The Exposé Series: Unfiltered with Abayomi Ayoola
Every client sees the finished moment, the lighting, the energy, the content rolling out across timelines the next morning. What they rarely see is what it costs to get there: the sleepless nights, the last-minute chaos absorbed quietly by a team standing just out of frame, the discipline required to keep a brand’s reputation intact when everything on the ground is falling apart.
In this episode, Abayomi takes us behind the scenes of what a “flawless” activation actually demands, and why, more often than not, the audience is applauding a version of events the team lived in very differently.
Q: Do clients tend to underestimate what it actually takes to execute an experience?
Abayomi: Almost every major activation starts this way: an unrealistic expectation, a timeline that is far too frugal. Clients see the beautiful end of it: the lighting, the energy, the post-production. What they don’t see is the interconnectivity behind it, the months of planning compressed into a shorter window, the back-and-forth on budget and brand feedback, and how a single round of revisions can quietly reroute production, procurement and sourcing overnight.
It is like watching a movie on Netflix. The audience judges the film. They never see what happened behind the camera.
Q: What do people not see about what it actually takes to run a successful activation?
Abayomi: The pressure. Insomnia. I have carried some version of that for years now, and I am not alone, nearly every agency MD I know carries the same weight quietly.
Let me give you a scenario. We were set up for an event long before execution was due to start, exactly how we like to be. Then rain came out of nowhere. We scrambled to protect everything, and the rain passed not long after. But the client arrived hours later, saw us still resetting the site, and assumed we hadn’t done anything at all. We were blamed for poor execution for a storm we had already handled before he even arrived.
What the client sees is the request, delivered in whatever tone they choose to use. What they don’t see is the team solving weather issues, managing power failures, handling vendor risk, working with talent that doesn’t always show discipline, redesigning experiences at the very last minute. But at the end of the day, the magic happens, and the agency gets celebrated for it. Behind every piece of magic an audience sees is intense operational discipline and I mean that with every ounce of the word “intense.”
Q: Can you share a moment when an activation almost didn’t go as planned?
Abayomi: The story I just told is one. But here is another layer to it, on a separate occasion, a performer who was meant to take the stage had not been properly briefed by the agency coordinating them. Everything we had planned and rehearsed around that performance simply didn’t materialise the way it was supposed to. It felt like a mirage. But we moved.
That is what this industry demands of you. You plan meticulously, and then you adapt in real time without letting the audience see the seams.
Q: What makes the difference between a campaign people forget and one they still talk about?
Abayomi: People forget your setups. They forget your aesthetics. But they will always remember how the brand made them feel.
The most impactful campaigns are the ones that create a genuine emotional connection between the brand and its audience.
In Nigeria, we spend the bulk of our budgets on facades : the look, the structure, the visual wow. But the core experience, the part that actually moves people? That is where the investment is missing.
Leaner budgets are actually forcing agencies to think more creatively, and I think that is a good thing. At the Chivas Arsenal Watch Party, our screen packed up about five minutes before the event. For a watch party. The irony was not lost on us. But instead of panicking, we played with the lights, reworked the screen content, and got the influencers in the room to turn the moment into something fun. What should have been a disaster became a highlight.
Some things cannot be scripted. And sometimes, a bit of luck helps. But the agencies that win are the ones that know how to pivot without losing the emotion of the moment.
Final thoughts
What comes through clearly in this episode is that the “magic” clients pay for is never the whole story. It’s the visible 10% of a much longer, much harder 90% that happens off-camera, the sleepless nights, the split-second redesigns, the discipline to absorb chaos and still deliver something an audience will remember for the right reasons.
In the next episode, Abayomi walks us through what happens before that magic is even possible: how a single idea makes its way from a client’s brief to a fully realised experience, and just how much can go wrong in between.
Episode 4 is coming soon. Follow Exposé on LinkedIn so you don’t miss it.
