CORPORATE SCENE
A Chat With Trushar
Khetia, Chief Coach
TRIA Out Of Home
Media
By Pauline Mwatu
T
rushar Khetia is a serial
entrepreneur and a visionary.
He founded Tria OOH in 2013
which is an out of home media company
that provides a platform of advertising
on Transit media in Kenya. He used
his fearless go-getter outlook to go
where few would dare to go. And he
realized that to be effective you have to
be different and that’s how Tria OOH
was founded. Pauline Mwatu hosted
him under Marketing Africa Corporate
Scene series and brings you the excerpts.
Thank you for sparing time
to sit on Marketing Africa
Corporate scene. Please
tell us more about your
background?
I did my primary in Kitale and my
secondary school in Nairobi then I was
fortunate enough to go to Manchester for
my university, where I studied business
management, specializing in Marketing.
Marketing has always been a very strong
passion, I have a lot of love for brands
and how they get created because for me
everything that you see out there in real
life once was in somebody’s head, from
somebody’s head it went to paper, from
paper it went into production. I love to
always know where things start from.
My first employment was with Procter
& Gamble, the largest FMCG company
in the UK. My role was to market their
brands in the UK’s retail outlets and
supermarket chains. That was a wonderful
experience and after spending almost
seven years abroad I decided to come back
home. From my experience abroad, I had
this passion and idea of doing something
on transit media out of mainstream media
and that’s when I started Tria in 2013.
What have been your key
Every sector we are in gives you a cap-
tive audience, it means there is a rea-
son why those guys are there, they are
either stuck in traffic, waiting for a
bus, traveling in the bus, there is a car
stuck behind a Matatu, or they are in
the shopping mall. We give you a cap-
tive audience that you can engage.
42 MAL31/19 ISSUE
milestones over the years?
We started the company from ground
zero; employment contracts for potential
employees were ready but not yet signed
because I always believed we needed to hit
the ground not even running but flying.
My aim was to secure the first client before
making any commitment on employment.
It also meant having some creative designs
as well as concepts because you are getting
into a space that had not been executed
well before. The industry was still young
and lacked the requisite creativity.
It was amazing that our first client was
Unilever! This was the time they were
launching the new pink Omo, which
they were calling Omo Fresh and they
took a leap of faith on us. We didn’t have
a portfolio or a case study to showcase.
After that we got another project from
Kenafric Industries, this time it was
Chewing Gum. All over sudden we had
momentum, and with that we were able to
secure the office, secure the contracts and
that was our major milestone!
Going back to the name
TRIA, why this name, is
there some reason behind it,
does it trigger something or
is it an abbreviation?
The concept came from actually sitting at
the doctors’ reception! You know you have
to fill in your details, you have to put in
your first name, your last name so when I
was doing that and I looked at my name