Belva Digital, in partnership with WildMango, has been awarded a Distinction for Innovation at the PMG AI & Tech Global Hackathon, held during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, for developing BelvaOS, beating other competitors from over 30 countries around the world. Belva is a marketing and technology services company based in Nairobi.
The global hackathon brought together hundreds of innovators, marketers, technologists, and creative leaders from around the world to tackle one of the industry’s biggest opportunities: how artificial intelligence can accelerate creative production without compromising strategic thinking or human oversight.
Working in an intensive 24-hour sprint, the Belva Digital and WildMango team designed and built a fully functional product prototype that analyses campaign performance, interprets emerging cultural trends, and generates evidence-based creative concepts while keeping marketers firmly in control of the final creative decisions.
The resulting solution, BelvaOS: Creative Pulse, which introduces a new approach to AI-powered creativity. Unlike conventional AI tools that begin with prompts, Creative Pulse starts with evidence. It combines historical campaign performance, creative patterns, cultural relevance, and brand guidelines to recommend and generate creative concepts that are explainable, strategically informed, and brand-safe.
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“Our vision has always been to build technology that empowers marketers rather than replaces them,” said Fred Kithinzi, Founder and Group CEO, Belva Digital. “Creative Pulse bridges the gap between campaign intelligence and creative execution, enabling brands to understand why previous campaigns succeeded before creating the next one. That means better decisions, faster execution, and more impactful marketing.”
The innovation responds to a growing challenge facing marketing teams globally. While organisations have access to more campaign data than ever before, much of that intelligence remains disconnected from the creative development process.
Teams often spend days or even weeks, moving from campaign reporting to the next creative brief, limiting their ability to respond to fast-changing consumer behaviour and cultural moments. Creative Pulse dramatically shortens that journey by connecting campaign intelligence, cultural signals, and generative AI into a single workflow that delivers actionable creative recommendations within minutes.
“AI should enhance creativity, not replace it, its how we use it to be better and faster” said Serah Katusya, CEO, Belva Digital. “This recognition validates our belief that the future belongs to solutions that combine the speed of AI with the strategic judgement and nuanced creativity of humans. Creative Pulse demonstrates how brands can create more relevant, data-driven campaigns while maintaining human oversight at every stage.”
Creative Pulse represents one of the features within the broader BelvaOS vision, an AI-powered marketing operating system being developed to help brands plan campaigns, generate creative assets, orchestrate customer experiences, launch across multiple channels, monitor performance, and continuously optimize marketing through AI.
Receiving a Distinction for Innovation at the PMG AI & Tech Global Hackathon reinforces Belva Digital’s commitment to building practical AI solutions that solve real marketing challenges while positioning African innovation on the global stage.
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