As the countdown to the 2026 Marketing Edge National Marketing Stakeholders’ Summit intensifies, Marketing Edge is proud to spotlight one of the most compelling voices confirmed for this year’s panel; Franklin Ozekhome, Executive Vice President, Strategy and Innovation at Chain Reactions Africa.

The summit, scheduled to hold virtually on Wednesday, September 24, 2026, via Zoom, is themed “Cultural Authenticity as Currency: Turning Heritage into Modern Branding and Marketing;” a theme that speaks directly to the body of work Franklin Ozekhome has spent his career building.

Widely recognised as one of Africa’s foremost cultural and brand strategists, Ozekhome brings a rare and distinctive blend of creativity, foresight, and entrepreneurial intelligence to every boardroom and stage he occupies. He is the creator of HumanOS; a proprietary framework for cultural strategy, the co-founder of Maskvrade, a pop culture company, and the founder of Pop Culture Varsity, Africa’s first strategy school dedicated entirely to cultural intelligence. He also pioneered TINK Africa, the continent’s first digital platform for consumer trends and intelligence.

His career spans some of the world’s most prestigious marketing networks; mediaReach OMD, McCann Erickson, Insight Publicis, Leo Burnett, and Digitas, a Publicis Groupe company, where he shaped strategy and innovation for brands including PepsiCo, MTN, Samsung, Visa, Nestlé, Philip Morris, British Airways, Coca-Cola, Jaguar Land Rover, and Promasidor. He also served as Vice President of Marketing and Communications at Vendease, helping scale one of Africa’s fastest-growing foodtech companies before joining Chain Reactions Africa as Executive Vice President in 2025.

At Chain Reactions Africa, Ozekhome’s mandate is bold and expansive; to move the agency beyond siloed discipline and build an integrated ecosystem where strategy, public relations, advertising, design, experiential, digital, data, and AI-driven innovation converge to unlock new opportunities for clients. It is a mandate rooted in the same conviction that drives this year’s summit theme: that culture is not a backdrop for marketing, but its most powerful engine.

Israel Opayemi, Founder and Chief Strategist of Chain Reactions Africa, captured the essence of what Ozekhome brings succinctly. “Franklin brings the cultural intelligence, strategic insight, and creative innovation foresight that will help us design and execute what comes next, where brands move beyond campaign to create platforms, ecosystems, and cultural impacts that influence the world.”

For a summit exploring how African heritage translates into modern brand value and commercial power, Franklin Ozekhome’s presence on the panel is not incidental. It is essential. His life’s work; from TINK Africa’s consumer intelligence platform to Pop Culture Varsity’s strategy school to HuamanOS’s cultural framework, represents exactly the kind of applied, systematic thinking about culture and brand that this year’s summit demands.

The 2026 Marketing Edge National Marketing Stakeholders’ Summit promises to be the defining industry conversation of the year. Franklin Ozekhome will be one of the voices that makes it so.

Registration is open. Join the conversation.