Dig a little deeper and you discover a man of deep convictions, sound judgement and gentle humility, who simply tries to do his best for both investors in Oikocredit and his fellow countrymen.

On earning his high school diploma in Senegal, Sambou completed his education in Montreal, Canada during the 1990s finally earning an MBA in Financial Services – before joining the Royal Bank of Canada.

There, he advised his clients to look for maximum returns on their savings and investments, promoting stock market shares and bonds, long before the concept of ethical or microfinance investment was really established.

It’s hard to imagine he could have foreseen the path his career was actually taking him on, but he was learning important lessons about being careful with his clients’ money, along the way.

Even on his return to Senegal to work for the more commercial Citibank, Sambou was far removed from the everyday credit needs of ordinary people. Unsurprisingly, a corporate bank like this was only interested in deals that delivered acceptable returns. Social impact didn’t come into it. And as Sambou himself puts it, that left him with a slightly uneasy feeling.

“At the end of each year, you made your profits, you earned a good bonus, but still there was something missing. You never saw any real benefit from what you were doing.”

Even when his wife suggested he apply for the Oikocredit job she’d seen in the local newspaper, Sambou wasn’t sure just what he wanted. The thought of opening an office from scratch, seeking out partners in remote rural areas and managing such a risky portfolio of investments, was alien to everything his formal business training had taught him.

Yet he says, he soon found his feet “When I went to my first meeting with our partners – banana farmers, in Tambacounda – I found exactly what I was missing. Just talking with them in the village, and seeing the poverty they were living in. It showed me that I was missing the chance not just to improve the lives of these people, but also to contribute to the economic development of my country.”

And Sambou was smart enough to quickly grasp that he didn’t have all the answers. As he travelled around talking to different microfinance organisations and the people they helped, it became obvious that his MBA and business training could only take him so far.

“It’s very, very, very dangerous to think that you have all the answers because you have an MBA”, says Sambou “What I learned is that these farmers know far more than you could ever do. I learned a huge amount from them. You have to make sure you listen as well as talk.”

Sambou will only modestly admit it is this ability to stand back and see the big picture that is his particular talent. He has to balance the need for prudent business, clear accountability and acceptable risks or returns with an absolute commitment to help the very poorest people in Senegalese society.

“I always try to do something different from all the other big international lenders” he explains. “They only give money to the biggest microfinance partners in Senegal. But I go out into the rural areas and search for partners to work with. I go even it’s very far away or there’s no proper road. We go to them. They don’t come to us. They don’t know people like Oikocredit exist.”

But once he’s found a group he wants to work with, then it’s down to Sambou to make sure he works with them to help them organise themselves, put in place the right structures and put together a business plan that stands up to examination, long before major investments are made. It’s slow, careful painstaking work that can take years to put together. But Sambou is convinced it’s the right way to go about things.

“I have to think about how sustainable a project or loan might be. Because of my background I know that investors in Oikocredit are people who have worked for many years to earn their money.”

“It’s not as some people here in Senegal believe, that investors simply have more money than they know what to do with. We have to have a level of confidence that people really will benefit from the project and that our investors will get repaid.”

The fruits of Sambou’s labours are about to be harvested in Casamance in southern Senegal, where this season’s Mango harvest will be the first to be packed, processed and shipped to the Netherlands. In previous years 75% of the crop has gone to waste, due to lack of access to a market.

It’s all thanks to a new factory, which Oikocredit has helped the local farmers co-operative to build and take part-ownership in. But it’s been a long three-year journey to get here. And Sambou admits you need to have a certain something to keep you going.

“Each morning when I wake and come to this office I have this commitment, to help improve the lives of the people, of my country. The day I don’t have this I should probably do something else…but for now it’s something I have with me every day.”

And thank goodness it is, as you get the feeling, without the missing link of Sambou’s drive, energy and ability, the work of Oikocredit in Senegal would be greatly diminished.

The Oikocredit staff we met, like Sambou Coly, were a surprising mix too. Investors in Oikocredit should be reassured that their money is being managed by someone like this former banker who returned to Senegal after completing his MBA in Canada and learning the business of lending money at Royal Canadian Bank and Citibank.

As committed to the cause as any charity worker, Sambou brings a unique entrepreneurial spirit to the business of alleviating poverty and developing his homeland.

And then there were the mango farmers, and vegetable growing women’s groups of Casamanche. 75% of their crops go to waste simply because they can’t find a market for their fruit and vegetables.

And yet thanks to Sambou’s inspiration and their own hard work, they now form a 5,000 strong collective co-operative community – who once they begin exporting their own prepacked and prepared, fresh and dried vegetables – are soon going to be able to properly support themselves and their families for the first time in their lives.

Senegal is a poor country, but one with immense potential. There are problems and injustice yes, but this is not a perfect world of right and wrong, black and white.

The beauty of development lies in carefully picking the right path through all that chaos and disorder.

I saw that Oikocredit does this well. And in doing so are helping people to enrich themselves, their community and their country, in every sense of the word.

