If the first part of this series was about how the madmen stumbled into the machine, and the second about how the money broke it, this part is about what the machine does to the people inside it.
Not the awards. Not the case studies. The bodies. The marriages. The minds.
On a pitch night in Kampala, somewhere between midnight and 3 am, the city goes quiet, but the minds behind the advertising agencies get louder.
A designer is on revision 17 of a key visual. A copywriter is arguing with themselves over whether “unlock” or “unleash” feels more premium. An account manager is refreshing their inbox, waiting for “client has reverted” like a bad medical result.
Somewhere, a managing director is looking at the budget for that same campaign and asking a question they’ve asked too many times: “How is this supposed to work?”
This is the emotional cost of creativity in Uganda’s advertising industry: a life lived between deadlines and debit orders, brainstorms and brain surgeries, “we love it” and “we regret to inform you.”
It is the story of people who chose a career that looks like fun from the outside, and discovered that sometimes, the price of making other people feel things is slowly losing touch with their own.
The original pressure cooker
To understand today’s burnout, you have to go back to the generation that thought exhaustion was just part of the job description.
Daniel Ligyalingi, co-founder of Maad Advertising, still remembers his nights at MCL McCann (now Maad McCann) in the late 1990s; the first proper agency many of Uganda’s industry leaders ever saw from the inside.
“Long hours were the norm,” he recalls. “There were days I worked 24-hour shifts, waiting for presentations, only to freshen up quickly and return to deliver them.”
Mike Daugherty, the American founder, shouted over spelling mistakes. Nothing left the building without passing under his red pen. It was brutal, but it built a generation that equated excellence with endurance.
Across town at Adapt-TBWA (later QG Saatchi & Saatchi), the culture was just as intense, only more glamorous.
When David Galukande, co-founder of QG Saatchi & Saatchi, talks about those years, he describes a place that felt like a movement, not an office.
“During periods of intense growth, the pressure was real: tight deadlines, major accounts, long nights,” he says. “But we turned that pressure into fuel … while the hours were long, the energy was contagious. The agency felt alive.”
For that generation, stress was normalised very early. If you survived it, you were “strong.” If you complained, you were “not cut out for this.”
Those habits didn’t stay in the past. They became the default setting that the industry inherited.
When “it feels like play” hides the danger
Listen to Josephine Muvumba, Managing Director at MetropolitanRepublic Uganda, talk about her early years at the agency, and you can hear the seduction.
“Shaking up the industry, making our mark and growing the agency from scratch was exhilarating,” she says. “These were busy days. I worked long, long hours. But when you love what you are doing, it feels like play.”
That sentence, “it feels like play”, is the sweet poison at the heart of creative work.
You’re not packing boxes or counting stock. You’re making films, writing lines, building brands. You get to see your work on TV, on billboards, in bars, and in taxis.
As Alemu Emuron, founder of The Quollective Africa, puts it, there is a strange thrill in hearing strangers repeat your lines at the kaduka or in a matatu. The work doesn’t just live on a spreadsheet; it lives in people’s mouths.
When the agency feels “alive,” as Galukande describes it, the lines between duty and addiction blur. The long nights don’t feel like exploitation; they feel like belonging. You’re part of something bigger than yourself.
Until your body sends you a memo that your passion never read.
“We operate in constant fight-or-flight mode”
No one illustrates the physical cost of that culture more starkly than Rommel Jasi, Managing Director of Saladin Media.
Over nearly two decades, he’s run a “monster” Western Union account, led Saladin Media, and now chairs the Uganda Advertising Association. Somewhere along the way, his body started keeping score.
“Over the last five years, I’ve undergone three brain surgeries; the most recent in January last year,” he says calmly. The first two, in India at the onset of Covid, failed. By God’s grace, the third in Johannesburg was successful.
When he asked his doctor what caused the tumour, the answer came with the force of an indictment.
The doctor told him his research linked many of these tumours to hormonal imbalances “often brought on by chronic stress.”
In Rommel’s words: “In our industry, we operate in constant fight-or-flight mode. Stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol spike regularly, and over time, this has consequences.”
That sentence could be carved into the reception of every agency in Kampala.
It’s not the one all-nighter that breaks you. It’s the years of “urgent” briefs, weekend pitches, last-minute reversals, WhatsApp at 11 pm, and the constant low-grade anxiety of waiting for money that doesn’t match the effort.
