If part one of MadMen, Dreamers and Deal-Makers was about how Uganda’s advertising giants stumbled into the industry, this part, which is precisely part two, reminds you of what happened after they got in, and what it feels like to keep the machine running now that the fuel is running out.
There was a time when this business felt almost decadent. Retainers were thick. Media commissions flowed. A small set of agencies handled a small set of giant brands, and the money felt endless.
Today, many of those same people sit behind the same desks, staring at three-page scopes and retainers that can barely pay for one decent photographer.
They lead teams younger and more outspoken than they ever were. They negotiate more with procurement than marketing. They still love the work. But love has become expensive.
This is a story about that pain; about broken retainers, shrinking budgets, and the long, stubborn fight to hold on to value and ethics in an industry that often seems determined to give both away.
When the machine was fat and loud
Talk to Daniel Ligyalingi, co-founder of Maad McCann, or Adris Kamuli, its managing director, and their faces change when they describe the early years. Their eyes return to a world that felt simpler, even when the work was intense.
For Ligyalingi, that world was MCL McCann (now Maad McCann) in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when media buying drove the business.
“As a media buyer, most of the agency’s income came from commissions,” he recalls. “We were handling Coca-Cola, Uganda Breweries, big social marketing projects. For a young professional, then, the pay was comfortable.”
The model was straightforward: clients spent big on radio, TV, and outdoor; agencies earned commissions on that spend. Retainers existed, but the rivers of money ran through the media.
Across town at Adapt-TBWA (later QG Saatchi & Saatchi), Kamuli was living the same era from the creative side, the age of early MTN campaigns, big launches, new banks and breweries trying to out-shout each other.
“It was glamorous and prestigious,” he says. “We were handling MTN when advertising was just blossoming. Retainers were solid. For young people like us, it was exciting and rewarding.”
Agencies were small, brands were few, and spend was heavy. If you sat at the right desk, you handled hundreds of millions in client budgets long before you knew what a pension was.
But even then, cracks were forming. Ligyalingi watched suppliers wait for months to be paid. Invoices gathered dust. Debts piled up. When Celtel, MCL’s cash cow, left, the agency wobbled on a shaky financial skeleton.
“It wasn’t just losing the client,” he says. “It was the lack of financial discipline. If you don’t pay partners on time, you burn trust. Once you burn trust, everything else is only a matter of time.”
The coaster looked shiny. But bolts were already loose.
From fat retainers to broken promises
Two decades later, the industry’s language has changed. In conversation after conversation, the same words surface: scope, retainer, budget, value, unsustainable.
Alemu Emuron, the once-accidental creative from part one who has since sat on Cannes juries and built The Quollective, captures the transition best.
“Back then, the conversation was mostly about brand love,” he says. “Did people love the campaign? Were they talking about it? Now it doesn’t matter how much they love your work if it doesn’t move numbers. And yet the money you’re given to move those numbers has shrunk.”
He describes the new reality with the precision of someone who’s stared at too many costings.
“You get a scope of work that runs two or three Excel pages,” he says. “Digital, ATL, BTL, influencer management, reporting, everything. Then you look at the budget and ask yourself, genuinely: how is this supposed to work?”
The old retainer meant a core team, strategy, creative, account management, reporting, and maybe extras. Today’s retainer often means everything: daily content, community management, influencers, scripts, design, reports, campaigns, emergencies, crammed into a fee that once covered just creative.
On paper, it looks efficient. On the agency floor, it feels like being set up to fail. Joshua Kamugabirwe of TROI Media sees the pattern across East Africa.
“Every client says they want value for money,” he says. “But value has become defined as ‘more work for less spend.’ The expectation is that you’ll stretch yourselves because ‘times are hard.’ But times are hard for agencies, too.”
The tension between promise and possible delivery has become permanent.
Cashflow: the slow, invisible choke
One of the cruelest twists in Uganda’s advertising story is that agencies can look busy and successful on paper and still be dying quietly inside.
The reason is cashflow. “Three months. Six months. Sometimes longer,” Alemu says when you ask how long payment takes. “Big money demands big patience. But patience alone doesn’t run businesses.”
The arithmetic is brutal. A client approves a campaign. Suppliers need deposits. Teams need salaries. URA wants tax on the invoice value, even if the invoice hasn’t been paid.
Meanwhile, the client’s accounting system is still processing last quarter’s work and asking for revised LPOs (local purchase orders).
Jeffrey Amani, now running Zeus The Agency, knows the chaos.