The fine line between memorable and moronic is moving and advertisers need to make sure that they stay on the right side of it. Even if the ‘loud and proud’ approach still resonates with a section of the viewing public it seems to be disenfranchising in increasing numbers. This stance was substantiated in a comprehensive research project that we undertook on behalf of Safestyle Windows, who have built a hugely successful business, largely on the back of the iconic, if sometimes annoying ‘Windows Man’ a piece of advertising gold that was clearly ahead of it’s time. Feedback showed that nowadays, whilst people clearly recalled this advertising, it often left a negative (completely inaccurate) perception of the product and the company.

This has led to the gradual introduction of a ‘softer’ more customer centric creative approach which has succeeded in delivering results without assaulting the ear drums! Interestingly around the same time other notorious TV shouters DFS and We Buy Any Car have also ‘turned the volume down’ in some of their creative treatments. Go Compare have gone a stage further by apologising and asking for previous offences to be taken into consideration.

Clearly the desire to be remembered at all costs is being outweighed by the fear of causing offence to an increasingly fickle viewer.

The City Car Club looks like a brilliant idea, we’re joining up.

Ultimately consumers can only digest a finite amount of advertising in any given period, therefore they should become more discerning about who they engage with and how they engage with them. Advertisers who acknowledge that the prospect is now more in control will be the ones who reap the benefits. Ultimately the success of mobile will only be at the partial expense of some of the more traditional channels, print perhaps being an obvious victim.

What worries me most in all the excitement is the increasing dominance of the screen in our everyday lives. Having been brought up on a strict ration of 1½ hours television a day I watch in some dismay as the generations below me flit between TV, PC, tablet and mobile without pausing for breath. It can’t be unusual for today’s teenager to spend 70% to 80% plus of their waking day directly interacting with one screen or another.Watching can never be as healthy as doing, computer games shouldn’t replace the real thing, texting just can’t be as informative as talking and even the mighty internet is a poor substitute for an active imagination.

More worrying is still, we can’t break the habit. Technology addiction clinics are springing up in hospitals all over the UK and road accidents caused by drivers and pedestrians texting on the move are a recent, worrying phenomena.

No-one can doubt that 2013 will be the media year of the mobile. The real soothsayers are the ones who can predict if and when there will be a back-lash against the screen and more importantly what might replace it.

Although it’s no new phenomena, street fundraising appears to be on the up, indeed there are certain precincts and pedestrian bottlenecks where it’s practically impossible to make it from one end to the other without receiving the familiar, over familiar approach.

It’s easy to understand and empathise with the charities concerned, when times are tight, competition for donations and new donors intensifies. Traditional print based recruitment channels are drying up and the donor age profiles they provide are getting older. The attraction of a low risk, cost efficient source of revenue is no doubt a compelling one.

Whilst all these components are measurable, what is far more difficult to quantify in the short term is the potential negative effect that this obtrusive technique might be having, on both the individual charities and indeed the sector as a whole.

Even the most polite, ‘can you spare me 5 minutes……..have a nice day’, can grate after a while, whilst some of the more robust ‘stand and deliver’ approaches can verge on the intimidating.

Remember, any brand is only really as strong as it’s weakest representative and the damage that they do can be lasting.

I still remember vividly (although it was many moons ago!), one of the first times I saw this effect in practice:

Our agency was working with Crisis (then Crisis at Christmas) to try and run a fundraising campaign on a budget that would have made a shoestring look wide!

Media choices were limited, we couldn’t afford direct mail or broadcast whilst online didn’t really exist (long time ago!). National press was our only real viable avenue, the question was how to extract maximum impact from minimal spend.

Our recommendation was to shift the proposed campaign period from November to as close to Christmas as we could get, avoiding the busy Autumn pre-Christmas media market and taking advantage of the dearth of activity and dramatically reduced ‘short term’ prices around the event itself. The nature of the charity also lent itself naturally to this timing, even allowing the opportunity for some relevant conscious pricking.

The counter balance argument was that nobody had the time or inclination to read a newspaper over the holiday period. Whilst this may have been true in part there was one crucial exception. In the pre-digital age readers relied far more on the press as a source of TV listings reference. Every national press title published a Christmas TV programme guide, this by definition had a two week shelf life and would be referred to frequently over the period. We decided to focus our campaign exclusively into these supplements.

The masterstroke was a creative execution that that glued all these variable elements together seamlessly. The charities message, the timing, the pricking of conscious, and the media environment, all combined perfectly in headline and imagery.

The picture of a homeless person sitting outside a makeshift cardboard shelter and the headline ‘Another Christmas in front of the box’ was simple, but in this environment, unmissable.

The cash poured in, way beyond even the wildest expectations of both client and agency, beating target by tenfold, making a fortune for the cause and adding several hundred invaluable fresh donors to the database.

The simple lessons behind this success are as true today as they were then:

Think laterally but logically, don’t ignore the obvious but think outside the box if you can build a case for it.

Marry the media to the message to add impact.

Never underestimate the importance of timing.

Take advantage of every variable to give you the maximum exposure for minimum investment

In the immortal words of Hannibal Smith ‘I love it when a plan comes together’.

It sells the purpose, not just the function of product. It simplifies the message, but never loses it’s power. And most importantly I think it treats it’s hero, and it’s viewer with respect. There’s no pandering to fashion, aspiration or stereotype. It shows us the world. And how in small way, how we can make it better.

The thing is, in the wrong hands a brief like this could have come out so much worse. Thank goodness it stayed human and true.