After his surgeries, Rommel changed the way he leads. “We’ve deliberately created a human-centered culture in our agency, where pressure doesn’t translate into burnout,” he says.
That means no-meeting Fridays so teams can “work, reflect, or just breathe,” adding mental health support to the medical package, insisting annual leave is mandatory, and blocking off time in his own calendar for golf as therapy.
His story is a warning and a blueprint at the same time: if the industry doesn’t redesign itself, the bodies of its leaders will do it for them.
The quiet panic of money
If creative pressure exhausts the mind, cashflow fear gnaws at the gut.
The emotional soundtrack of Uganda’s agencies is partly made of client feedback and internal reviews, and partly of phone calls from landlords, URA, and banks.
Jeffrey Amani, now running Zeus The Agency, talks about that tension in very practical terms. You deliver the work. You raise the invoice. The client delays. The taxman does not.
“You’re in a situation where 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 founders, the anxiety is layered. On top of the brief and the creative review, there is rent, payroll, supplier invoices, and equipment leases.
As John Chihi, founder & lead consultant at Media Age, puts it, people often forget that agencies are “real businesses, just like our clients… we face the same business pressures: overheads, operations, staffing, and profitability. That’s on top of the actual work we do for clients.”
Meanwhile, the commercial rules have changed. Alemu describes a typical modern brief in a way that compresses the whole emotional mess into one image.
“You get a scope of work that runs two or three Excel pages,” he says, digital, ATL, BTL, influencers, reports, content and community management. Then you look at the budget and ask yourself, genuinely: ‘How is this supposed to work?”
And even if you make it work, the money might land in three months. Or six. Or “soon.”
That time gap between the work and the reward is where a lot of quiet panic lives. That’s where late salaries become tense WhatsApp chats. Where suppliers start to doubt you. Where founders start to question if this whole thing is worth it.
It’s also where bad decisions are born: kickbacks, under-reporting, using supplier money as working capital, and agreeing to “free” work in the hope of future glory.
“Pressure makes bad choices look attractive,” Ligyalingi says. “When you are struggling with cash flow, the idea of just ‘adjusting’ a plan or hiding a discount from a client can feel like survival. That’s where character is tested.”
For leaders who still want to sleep at night, this isn’t just a financial puzzle. It’s an emotional one.
The Gen X scars, the Gen Z boundaries
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The Gen X and older millennials who now run agencies grew up in a culture where being shouted at in a boardroom was somehow framed as tough love.
In Alemu’s words, that was “normal feedback culture” in his early days. Today, he knows “you’d be trending on Twitter that afternoon. HR would be calling you in.”
Many of those leaders carry a strange mix of trauma and pride from that era. They survived, and survival became part of their identity.
Now they are managing a generation that refuses to normalise the same pain.
“Gen Z has surprised us; they can be unpredictable, and sometimes you are not sure of what they really want,” says Joshua Kamugabirwe, Regional Manager at TROI Media.
“They have a description for almost every life challenge; if the leadership complains twice, they are labelled ‘toxic’. If a client rejects work, they become ‘difficult’.”
He doesn’t say this with contempt; he says it with curiosity. Because in the same breath, he admits: “Gen Z also brings unmatched energy, bold creativity and digital fluency… harnessing their strengths is what keeps agencies like ours fresh and future-ready.”
Ligyalingi went through his own adjustment. Raised on Daugherty’s 24-hour shifts and sharp tongue, he initially led Maad in the same register.
“My management style was quite aggressive,” he admits. “It worked with my generation… but millennials and Gen Zs often found it uncomfortable and frustrating.”
He had to unlearn. So did many of his peers.
From Alemu’s vantage point, now that he coaches younger creatives across Africa, he’s seeing mental health surface in ways his generation never allowed it to.
He talks about Gen Zs openly naming their struggles: anxiety, panic attacks, burnout, and how that forces older leaders to confront something they were taught to bury.
The emotional cost is no longer silent. And that makes some leaders uncomfortable, but it also creates the possibility of change that their own bosses never offered them.
Digital: always on, never done
If the first wave of emotional strain came from long nights in traditional agencies, the second wave arrived with the glow of screens.
Digital didn’t just add new channels; it added new rhythms: real-time, always-on, multiple iterations.
“We’re no longer in an era where you could spend weeks and a big budget crafting a single glorified 30 or 60-second TV ad and expect it to do all the work,” Rommel says. “Today, you’re expected to produce multiple iterations, across multiple formats, in real time. That demands agility.”
