FH Strategy

FH Strategy · Across Africa · Since 2015

Nobody changes
their mind
because of a fact.

They change it because of a feeling.

Then they go looking for the fact. We are a pan-African creative transformation agency, and we spend our time finding the feeling.

Films that run on national television. Songs a country learns by heart. Platforms that keep working after the campaign has stopped.

What we found out about people

The work

What we found out
about people.

Every one of these started as a brief about a product. None of them stayed that way.

Vodacom Zaidi ya Connection key visual Film · OOH · Product

Vodacom Tanzania

Zaidi ya ____. Ni ____.

A telco spends its life arguing about speed, coverage and price. Those are the three things a customer never thinks about until something breaks. So we stopped describing the network, and asked a country to finish a sentence about it.

 HOOK by Safaricom 1M → 4M

Safaricom · HOOK

Safaricom is the plug.

Gen Z does not want brands to connect them to things. They want brands that connect with who they are.

 Shine Kenya 49% → 52%

Safaricom · Shine

Where winning begins.

Hope alone is not enough. Tools alone are not enough. People carrying a whole household need both, at the same time.

 Blaze by Safaricom KES 28Bn

Safaricom · Blaze

Be your own boss.

There were no jobs. There was extraordinary talent. Young Kenyans did not need another network. They needed somebody to believe them first.

 Flip the Script, I can marry USD 1.8M · Zimbabwe & Malawi

Flip the Script · PSI

I can love. I can marry. I can have kids. I can run.

Nobody refuses a tablet. They refuse to become the person they think the tablet makes them. So we stopped talking about treatment and started talking about what it gives back.

 Ours to Keep film still Film · anthem

WWF

Ours to keep.

A country does not protect what it is told to protect. It protects what it already believes belongs to it.

 Unilever elections social experiment Social experiment

Unilever · Kenyan elections

Nobody is born knowing which side you are on.

Every election, brands say the same word: peace. So we stopped saying it, put children on a set with two gifts each, and filmed what they did without being asked.

 National coverage

Zimbabwe · social impact

Is a cow worth more than your sister?

One in three girls married before adulthood, and everybody involved believed they were doing the right thing. You cannot out-argue a belief. You can only out-feel it.

 BADO end card Film · jingle · ten brands

CFAO Mobility · all brands

Still. Bado.

Cheap stops. Good keeps going. In Kenya the highest compliment you can pay a machine is not that it is new. It is that it is still here.

 It Starts With Me Seven markets

AGRA · YEFFA

It starts with me.

Young people did not walk away from farming because it was hard. They walked away because nobody had ever made it sound like a future.

 BYD Kenya campaign Eight surfaces

BYD Kenya

Hidden Kenya.

Nobody buys a car. They buy the version of themselves who drives it. Eight surfaces, one person, the same quiet promise on each.

 Not a campaign

Norwegian Refugee Council · IDMC

The hardest thing to fund is the thing everything else stands on.

Money follows visible delivery. A blanket photographs well; a methodology does not. So for the organisation that produces the world's displacement figures, we went and collected the evidence of its own value. Sixteen interviews, coded and synthesised, then language a donor committee could act on.

Open the work →

There is a moment, somewhere in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday, when somebody decides what they think of you.

It is not while they are reading your brochure. It is while they are half-listening to a radio in a matatu. Scrolling past you on a phone with a cracked screen. Watching a billboard go by from the back of a boda, in traffic, thinking about something else entirely.

They are not weighing your features against the competition. They are asking a much older question, and they are asking it in about a second.

Does this thing know me?

Almost nothing does. Almost everything is talking about itself.

That is the opportunity. Not to be louder than the others. To be the one that was paying attention.

This is the whole job

The receipts

Get the feeling right
and the numbers follow.

They are the receipt. They were never the point.

28Bn

Kenya shillings in revenue, generated for one client through one brand platform.

Safaricom · BLAZE

3.6M

Youth customers acquired on that platform.

Safaricom · BLAZE

65

Net Promoter Score, among the highest in African telecoms.

Safaricom · BLAZE

+300%

Growth in platform customers, one million to four million.

Safaricom · HOOK

How we think

A powerful truth
sets creativity free.

Our method is called Truth 2 Meaning. We hunt through five kinds of truth until we find the one that changes everything. Then we build something loud around it.

Culture

The macro forces shaping how people think, feel and behave. The currents your brand has to swim in.

Category

The conventions, the rules of the game, and the spaces nobody else has taken yet.

Company

The distinctive DNA. What only you can honestly say, and mean.

Consumer

Attitudes, beliefs and motivations of the people you are trying to move.

Connections

Where, when and how we earn our way into their lives. Media as behaviour, not placement.

The whole method →

The engine room

We were asked
for a campaign.
We built the machine.

A campaign stops when the money stops. So for Vodacom we built something that does not: a platform where a shopkeeper in Mwanza speaks for fourteen seconds in Kiswahili, and nine finished pieces of communication come out the other end.

WhatsApp, TikTok, Instagram, a radio script, a billboard, a press release, a sales slide, a town hall script, a regulator brief. Nobody at Vodacom wrote any of it.

See how it works →

Start something

Tell us what
you are actually
trying to change.

Not what you want to say.
What you want to happen.

Bring us the brief you were given, and the one you wish you had been given. We are more interested in the second one.

Send us a brief Our standing