The engine room
A campaign stops
when the money stops.
So sometimes we build something that does not.
Occasionally the honest answer to a brief is not a campaign at all. It is a piece of machinery that keeps producing the campaign after we have gone home.
Every brand in Africa says it wants authentic stories from real customers. Almost every one of them then builds a form.
Headline. Summary. Long-form story. Impact statement. Upload a photograph. Tick the consent box.
That is an editor's job, handed to a shopkeeper in Mwanza who has forty seconds and one working hand. It is why those archives are always empty, and why the three stories that do arrive were written by the agency.
People will not write for you. They will talk to you.So we stopped asking anybody to write anything.
Built for Vodacom Tanzania
One sentence.
Fourteen seconds.
The campaign device became the product mechanic. A contributor does not submit a story. They finish a sentence, out loud, in Kiswahili.
Zaidi ya ____. Ni ____.
-
01
They speak
Consent, who and where, then hold the speechmark and talk. About twenty seconds. Nothing is typed.
-
02
The engine proposes
It transcribes, and offers the two blanks back. The contributor corrects two words and confirms. That is the entire submission.
-
03
A human decides
Three explicit gates, each a pass or fail with a note, against a named reviewer. Every decision lands in an audit log with a timestamp.
-
04
Nine things come out
Only once all three gates have passed. Each one drawn as the surface it will actually live on.
The output
Nine finished pieces.
Nobody at the client
wrote any of them.
The dark chat thread. Quote card, message, and a playable voice note with its waveform.
TikTok
A 9:16 screen with the photograph, supers burnt in, action rail and caption.
The post. Avatar ring, carousel frame, actions row, caption with its hashtag.
Radio
A sixty-second script with speaker cues, in Kiswahili.
Billboard
A 48-sheet, logo placed, credit strip set.
Press
A release sheet, ready to send.
Sales deck
A 16:9 enterprise slide for the commercial team.
Town hall
An internal sixty-second script.
Regulator brief
An evidence sheet with its full source trail.
What it changes
The marketing team
stops writing
and starts choosing.
The cost of a story collapses, because the expensive part was never the production. It was the writing, the chasing, the approvals and the translation.
The archive fills, because contributing takes twenty seconds instead of twenty minutes.
And the brand gets something it cannot buy: a public record of what the country said it was for, in the country's own words, with consent on file and a named human being behind every decision.
There is a second layer underneath: what people name, ranked against what it turns out to be for. That is the part the client pays for. Contributors never see it, and never should.
How it is bought
It is licensed,
not commissioned.
The engine is ours. You license it, configure the front door to your brand and your language, and run it for as long as it is useful. It is not a retainer, and the intellectual property is not assigned.
Where it fits
Any organisation that needs a continuous supply of true stories from people who will never fill in a form: telcos, banks, development programmes, ministries, membership organisations, anybody running a national footprint.
What we need from you
A reason for people to speak, somebody empowered to approve, and a decision about where the line sits between what is published and what stays internal. We handle the rest.