covers Sub-Saharan Africa and includes Scanad Uganda, to share his perspective on the sector and the trends redefining how brands communicate with consumers.

There’s a perception in the market that larger agencies lack agility and become disconnected from local realities. What are your thoughts on this sentiment? 

Attaining a large scale is the reality of a few and an ambition of several agencies in our region. Becoming big is a milestone in an organisation’s journey, not their business model. 

For example, if you’re a car company and you need to grow the number of test drives in one dealership in Kampala, you need agency partners with agility. But if you take the same objective to two hundred dealerships across fourteen countries, you need scale. In the old world, small agencies would typically excel at the former and the big ones at the latter. There is a market for all levels of scale across agencies because each one brings different strengths to the table. 

In the world we are headed towards, though, clients require both.

Big marketers and small are under pressure today to deliver results in the short term while building the brand in the long term. National brands have global ambitions. Global brands need to earn relevance in local cultures while maintaining their global brand philosophies. Large brands need personalisation, and small brands need rapid expansion. Scale and agility are no longer mutually exclusive.  

Clients need partners who can deliver agility and scalability simultaneously. We are building the operating model for our Africa network to be agile, at scale. Agility comes from our people and processes, while scale is enabled by our technology infrastructure and processes.

You recently transitioned operations for one of the biggest businesses in Uganda. What’s the plan? 

Additions and reductions to client portfolios are the very nature of our business. It’s a dynamic reality every agency navigates. As you rightly point out, we recently concluded a long-standing and successful partnership with a major telecommunications client. Being a significant account, such a transition naturally affects our operations in Uganda. 

However, it’s important to view these moments within the broader context of our overall business. While one chapter closes, others are simultaneously opening. What hasn’t been widely discussed is the significant upswing of new business wins we’ve experienced in recent months. We’ve secured sizable mandates with clients such as the European Union, Unilever, and Sanlam right here in Uganda. These represent fresh opportunities to apply our expertise and drive growth for diverse sectors in the market.  

Scanad Uganda has always managed a wide and varied roster of clients, providing comprehensive creative, digital, and media services. Last year, we added Scanad Uganda to the Ogilvy Africa Network of agencies, which puts it in a truly unique position. As Scanad Uganda, we are one of the most culturally rooted agency brands in the country with an intimate understanding of consumers and culture. Now, as part of a global network, we gain unparalleled access to world-class tools, advanced technology, and vast category expertise.  

Ogilvy’s ‘borderless’ approach empowers us to demonstrate the agency’s agility in Uganda while leveraging the formidable might of a global network with a deep presence in Africa. This synergy delivers both hyper-local relevance and international best practices. 

What are you offering today that other agencies don’t? 

Currently, there’s a growing impatience sweeping across the region, and rightly so. People are impatient with what has been before, and are impatient to build a different future. Our young people are creative and resourceful, and more people than ever across generations are talking about how and why Africa must take control of its own success. 

It’s exciting, but for many of our clients, it’s scary. Across our industry, too, many say survival in this age of disruption is hinged on competition falling to the wayside, a form of natural selection. For us, we don’t think in terms of competitors. We think about it in terms of the opportunity we have to disrupt ourselves as a sector – ways of thinking, behaving and executing. In the middle of this fight for attention, more people should be thinking harder about how to do the right thing by their clients. 

In the dynamic domain of marketing, we aim to be the most effective growth-hacking engine for our clients. In this context, instinct and experience, while valuable, are no longer sufficient for sustained success. You also need the ability to mine data for precise targeting, social intelligence to grasp cultural nuances, technology platforms enabling mass personalisation, and systems for rapid, consistent deployment. 

We believe the race for relevance is a marathon that now demands the pace of a sprint. Our agency is purpose-built to partner clients who share this ambition, providing brilliant creativity, sophisticated tools and deep cultural insights necessary to win in today’s competitive landscape. 

There are also bigger questions we should be challenging clients and the industry to ask. 

We need to stop treating symptoms and start changing systems. We want to partner for impact with clients and colleagues who share a bold ambition for the region. Here’s my open invitation to clients or any business in the market: bring us the one question that keeps you up at night – the business problem a billboard or a quick digital burst can’t fix; and see how we respond differently from what you’re used to. We want to work with you to unlock the next growth hack. 
This is what we mean when we talk about our Quantum model. We have evolved our entire operating model to do things differently each time, instead of forcing a playbook to fit. And we can do this at scale, every day.  

There’s chatter about exits. What’s changed in your model for retaining and reskilling talent? 

Scanad has long been recognised in Uganda as a premier source of talent, with many of our alumni now holding influential positions across the industry, both in client organisations and peer agencies. 

Transitions are a natural part of any healthy business ecosystem, and we take immense pride in knowing they carry a piece of our culture and continue to shape the industry alongside us. 

This high demand for our talent, while a testament to our quality, sometimes comes at a price. But we continuously invest in future talent, both by nurturing the best local talent for roles within the country and across the region, as well as bringing world-class global expertise to Uganda. The mix of skills is a journey of continuous evolution; some transitions provide an opportunity to bring in newer skill sets vital for the evolving market, while preserving our foundational strengths. 

You’ve adjusted your presence in some markets. Is this affecting cross-border work? 

On the contrary, we have built a thriving network across Sub-Saharan Africa, covering 39 countries through a combination of owned offices and strong affiliates. We review this roster from time to time and evolve the nature of our footprint to best reflect what each market needs. While ownership structures vary due to local regulations or market size, our commitment to clients remains consistent. When they sign with us in any of these countries, we commit to the same high standards expected from Ogilvy or WPP globally. 

Our region does present unique challenges for scaling, given its complexity. However, our parent company’s four-decade presence on the continent is a testament to our unwavering commitment and staying power. Uganda is a critical market for us in East Africa. We are dedicated to evolving our business here to fuel the industry’s evolution, ensuring Ugandan clients have exclusive early access to the best of the marketing world. 

Technology was already changing marketing, and now AI is doing so even faster. How is Scanad Uganda getting ready for it? 

Mar-Tech has been foundational to us for years, building solutions for the region. While creativity remains central to what we do, technology multiplies its impact. We obsess over measurement, moving beyond ‘vanity metrics’ to credible ROI models, accessible as SaaS with our product, Obrio. For lead management, there’s Optimus; for real-time content, FEED; for deep insights, our Insights Engine; and for the creator economy, we have InfluenceO. Each of our clients at Scanad Uganda leverages one or more of these. 

AI is different. It’s not just a new technology; it’s the new backbone for all technologies. AI enables a new way of doing everything. It’s a multiplier of human abilities, not a substitute. Additionally, WPP has built WPP Open, an AI-enabled operating system with major LLMs and AI tools, acting as a new workspace for our people. Launched in Africa this year, our Scanad Uganda team has already achieved an over 80% adoption rate. 

 Across the region, we’ve invested over ten thousand human hours in AI training this year. We are, without doubt, the most AI-ready agency in Uganda and Sub-Saharan Africa.