“URA expects their tax by the 15th,” he says, “but the client hasn’t paid you. It feels like you’re being asked to pay yourself.”
For small and mid-sized agencies, this isn’t a nuisance; it’s existential. Do you borrow to execute work you may be paid for six months later? Delay salaries and hope staff understand? Stall suppliers and risk blacklisting? Say no and watch the work go elsewhere?
This is where Ligyalingi’s discipline looks prophetic. Having seen MCL buckle under weak financial controls, he built Maad on one iron rule: never eat supplier money.
“If a client has paid and we’ve agreed on a plan, that money must be spent as agreed,” he says. “It’s not your working capital. The moment you fail to pay partners, you lose credibility.”
Ligyalingi has lived by this principle right until now, even when he was still running Maad.
At Maad, he says, it meant modest salaries early on, resisting temptations, and building a cushion.
And even when Maad lost Warid and later Orange, everyone survived. No one was fired, nor was anyone’s pay slashed.
“We saved in the good times,” he says, “we survived the shocks.”
In a late-payment ecosystem, that discipline is rare and quietly revolutionary.
Shortcuts, kickbacks and the erosion of value
Money pressure doesn’t just strain cash flow; it corrodes ethics.
Ask Rommel Jasi what keeps him up at night, and he won’t start with creativity. He’ll start with behaviour.
“Where we are now stems from unsustainable practices,” he says. “Fee cutting, undercutting, backdoor deals, accepting ridiculous conditions just to retain a client. If agencies had played fair and upheld standards, we might still be thriving. But over the last 18 years, it’s been steady decline.”
He describes pitches where agencies slash fees only to discover someone has gone so low that the only way to deliver is to cut corners.
He remembers a case where an agency told a client, “We’ll do it for free.” “Free,” he says softly. “Today, that agency is a shell.”
Ligyalingi’s response is personal: “Honesty was something I took seriously. Planning a media schedule based on kickbacks instead of strategy was unacceptable,” he says. “Once a client realises you’re not straight, trust is gone. And you can’t buy it back.”
He also admits the temptation. “Pressure makes bad choices look attractive. When you’re struggling with cash flow, ‘adjusting’ a plan or hiding a discount can feel like survival. That’s where character is tested.”
The results are visible everywhere: random billboards that look like PowerPoint panic, campaigns that feel thin and recycled, discount-driven “strategies” that mistake cheapness for value.
The industry hasn’t lost talent. It has made it harder for talent to do great work without burning out or bending.
From “brand love” to “show me the numbers”
Related
Amanda Ayebare, AutoXpress CFO: Balancing Survival and Growth in the Adventurous SME Landscape
Alongside the financial squeeze is a deeper shift in mindset.
In the era of Warid’s Pakalast characters and MTN’s early shouting, impact was measured by culture. Did people quote your lines in taxis? Parody your radio spots? Turn your campaign into slang?
Today, the client’s question is sharper: what did it do for the numbers?
“As a creative, you can’t think only in ‘cool work’ anymore,” Alemu says. “You have to understand business. What does success mean to the person who signed that brief?”
Briefs now arrive with explicit sales targets; sometimes fair, sometimes unrealistic, always heavy.
Kamugabirwe built TROI around that weight. In his world, a campaign that wins hearts but doesn’t move business indicators is no longer a success.
Peter Magona at TBWA adds another lens: Return on Relationships; the long-term health of the brand, the trust between agency and client, the life of the brand beyond quarterly reports.
“If we reduce everything to short-term metrics,” he argues, “we risk destroying the very brands we’re trying to grow.”
Somewhere between return on investment, relationships, and cultural impact sits the modern definition of value. The industry is still hunting for that balance.
Gen X scars, Gen Z boundaries
Money isn’t the only friction. People are. The accidentals who entered through side doors are now bosses, and the way they were raised in the business often clashes with the generation they manage.
Kamugabirwe describes Gen Z with admiration and bewilderment.
“They have a label for almost everything,” he says. “Push them twice, you’re toxic. A tough client is abusive. But they bring the energy and digital fluency agencies need. The challenge is channeling it.”
Ligyalingi admits his early management style was aggressive.
“It worked with my generation. We were used to being pushed hard. But millennials and Gen Z found it uncomfortable. I had to adjust.”
Alemu recalls that back then, it was brutal and normal.
This isn’t just softness versus hardness. It’s a reckoning with what kind of culture the industry wants. Fear built resilience, but it left scars. The new workforce is less willing to trade mental health for a portfolio.
