Desmond Olabisi, founder and chief executive officer of Cogent and Poise Limited, says the marketing industry must stop chasing numbers and start chasing meaning. Speaking at the Brand Handlers Summit and Award 2.0, he said the real challenge for brands today is not visibility alone, but connection.

“The game is not reach anymore, it is resonance,” he said. “It is more of relevance and also the feeling that these youths have.”

For Olabisi, that shift is crucial because African youth are no longer passive consumers. They are active, critical and selective, and they expect brands to understand their world.

“If we are talking about culture itself, the culture we are talking about is not the deep traditional culture,” he said. “It is what these youths are doing day by day and what they are going through in their lives. That is exactly what the brand needs to participate in.”

He argued that marketers must look beyond broad demographic numbers and begin to understand what young consumers truly care about. While Africa’s youth population remains a major strength, he said brands cannot win with statistics alone. “What we are really fighting here,” he said, “is relevance.”

Olabisi also challenged the obsession with large influencers and high follower counts. According to him, a creator with a smaller but more engaged audience can be more valuable than a celebrity with millions of passive followers.

“If an influencer has two million followers that are passive, there will be reach, there will be awareness,” he said. “But how many people participate in that product? If you get a creator who has just fifty thousand followers, and those followers are people who share the same kind of life, you are very sure that most of them would get that product.”

His point, he said, is simple: trust matters more than size. “This is because the creator is living the life of the followers,” he said. “They are so close.”

He added that brands must stop thinking only in terms of impressions and start thinking in terms of participation and action. “You are not talking about reach or impressions anymore,” he said. “Now you are talking about voucher cards, swipe-ups, click-ons. You are talking about how these creators themselves would be able to get these followers to make sure they are using a brand.”

For Olabisi, this is also where monetisation comes in. He said the creator economy should not be treated as a side conversation, but as a serious business model that benefits both brands and young people. “You have to monetize that creator economy,” he said. “You have to make them feel that they are going to make something out of it.”

He also warned that young audiences are harder to impress and quicker to scrutinise. “Youth scrutinize virtually everything they want to get into right now,” he said. “If they are about to go for your brand, they would scrutinize it, and it is that brand that stands the test of scrutiny that will stand out.”

For him, the message to brands is clear: stop chasing attention alone. “The brand that recognizes this,” he said, “is the brand that would succeed.”