Highest revenue in six months: How Bukayo Ewuoso turned dormant accounts into active ones at Eskimi

You have accounts that used to spend and stopped. Before you write them off, read how Bukayo Ewuoso approached the same problem.

The hardest accounts to recover aren’t the ones that said no. They’re the ones that said yes, spent money, saw your platform work and then went quiet anyway. Most people leave them there. Bukayo Ewuoso didn’t.

When the opportunity at Eskimi came up, Bukayo didn’t see himself as a salesperson. He was a marketer. He understood brands, positioning, and how campaigns were supposed to work. The commercial side of the business — account management, revenue targets, client retention — felt like a different job.

He took it anyway, because what he actually wanted was to understand how the business side of things works from the inside. The sales role was the fastest way in.

Eskimi is a global AdTech platform serving over 2.5 billion users with a strong presence in emerging markets. The product sits in the programmatic advertising stack — the infrastructure that decides, in milliseconds, which ad a person sees on which website or app, and at what price. It is not a simple sell. Most marketing teams at Nigerian enterprises had a surface-level understanding of digital advertising and a deep familiarity with Meta and Google. Programmatic was something else. Explaining it was part of the job.

Within six months, Bukayo was helping drive the highest revenue the business development team had seen. He had done it not by closing new logos, but by going back to accounts that had gone quiet and giving them a reason to spend again.

“I knew I didn’t like sales. But I also knew I needed to understand how the platform worked from the inside. That was the trade.”

This is an edition about what it takes to sell a product that most buyers don’t fully understand, in a market that is still figuring out what programmatic advertising (or a relatively new product) can do for them.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length, clarity, and flow.

In 2020, you got into a sales role without a sales background. What was the actual draw?

I wasn’t looking for a sales role, honestly. What I wanted was to understand AdTech from the inside: how the platform worked, how it was built, how it reached people. Marketing had always been my lane, but I realised I didn’t fully understand the infrastructure behind the ads I was running and recommending.

Eskimi gave me a way in. And I told myself: even if I don’t love the sales part, I’ll learn everything I can about how this product actually works. That ended up being the thing that made me useful, because I could explain it in ways that made sense to buyers.

What did it look like when you got there?

I inherited accounts with two conditions. Active ones, where a client is already spending, and you just have to keep it going. And dormant ones where the relationship exists on paper but nobody’s been talking, and nobody’s been spending.

The dormant accounts were the more interesting problem. These were brands that had been on the platform, understood roughly what it did, but had stopped. The question was: why? And what would it take to bring them back?

How did you approach the dormant accounts?

I didn’t wait for them to come to me with a brief. I went in with something already built.

I took about 5-7 brands. I looked at what each brand was doing in the market — their online campaigns and messaging, their objectives, what they were trying to get people to do — and then build a proactive proposal that showed how our platform could do it better. It was not a slide deck explaining features but an actual working concept.

For example, “we see you’re doing X & Y, here’s how you can use our platform to achieve this.”

I remember creating a rich/interactive banner, instead of a static ad, for the brands to give users an opportunity to engage with the products.

Here’s an example: I designed a rich media ad where users could actually customise their noodles based on different flavours and ingredients. Then I took that concept to our developers and got it built. Showed up to the client not with a pitch, but with something they could see and interact with.

That’s what brought three or four of those accounts back to spending. Indomie was one of them.

That’s a lot of extra work for accounts that weren’t even active yet. Why do it that way?

Because a proposal is easy to say no to. Something built is harder to ignore.

These clients weren’t uninterested in the platform. They’d used it before. What they needed was a reason to believe it was worth allocating budget again and a specific reason, not a general one. When you show someone exactly how their brand could show up, using their product and their customers, it becomes a real conversation. Not a vendor pitch.

What did selling to enterprise buyers like MTN or Coca-Cola actually teach you about how Nigerian marketing teams make decisions?

The first thing is that reach matters enormously. These are brands trying to get to millions of people across a market with all kinds of infrastructure variations. When we could show them we could reach over 50 million Nigerians users on our network, outside of what Google or Meta could offer, that opened the conversation. Back then, the reach for Facebook was about 30 million, Snapchat was a lot less, and X (Twitter) was about 3 million.

But reach is just the entry point. The real question is always: of those 50 million people, how many are the right ones? That’s where targeting came in. We could get granular on behaviour, interest, device, narrowing it down to the exact profile a client needed. That’s what made the pitch credible.

Using rich media (interactive ads) was also an edge for us in a world that had ad fatigue and blindness. We once ran a campaign for Schweppes where people could make their own cocktail by mixing different ingredients. This was creative and captured people’s attention.

The brands that struggled with programmatic were usually the ones that hadn’t defined what success looked like before we started. So part of the job was helping them do that first.

Campaigns don’t always perform. What happened when they aren’t?

The worst thing you can do is wait for the client to notice. By then, you’re already in a defensive conversation.

What I did was track pacing weekly. If a campaign was supposed to hit a certain number of impressions or a certain cost metric by week two, and it wasn’t there, I would flag it before the client asked. Here’s where we are, here’s where we should be, here’s what we’re adjusting. That communication is what keeps a client. Because they know you’re watching it as closely as they are. After the campaign, it’s also important to share recommendations for the next one.

The tension that came up was around outcomes that were harder to attribute directly. You can drive someone to a page. You can’t always drive them to purchase. That’s a real conversation to have, honestly, and the clients who lasted were the ones who understood that distinction and planned their campaigns around it.

What’s the hardest thing to get an enterprise buyer to believe about programmatic advertising?

That the impressions mean something. There’s a lot of scepticism — reasonable scepticism — about whether digital advertising in Nigeria actually works the way the pitch says it does. Viewability, ad fraud, and whether the right person actually saw it.

The answer isn’t to argue. It’s to bring the data they care about, in a format that connects to their actual KPIs. That’s different for a telecom than it is for an FMCG. You have to know the difference before you walk in.