Communiqué 65: Do African creators need talent managers? Penzaarville thinks so
With a client roster that includes Layi Wasabi, Broda Shaggi, Tomike Adeoye, Tayo Aina and Diary of a Naija Girl, Penzaarville Africa wants to be the CAA for African content creators.
In case you (somehow 🙄) missed it, we have released the African Creative Economy Database. Learn more about it here.
1. A game of chance
In 2021, Olayiwola Isaac was a final-year law student at Bowen University in southwest Nigeria. He spent a ton of his free time between lectures making skits. Then he made one about blocking his mother from viewing his WhatsApp status. It went viral and marked the beginning of an upward spiral. By the end of 2022, off the back of characters like The Professor, Isaac, now popularly known as Layi Wasabi, became a modest online sensation, with over 500k followers on Instagram and a client roster that included brands like Chicken Republic and Flutterwave.
But potential outpaced infrastructure. Layi Wasabi, with the help of a university friend, personally managed his brand and business—a common experience with many African content creators. According to the 2023 Selar African Creator Economy Report, only 24% of African content creators worked with a team of experts to support their work. The lack of experience showed. When Layi Wasabi, then based in Ibadan, a city just a few hours from Lagos, was booked for a shoot in Lekki, Lagos, the client did not arrange for his accommodation.
Enter Olufemi Oguntamu, CEO of Penzaarville Africa, a talent management agency with a reputation for turning viral fame into sustainable business. Earlier, Oguntamu had reached out to Layi Wasabi to ask for his rate card. But, the version he received was not properly designed—the first sign of poor management. Then, Oguntamu found out about the accommodation problem, and he decided to step in. He booked a room for Wasabi at the Lagos Continental Hotel and invited him to dinner.
Over dinner at Cilantro, a restaurant located in the upscale Victoria Island, Lagos, Oguntamu reviewed Layi Wasabi’s brand. “The conversation that we had felt like a lecture. So, you know, when someone is talking to you and you're like, oh yes, I realize this, I realize that. He's telling you where you have been, where you are as a brand, and where you should go,” Layi Wasabi told Communiqué.
Oguntamu also laid out Penzaarville’s value proposition to him: creative autonomy, a plan to scale his brand, and critically, a profit-sharing model that included Layi Wasabi’s existing manager.
A few weeks later, Layi Wasabi signed a management deal with Penzaarville Africa. Since then, the creator talent agency has added top content creators like lifestyle influencer Tomike Adeoye and travel YouTuber Tayo Aina to its client roster while consulting for many others, cementing its status as a prominent African creator management agency.
2. Penzaarville Africa 1.0
Long before Olufemi Oguntamu became the architect behind the success of several African creators, he was just a university student with a BlackBerry and an uncanny ability to command attention. In the early 2010s, while studying Mass Communication at Olabisi Onabanjo University, Oguntamu amassed a contact list of over 1,000 names on his BlackBerry, a formidable digital footprint in Nigeria’s pre-Instagram era. What began as casual promotions for campus parties (at ₦500 per post) soon caught the eye of brands seeking to tap into youth culture. “I didn’t see it as a career,” Oguntamu recalls. But when brands like Guinness began to approach him to not only promote their campaigns but get other influencers to do so as well, he realized the inherent business opportunity.
After graduation, Oguntamu cut his teeth at Lagos’s elite PR firms—Red Media Africa, where he worked on The Future Awards Africa and later Mediacraft. These stints sharpened his understanding of brand storytelling but left him restless.
In 2015, he launched Penzaarville Africa as a digital marketing and influencer agency, betting on Nigeria’s burgeoning social media boom. Early clients included Wema Bank, Samsung, and the Lagos State Government, but the breakthrough came in 2019 when the agency spearheaded the Nigerian rebrand of ride-hailing giant Taxify to Bolt. The campaign, which leveraged several creators as influencers to promote the service, established Penzaarville Africa as one of the leading marketing agencies in the country.
Penzaarville’s success in influencer marketing sowed the seeds of its evolution into a creator management agency. Oguntamu’s deep relationships with content creators—forged while brokering brand deals—revealed a glaring inefficiency: many lacked professional representation. “They’d land big campaigns but undervalue themselves,” he said. “After negotiating deals for them, they’d ask, ‘Why don’t you just manage me?”
MC Lively, a rising skit maker at the time, was the first to formalize this arrangement in 2018. However, the signing of Broda Shaggi, one of Oguntamu’s friends from university who was gaining prominence as a creator in 2019, marked Penzaarville’s definitive shift from brand campaigns to talent management.
3. A leaf—or several—from the CAA playbook
To properly understand how Penzaarville is growing as a leading creator talent agency, we must look to the global talent management agency, Creative Artists Agency (CAA). Creative Artists Agency (CAA), now a $5 billion behemoth, didn’t become Hollywood’s most powerful talent firm accidentally. Its growth followed a deliberate strategy of consolidation.
CAA's first move was signing not just actors but directors and, later, athletes and musicians. By the late 1990s, it represented over 1,400 artists, making it impossible for any project to be made in Hollywood without them. Having consolidated the market for Hollywood talent, CAA expanded into adjacent industries: sports (CAA Sports), branding (CAA Marketing), and other geographies (India, China, and London), increasing its capacity to broker deals for its clients across industries and borders.
Nigeria’s creative economy—valued at $2.4 billion but historically fragmented—is ripe for a CAA-style consolidator. Penzaarville’s strategy mirrors the Hollywood giant’s, albeit with local nuances. Like CAA in the ’90s, Penzaarville is aggressively signing multihyphenate talent: comedians (Broda Shaggi, Layi Wasabi), travel creators (Tayo Aina), and actors (Tomike Adeoye). The goal? Make brands and platforms depend on the company for access to creators, becoming indispensable in the era of creative commercialization.
Penzaarville is deliberate about the talent it signs—far more than simply chasing metrics like follower counts. The agency targets creators with a clear, scalable growth trajectory, focusing on those with distinct personas, cross-platform appeal, and untapped commercial potential. Once signed, Penzaarville conducts an in-depth brand audit, analyzing the creator’s strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for expansion. For example, with Layi Wasabi. After signing him, Penzaarville’s analysis revealed that his newly introduced "Lawyer" character, which he had only made two videos with, had viral potential but needed focused content development. The agency advised doubling down on the character. The result? A surge in engagement, and ultimately, the inaugural African Magic Viewers’ Choice Award for Best Digital Creator. Today, the “Lawyer” isn’t just a skit staple; he’s the centerpiece of Layi Wasabi’s content, with two YouTube series built around the character.
The brand audit extends beyond content strategy. Penzaarville meticulously matches creators with commercial partners that align with their personas. For Layi Wasabi, this meant partnerships with brands that valued his sharp wit rather than generic influencer campaigns.
Also mirroring CAA’s global expansion strategy, Penzaarville is methodically introducing its talent to international markets, recognizing that Africa’s cultural influence is a growing global currency. In 2024, Penzaarville organized a U.K. tour for Layi Wasabi, testing his resonance with diaspora audiences and laying the groundwork for future European brand deals. Similar tours have been held for Broda Shaggi in East Africa. The agency is also managing Tayo Aina's transition from an African travel vlogger to an international travel YouTuber, with Penzaarville securing collaborations with global brands like the recent one with Express VPN.
Penzaarville’s approach—part talent incubator, part brand architect, part global distributor—echoes CAA’s rise, but with a critical differentiation: first-mover leverage in Africa’s under-systematized market. Where CAA competed with entrenched rivals, Penzaarville is writing the rules for talent management in the African creator economy, one country at a time.