Across advertising, entertainment, and digital ecosystems, his work is anchored on a central conviction: marketing today is not about reach alone, but about cultural permanence. In a conversation with Ibrahim Apekhade Yusuf on the evolving nature of branding, he unpacks what it means for brands to move from mere participation in culture to actually becoming part of it.
From visibility to cultural belonging
According to Isiakpona, most brands still operate under the assumption that being present in culture is enough. It is not. Presence, he argues, is passive. Cultural belonging is active—it requires the audience to adopt, repeat, and extend the brand’s expression without prompting or payment.
The difference, he explains, is what he calls “being carried.” A brand that is carried no longer controls distribution; the audience becomes the distributor. In his view, this is the only meaningful measure of whether marketing has truly worked.
Three forces determine whether this happens.
First is truth—specifically, human truth. Not brand aspiration or corporate positioning, but the reality already lived by the audience. Campaigns that fail at this level, he argues, are often built on internal brand fantasies rather than external human insight. The audience immediately recognises the disconnect and disengages.
Second is cultural authority. This is not about celebrity endorsements or influencer reach, but about credibility within a community. Authority, he notes, cannot be purchased; it is earned through alignment with what the audience already respects.
Third is craft. Execution quality signals respect. Sloppy or rushed creative work communicates indifference to the audience, while well-made work invites participation. The campaigns that endure, he suggests, are those the audience is proud to repeat, reference, or reinterpret.
A simple test, he adds, is time: if a phrase, idea, or visual from a campaign still lives in conversations a year later, the work has likely crossed into culture.
Why reach is no longer enough
For decades, marketing success was measured through reach, impressions, and frequency. That logic, Isiakpona argues, belongs to a different attention economy—one where visibility was scarce and expensive.
Today, the opposite is true. Attention is abundant, but meaning is scarce.
He points to three structural shifts behind this change. The first is economic: while the cost of impressions has steadily declined, the cost of actually changing human behaviour has moved in the opposite direction. The gap between “seen” and “influential” has widened significantly.
The second is generational. Younger audiences, particularly across African markets, no longer wait for brands or foreign templates to define culture for them. Instead, they construct and circulate taste in real time, often resisting anything that feels imposed.
The third shift is infrastructural. Culture now spreads less through public feeds and more through private networks—group chats, direct messages, voice notes, screenshots, and closed communities. These spaces, which rarely appear in traditional analytics dashboards, are often where cultural relevance is actually negotiated.
Together, these changes undermine the assumption that visibility equals impact. A campaign can be widely seen and still have no lasting effect.
Truth OS: a framework built around cultural reality
At the centre of The People Company’s approach is a system referred to as Truth OS, which informs work across its ecosystem—including Riques (experience and events), Duolibra (digital marketing and influencer engagement), Flipside Marketing (creative production), and Solv (a freelance platform for the creative economy).
The framework rests on three interconnected principles.
The first is truth as foundation. But not institutional truth—lived truth. In practical terms, this means every idea begins with a grounded understanding of audience reality, not brand ambition. If a campaign cannot be reduced to a simple human truth, it does not proceed.
The second is translation through connection. Truth is not left abstract; it is converted into three outputs: story (what is told), experience (what is felt), and utility (what people can do with it). Each plays a different role, but together they determine whether a campaign becomes memorable or merely visible.
The third is cultural engagement. Rather than relying solely on dashboards and impression metrics, the framework evaluates participation, conversation, adoption, and long-term presence. These signals are less tidy, but closer to how culture actually behaves.
The emphasis, he insists, is not conceptual decoration but operational discipline. If a framework does not change how work is commissioned, produced, and evaluated, it is cosmetic.
What it really means for a brand to be “carried”
The idea of cultural carry, as he describes it, is deliberately practical rather than abstract.
A brand is carried when it begins to operate outside its own marketing channels. It shows up in group conversations unprompted. It becomes meme material without brand involvement. It influences behaviour in measurable ways—purchase decisions, recommendations, or even language adoption. It appears in cultural spaces that were never directly targeted: music, comedy, social gatherings, or everyday conversation.
Importantly, this kind of diffusion is not always expensive. In fact, he notes that some of the most culturally carried products require little to no ongoing promotional spend once they have taken hold.
He points to Afrobeats as an example of organic cultural carry. Its spread across continents is not enforced by advertising but sustained by emotional resonance, community adoption, and repetition in social contexts. The same logic, he argues, applies to brand work at scale.
In contrast, many large campaigns generate temporary visibility but disappear from conversation almost immediately after paid promotion ends. The difference, he suggests, is between being seen and being remembered.
Rethinking relevance in modern marketing
For brands attempting to stay relevant in today’s environment, Isiakpona’s advice is both simple and demanding.
Start with truth before messaging. Many marketing failures, he argues, occur because teams rush to communication before confronting reality. But truth often challenges internal brand narratives, and avoiding that discomfort leads to weak output.
Design for participation, not just consumption. If audiences can only watch a campaign, it is incomplete. The strongest work gives people something to do, repeat, or reinterpret.
Finally, evaluate work over time rather than at launch. Immediate campaign performance is often inflated by paid media. Real impact becomes visible months later, when organic conversation either sustains or disappears.
For him, the ultimate question is not whether a campaign launched successfully, but whether it left anything behind once it ended.
In a landscape saturated with content, the brands that endure, he suggests, will not be those that speak the loudest—but those that become part of how people speak.