Leaders who grew up in harsher rooms are learning a new art: demanding excellence without destroying people.
“It changes when you realise people don’t work for you,” Alemu says. “You work for them. Your job is to make your team better.” Empathy takes time. Time costs money.
The “we’ll do it ourselves” trap
The fight for value is also playing out in the media. Ligyalingi has watched clients bypass media agencies to negotiate directly with stations.
“On paper, it looks like a bargain,” he says. “The station gives a low rate. Then you realise your spots are running when nobody’s watching. Who monitors for you? Who tells you that the cheaper schedule is wasting your money?”
He has seen the loop repeatedly: advertiser leaves to “cut costs,” buys direct, loses impact, then creeps back after the damage.
The same dynamic is growing in creative. Many clients now build in-house studios to design, write copy, and churn out content fast. It makes sense for low-risk, quick-turn work, but it blurs the line between strategy and execution.
“Clients are increasingly thinking for themselves, by themselves,” Amani says. “Agencies have to fight just to get into the room.”
In-house teams, freelancers, underpriced agencies, direct media deals: a market full of activity, not always full of value.
Louder work. Not necessarily smarter work.
Reinvention: new engines for an old machine
For all the bruises, there’s something fierce in the way these leaders talk about the future. The era of fat retainers is gone. So is the era where agencies survive on charisma and pitch theatre alone.
The response has been reinvention. TROI Media is one answer: lean, outcome-driven, built as a rebuttal to waste. “Anyone who chooses us would get unmatched service and true value for money,” Kamugabirwe says. It sounds like a tagline. For him, it’s survival.
The Quollective is another answer. Alemu’s model is grounded in cultural intelligence, listening on the streets, in villages, schools, and markets before writing briefs.
Culture safaris. Consumer labs. Collaborative workshops. Often, he says, “the solution isn’t a campaign. It’s a product idea.”
Maad remains proof that discipline is a creative resource. The Maad Factor, flexibility, accountability, coherence, teamwork, originality, and resilience, isn’t wall art. It shapes hiring, pitching, and payment.
Blue Flamingo, under Seanice Kacungira, built digital muscle when most agencies were still thinking in 30-second TV spots. Zeus, under Amani, grew from frustration with the freelance wild west and an insistence on craft and ethics.
Different shops, same instincts: don’t eat supplier money; don’t undercut into oblivion; don’t confuse noise for effectiveness; don’t sacrifice people for trophies.
Systems, not miracles
Alemu puts the sharpest summary on this chapter: “The problem isn’t that people don’t dream. It’s that they dream too small, and don’t build systems to support even those dreams. You don’t rise to the level of your ambition. You fall to the level of your systems.”
Dreams are cheap. Pitch decks are full of them. Conferences echo with them. LinkedIn glows with them.
What these stories reveal is that the real fight is about building boring, reliable systems: payment systems that don’t suffocate agencies; ethical systems that resist shortcuts; creative systems that protect quality; HR systems that safeguard people; pricing systems that reflect reality; leadership systems that outlive founders.
That is what this chapter is: not a cry for sympathy, but a call for structure.
Yes, the pain is real: shrinking budgets, broken retainers, unpaid invoices, eroded standards, burnt-out leaders, restless juniors. But so is the potential: people who built everything without a roadmap now have a chance, maybe their last, to rebuild deliberately.
Retainers may never go back to what they were. Procurement may never become cuddly. Gen Z may never respond well to “you’re an idiot.” Clients may never stop pushing for more for less.
But the people who built this machine still get to decide what kind of machine it will be.
One where retainers are fair, even if not fat; budgets are lean, but not dishonest; suppliers are partners, not victims; staff are stretched, but not broken; creativity is accountable, but not reduced to spreadsheets; ethics are default, not luxury.
The coaster is old. The road is rough. Margins are thin. But the engine is still full of madmen and madwomen who have survived coups, recessions, new networks, lost clients, pandemics — and now AI.
They know it hurts. They know it’s fragile. They also know they didn’t come this far just to watch it collapse under bad habits.
They may not fix everything. But they can choose what kind of professionals they want to be in the middle of the mess.
That choice — more than any retainer, award, or client win — is where the future of the industry will be decided.
And as long as they keep choosing to fight for value and ethics instead of simply mourning their absence, Uganda’s most improbable machine will keep moving.
Not because the road is smooth, but because the people inside refuse to stop driving.