It also demands stamina. At Blu Flamingo, born digital when everyone else was still thinking in 30-second spots, Seanice Kacungira built a culture obsessed with packaging, polish, and data.
It paid off. It also meant a constant treadmill of content, reporting, and optimisation.
Right now, she says, Blu Flamingo is driven by three things: “data, creative, and now tech … stories are just data: just pieces of data put together in a poetic way that has emotion behind it.”
That’s a beautiful line. It’s also an exhausting job description: to be the person constantly turning data into poetry, week after week, for clients who may not even remember last month’s campaign.
Digital has also blurred the border between work and life. The crisis tweet at 9 pm, the influencer scandal on Sunday, the client who texts “call me” at 10:30 pm because “it’s just social.”
The emotional cost here isn’t just in hours. It’s in the inability to switch off. To let your nervous system believe, even for a few hours, that nothing urgent is happening.
“We’ve built systems to stop people breaking”
In the middle of this chaos, a quiet revolution is happening. Some leaders are beginning to design emotional safety into the way their companies work.
Rommel turned his surgeries into policy: no-meeting Fridays, mental health support in the medical plan, mandatory annual leave, financial literacy sessions, an office with a swimming pool, and a home-like atmosphere.
“The idea was to create a place people want to come to every day,” he says.
Adris Kamuli, Managing Director at Maad McCann, talks about dealing with losses, rejections, and near-misses not with denial, but with ritual.
“I’ve learned to prioritise rest and sleep more,” he says. He leans on exercise, family, and small joys like music and prayer as coping mechanisms.
What keeps him in the game is simple: “I genuinely love this work… even after being told ‘we regret to inform you’ more times than I can count.”
David Case, the founder, partner, and now chairman of multiple agencies within the TBWA Africa network and one of the industry’s elder statesmen, has his own simple rules for survival in what he freely calls a stressful business: “step away regularly, sleep properly, invest in interests outside advertising, and treat challenges as learning rather than personal condemnation.”
Kamugabirwe at TROI tries to build boundaries into policy: partnerships with mental wellness providers, protecting weekends as much as possible, designing a culture where, in his words, “unmatched service and true value for money” doesn’t mean running people into the ground.
None of them is pretending they’ve solved it. The budgets are still thin. The scopes are still heavy. URA still wants its tax on time.
But the mindset is shifting from “be tough” to “build systems.”
“You don’t rise to the level of your ambition”
Maybe the most important sentence in all these conversations comes when Alemu zooms all the way out.
“The problem isn’t that people don’t dream,” he says. “It’s that they dream too small, and they don’t build systems to support even those small dreams. You don’t rise to the level of your ambition. You fall to the level of your systems.”
In part one of this series, the accidentals stumbled into the industry and turned accidents into careers.
In part two, they confronted the economic pain of broken retainers, shrinking budgets, and a race to the bottom that eroded value.
This third part is about a quieter crisis: people falling to the level of systems that were never built to protect them, only to squeeze results out of them.
If the industry continues to run on heroic stamina and personal sacrifice, it will keep producing good work at a bad human price.
It will keep losing people to quieter jobs, friendlier markets, or simply to burnout that doesn’t make headlines.
But if it takes its own emotional cost seriously, the brain surgeries, the panic attacks, the invisible exhaustion behind the gloss, then it has a chance to do something rare in African business history: design a machine that doesn’t eat the people who built it.
That would look like: retainers that match reality, not fantasy. Payment systems that don’t make founders pay tax on money they haven’t seen. Work cultures where “long, long hours” are the exception, not the badge of honour.
Leadership that can demand excellence without humiliation. Digital teams who are allowed to log off without guilt. Industry bodies that fight for standards that protect people as fiercely as they protect creativity.
Uganda’s advertising industry has always been improbable. It was built by pharmacists who ran away from the counter, cricketers who answered phone calls, radio hosts who were tired of being broke, artists who didn’t want to teach, and kids in flip-flops who thought “copywriting” meant copyright law.
They did not come this far just to die of stress in glass offices while chasing likes and late invoices.
The emotional cost of creativity is real. It has been paid in long nights, broken nerves, and scars that don’t show up in case studies.
The next chapter of this industry will be written by the people who decide, very deliberately, that brilliance and burnout are not a package deal; that you can still make work that moves a nation without living permanently in fight-or-flight.
Because if this battered Coaster is going to keep moving, it cannot run on adrenaline alone. It has to learn how to breathe.
