Absa puts Eliud Kipchoge at the centre of pan-African brand campaign
Image by Eliud Kipchoge
Absa Group has made Eliud Kipchoge the face of a new pan-African brand campaign, naming the 41-year-old its Official World Tour Financial Partner and featuring him in a television advert running across all its markets. The advert went live on 12 October, a day after Kipchoge won the Melbourne Marathon in a course record of 2:09:10. It was his first marathon win since Berlin in 2023, following 16th place in Cape Town in May and 12th in Porto Alegre in July. Melbourne was the third stop on his two-year World Tour, which aims to take him to a marathon on every continent, ending in Antarctica, while raising funds for the Eliud Kipchoge Foundation.
The campaign: “Story by Story”
“Story by Story” builds on Absa’s “Your Story Matters” brand platform, launched in 2024. Beyond the advert, the bank says the partnership will include customer experiences and community programmes across its markets. It has not disclosed a budget or explained how the campaign will differ from one market to another. Absa Bank Kenya held a separate launch in Nairobi on 13 October.
Kipchoge said: “Success is never achieved alone.” He also highlighted his longstanding relationship with Absa: “As a long-time Absa customer, that trust dates back many years.” For the bank, his existing relationship with the brand adds credibility to a campaign built around trust. Sydney Mbhele, Group Chief Marketing and Corporate Affairs Officer at Absa Group, outlined the commercial rationale in an August interview with the World Federation of Advertisers. Across Absa’s 12 markets, he argued, one athlete can give the bank a shared African identity without the national bias associated with sponsoring a team. A bank operating in Nairobi, Accra and Johannesburg cannot back one country’s football side without risking alienating customers elsewhere. Kipchoge offers an alternative, a Kenyan athlete whose reputation extends well beyond his home country.
Mbhele has credited “Your Story Matters” with lifting brand consideration across the group’s markets. Kipchoge gives that existing platform a recognisable face, but whether the campaign produces similar results across all 12 markets remains to be seen. The World Tour also has its limitations as a sponsorship platform. Cape Town, its only African stop, has already taken place under the Sanlam name. The four remaining races, scheduled for 2027, are in Europe, Asia, North America and Antarctica, outside Absa’s core markets. The partnership’s value for the bank will therefore depend more on its advertising rights and association with Kipchoge than on exposure at the races themselves.
South Africa is Absa’s largest market, and the bank already has a mass-participation running property in the Absa Run Your City 10K series and Kipchoge’s standing in Kenya is already well established so It will be interesting to see how the campaign resonates with customers in Johannesburg and Cape Town, and whether it helps Absa strengthen its pan-African brand.
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