Tolulope Ogunkoya, one of the finest and compassionate brains in the Nigerian marketing communications ecosystem, has departed this world to join his ancestors. Tolu passed on in the United Kingdom last month.
Before his demise, Ogunkoya was the managing director and chief executive officer of Media Reach OMD as well as the regional managing director of Omnicom Media Group WeCa with offices in Lagos, Accra and Cameroon, and partner offices in three other locations across West and Central Africa, overseeing two media companies - MediaReach OMD and PHD Media.
His illustrious career started at Insight Grey (now Insight Publicis) in 1990 as a trainee management executive, and he later moved to SO&U Saatchi & Saatchi. With the emergence of media independence as a stand-alone agency from media departments of advertising agencies, Tolu moved to head Media Reach as one of early staff. He subsequently became the managing director and nurtured the media specialist agency to become a behemoth in media specialist services in 1999.
Tolu was the president of the Media Independents Practitioners Association of Nigeria (MIPAN), the body that has all leading media agencies operating in Nigeria registered in its fold. His tenure as the president of MIPAN was very eventful as the association witnessed remarkable transformation in many facets, including organizing training programmes to upgrade the skills-set of practitioners in the ecosystem.
In recognition of his outstanding contributions to the advertising industry as a player, education resource person, etc, Tolu was elevated to the highest grade of professionalism in advertising in this country, inducted as a Fellow Registered Practitioner in Advertising (frpa) by the industry’s regulatory body APCON (Now ARCON).
He has also served as a resource person on many of APCON & MIPAN’s training programs. He was a member of the Institute of Directors (IoD) Nigeria.
He had in the last 27 years been on several executive education programs including Ashridge in the United Kingdom where he had his post graduate studies in general management and the AMP program at the Lagos Business School (LBS). He also had a Bachelor of Science (Honors) degree in Political Science from the University of Ilorin in 1988.
Says Vincent Oyo, his former boss when he joined Insight in 1990:
“Tolu provided value and leadership with the publication of Media Facts across Nigeria and West Africa that advertisers and media agencies found invaluable. And so five years ago, as the sustainable growth of the industry worried him, he found an answer in the setting up of an academy for the training of specialists for the efficient and effective deployment of media budgets - the Alphabet Media Academy.
“Tolu was always innately kind and it wasn’t a virtue that the cruelty of the corporate business world that sometimes required you to deploy the killer instinct, could easily diminish. He lived and ran the two worlds successfully. From both ends of his staffing spectrum Tolu ran his organisation with thoroughness and compassion. I find it inappropriate to detail out specific examples of such internal acts of kindness and compassion and would rather keep them private and personal but suffice it to say that they abound and are quite touching. Media Reach runs a crèche for its staff and before COVID-19 pandemic, core staff already had the option of a day off once a week to work from home.”
Tolu’s transition would definitely create a vacuum and the industry would miss him greatly. Farewell, Tolu.
