Marketing has changed considerably in Nigeria over the last decade. The platforms are different, customers are more informed and businesses have more ways to reach their audiences. But for Collins Oforgu, one question has remained important: what does a business actually get from the money it spends on marketing?
That question has shaped much of Oforgu’s career.
Before building Evaluate Media, Oforgu worked across technology and digital businesses, including PropertyPro, Supermart.ng and Swift Networks. His experience in those organisations exposed him to different sides of marketing, sales and customer acquisition.
He later moved into entrepreneurship, where one of his early projects was Retrosoft Solutions. In 2019, the company launched Ruby, a marketing technology product designed to help businesses generate leads through digital advertising. The product was tested with businesses in sectors including real estate, finance, health and travel, with Oforgu saying the results showed a significant increase in leads compared with conventional online advertising.
The experience was an early indication of the direction his career would take.
Evaluate Media was subsequently relaunched as a marketing and media company. By its third anniversary in 2022, the company said it had grown its client base to more than 200 local and international businesses. Oforgu attributed part of that growth to the company’s focus on providing branding, public relations and marketing services to businesses, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises.
Today, Evaluate’s services cover digital advertising, public relations and media relations, social media management, website development and video advertising, among others.
But the marketing business has also changed since Oforgu started.
The growth of social media and digital advertising has made it easier for businesses to reach large audiences. At the same time, it has created a new problem. Businesses can now see how many people viewed an advert, clicked a link or engaged with a post, but those numbers do not always tell them whether the marketing worked.
That is an issue Oforgu has spoken about publicly.
In a 2025 interview with P.M. News, he argued that Nigerian agencies need to move beyond simply delivering graphics, social media advertising and visibility. His view was that clients increasingly want to understand what their marketing expenditure is producing and how it is contributing to business growth.
It is a position that has also influenced how he describes the role of an agency.
For Oforgu, the job should not end when a campaign goes live. An agency needs to understand what the client is trying to achieve and how marketing fits into that objective. A business looking to sell property, for example, may generate thousands of impressions and enquiries, but the real question is how many of those enquiries become actual customers.
That distinction between visibility and results has become a recurring part of his thinking about the industry.
His interest in the practical side of business also extends beyond his agency work. Through the Collins Oforgu Mentorship Initiative and Evaluate’s entrepreneurship programmes, he has worked with people looking to develop their businesses or make the transition from paid employment into entrepreneurship. The mentorship programme, for instance, runs for 12 weeks and combines group sessions, resources, networking and access to mentors.
Oforgu’s career has also taken him outside the traditional marketing agency environment.
He currently serves as Group Chief Operating Officer at Novarick Group, giving him an operating role in the real estate business. That experience has brought him closer to the other side of the marketing equation. Marketing can generate attention and leads, but the business still has to convert those opportunities, deliver its product and manage the customer relationship.
For someone who has spent much of his career around marketing, that experience provides a different perspective on what happens after a campaign produces a lead.
It also reflects the direction Oforgu’s career has taken in recent years. Marketing remains central to his professional work, but his interests now extend into business operations, technology, entrepreneurship and business development.
His view of the marketing industry is similarly broadening.
The industry is no longer only about advertising. Businesses now have to think about how their brand appears across search engines, social platforms, news publications and increasingly, artificial intelligence-powered search and recommendation systems. Agencies are consequently being asked to understand more than content and advertising.
Oforgu believes this will require a change in the way marketing companies operate.
The agencies that understand their clients’ businesses, track what their work is producing and adapt to changes in technology will have a different role to play from agencies that simply execute campaigns.
That has been the direction of his own career, from working in technology and digital businesses, to building a marketing company, developing marketing tools, mentoring entrepreneurs and taking on a senior operating role in another sector.
For Oforgu, the future of marketing is therefore less about being everywhere and more about understanding what happens after a business gets attention.
The question, ultimately, is not just whether people saw the campaign.
It is what happened next.
