Marketer of the month
Who is COLIN ASIIMWE ?
Ask around Kampala’s marketing circles about Colin Asiimwe and you’ll hear the same story told two ways.
One version has him as the guy who left MultiChoice at the height of the pandemic scramble, when the pay TV business needed him most, to go chase mobile money at a fintech nobody had quite figured out yet. The other has him as the guy who came back three years later, walked into a Head of Marketing office he already knew the layout of, and made it feel like he’d never left at all except everything he touched now had a sharper edge to it.
The experience of COLIN ASIIMWE
He first took the MultiChoice Uganda job in 2019, right before the world fell apart. DStv, GOtv, the Pearl Magic channels all of it landed on his desk just as COVID sent everyone home and television habits got rewritten in a matter of weeks.
Asiimwe’s path into marketing began in proper advertising, as an Account Director at Scanad Uganda, WPP Scan group’s local unit, between 2011 and 2012.
From there he moved to QG Group Uganda, the Ugandan home of Saatchi & Saatchi, where he served as Client Services Director through 2014, before taking on the top job at the Dubai-founded creative agency Tonic International as its Uganda Country Manager.
His strategy career deepened from there, first as Head of Strategy and later Head of Strategy and Digital at Metropolitan Republic, and then across the border in Kenya as Head of Strategy and Planning at VMLY&R.
In 2019, he joined MultiChoice Uganda as Head of Marketing, a three-year run that carried the DStv, GOtv, and Pearl Magic brands through the pandemic and produced platforms like Pearl Magic Prime.
He left in 2022 to become Marketing Lead at Wave Mobile Money Uganda, building out the fintech’s presence in a fast-growing mobile money market, before a stint in Kigali preceded his return to MultiChoice Uganda in 2025 back in the Head of Marketing seat he first held six years earlier.
Additional Information
The interesting thing about Asiimwe’s resume is how little of it looks like a ladder. He started in advertising as an Account Director at Scanad Uganda, then Client Services Director at Saatchi & Saatchi’s local operation, then running the Uganda office for a Dubai creative agency called Tonic International.
From there he crossed over into strategy, first at Metropolitan Republic and then at VMLY&R in Kenya, sitting on the agency side of the table long before he ever sat on the client side of it.
That’s not incidental. Spend a few years being the person clients hire to fix their thinking, and you come out the other end with opinions about pace.
Asiimwe has one he repeats often that businesses have to move at the same speed their consumers move, and that the rate at which audiences now burn through media should worry anyone in the industry who isn’t paying attention. It sounds like a line for a panel discussion until you watch him act on it in telecom launches across five countries, a mobile money sprint at Wave, a stretch in Kigali, and now a pay TV business trying to hold its ground against streaming with fewer subscribers than it had a year ago.
There’s an easy read on returning to an old job: safety, familiarity, a known paycheck. It doesn’t really hold up here.
Pay Tv in East Africa shed tens of thousands of subscribers in the year before Asiimwe walked back in DStv, GOtv and Pearl Magic, which means the job he came back to is a bigger, messier version of the one he left. Nobody returns to a fight that’s gotten harder because it’s comfortable.
What he brought back with him is the interesting part, a fintech’s instinct for chasing acquisition numbers, an agency’s discipline about strategy, and a habit of launching things rather than just keeping them running.
If you want proof rather than resume lines, drive past the Airtel Roundabout on Jinja Road. There’s a Boot and Ball structure standing there now, painted DStv blue, that’s become one of the more talked-about landmarks in Kampala ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup,the kind of thing people stop to photograph rather than scroll past, mostly because it’s parked in the middle of traffic and impossible to ignore.
It wasn’t the only move, DStv branding also spread across roughly 25 football turfs around the city, the ones where night cage football happens, putting World Cup energy exactly where fans already show up on their own and countdown clocks went up on billboards, transit stops and retail spaces around Kampala, ticking down to kickoff.
None of it would have landed the same way without the pricing behind it, cheaper packages, weekly “Ka Weekie” subscriptions, discounted decoders, a reminder that the spectacle only works if people can afford to watch what it’s advertising.
Why this recognition, and why now
Strip away the campaign and the resume and what’s left is fairly simple: fifteen years of range across advertising, strategy, telecom, fintech and broadcast; a body of work you can point to on a Kampala street corner; and a bachelor’s in mass communication, a digital analytics certification, and a Reforge growth cohort behind the instincts.
Marketers with one of those three things are common. Marketers with all three, holding down a job that got harder while they were away from it, are not.
Evolve Africa names Colin Asiimwe Marketer of the Month for June 2026. Not for one campaign, but for the pattern underneath it, a career that keeps proving the best move isn’t always up. Sometimes it’s out, and then back in, sharper than before
Academic Qualifications
Among his various qualifications, he holds a bachelor’s degree in mass communication, is certified in digital analytics, and is an alumnus of the 2022 Reforge Growth and Marketing Strategy cohort.