How Jennifer Barassa built one of Africa's top advertising agencies
Jennifer Barassa, founder of Top Image, explains to Dinfin Mulupi how she started one of Kenya's most successful advertising agencies.
Kenyan-born Jennifer Barassa had a comfortable life working at some of East Africa’s largest corporations, such as Johnson & Johnson and Sterling Health, to name a few. Quitting to launch her own business was the last thing on her mind.
It all started in the mid-1990s. At the time Barassa was group account director at an advertising agency. One of her clients was a major East African brewery company. The brewer was worried about the entry of canned beer into the market, a type of packaging their company was yet to introduce.
Barassa told How we made it in Africa that for Kenyans, who were used to bottled beer at the time, cans seemed classy and was a novelty. Her client was concerned they would lose ground in supermarkets to their competitors who were selling beer in cans.
Barassa advised her client to have merchandisers at outlets to protect its shelf space and to fight off competition. The beer manufacturer needed someone with the skills and expertise to execute this proposal.
Barassa decided to quit her job.
“I wrote my ideas on [a piece of paper] and went to a cyber café where they typed it for me. I spent about 30 shillings (US$0.3) to print and make photocopies and I hit the road. The first place I went to was the brewery company, because I knew they had a need. It was a very easy sale,” she said.
From her less than a dollar investment in 1995, Barassa has built her company, Top Image, to be one of the region’s most successful below-the-line advertising agencies. Below-the-line advertising strategies generally promote products in ways other than through the television, radio and print media.
Growing the business
In those early days, Barassa operated from her living room and had to do everything herself.
She used her network of contacts to land a contract with Standard Chartered bank, which wanted to run a campaign that would help decongest its banking halls and encourage people to use automatic teller machines (ATMs).
Barassa quickly got more contracts because many of her former colleagues worked with companies that needed her services.
“Within one year, my turnover was already one million shillings,” said Barassa.
Barassa needed pushing to go into entrepreneurship. Although her friends and colleagues always encouraged her to venture into business, she was just not ready. Taking that first step in 1995, she said, marked a new beginning.
“It was from there then that the entrepreneurial spirit [in me] was awakened. I started and I have never looked back.”
Surviving in a cut-throat industry
The market has changed significantly since Barassa launched Top Image. Back then, she said, there were only five below-the-line advertising agencies. Today she estimates there are about 60.
“We have fly-by-night agencies [and] briefcase agencies. There is cut-throat competition in the business.”
According to Barassa, Top Image stands out because it is results-oriented and delivers a quality service.
“We are not cheap. I am the Mercedes-Benz of the industry. I am expensive, I charge more than other people charge, but I give you results. I rarely go out to look for business; business comes looking for me,” said Barassa.
Top Image has expanded to Ghana, Uganda, Côte d'Ivoire and Tanzania. The agency is also set to start work in Mali, Rwanda and Ethiopia. Surprisingly, this expansion has been driven by the growth of mobile money in Africa.
Top Image began working with Kenyan operator Safaricom months before the launch of the now hugely successful mobile money transfer service M-Pesa. The agency was tasked with the job of recruiting and training agents about the then new product that would allow people to transfer money via their mobile phones.
Many traders could not take a day off work to be trained and so Barassa introduced a strategy she had used while working at Kodak: training traders over the counter.
"Michael Joseph (former Safaricom CEO) gave us a target of 1,200 agents [over 12 months] and at the end of the year we had brought in over 1,400 agents,” she explained.
Top Image continues to work with Safaricom on the project and has contributed to growing the number of M-Pesa agents from the initial 165 to over 65,000 today.
Thanks to that success, Top Image has been contracted by other companies rolling out mobile money services across the continent, such as MTN, Visa, and Orange.
Outspoken and a go-getter
Barassa added that her personality has contributed to her success in entrepreneurship.
“I am good at my job,” she said. “A lot of women never like to shout about their accolades... If you are good at something, say you are the best and prove it. I am very outspoken. People say I am full of myself. I am very aggressive, I am a go-getter. I will tell you exactly what I feel without shying away. Maybe I also have a lot of confidence, and I don’t apologise for it.”
Some of the challenges Barassa faces include finding suitable employees and dealing with long payment lead times.
“We also have corruption where brand managers and marketing managers collude with people who are willing to give kickbacks. They lock out people like us who are professionals but are not willing to bribe in order to get a campaign project,” she added.
These challenges notwithstanding, Barassa continues to excel in business. Top Image was ranked second in the Kenya Top 100 Mid-Sized Companies survey in 2009. Last year, Barassa was named the East Africa Business Woman of the Year at the All Africa Business Leaders Awards (AABLA).
She urges aspiring entrepreneurs to invest in ideas they are passionate about and surround themselves with positive thinkers.
Entrepreneurship, Barassa said, has taught her to manage her finances well.
“My fear has always been to die poor,” she noted. “I cannot die poor. I have seen people who were so successful and their businesses have gone down and now they are begging and they are so miserable. That has been my fear. I go to work so that I can retire comfortably.”