An advertising company that learned to build the technology.

Beauld began in Nigeria as the one-stop shop for the publicity, branding, signage and advertising consultation needs of clients in Kwara State. Billboards, fleet branding, shopfronts, radio, print — the physical, unglamorous end of getting a brand in front of people who had never heard of it.

That work taught us something the digital-only agencies had to learn later and more expensively: attention is bought in the real world as often as it is bought online, and the two are worth far more together than apart.

The client list came from that period and it is the one we are still judged on — Mouka Foam, Nigerian Breweries, First Bank, Coca-Cola, Orange Pharmaceuticals, and a number of Kwara State agencies including the Health Insurance Agency, the Broadcasting Corporation and the Primary Health Care Development Agency.

The move to Canada changed the shape of the company rather than its purpose. Faced with an advertising technology market full of platforms that almost fit, we stopped specifying software and started writing it. VYPΛ, our digital signage and out-of-home advertising network, came out of that decision. edimulo, a streaming service built for African audiences, came out of the same instinct applied to content.

Today Beauld runs from Ontario and Lagos, and the two halves of the business — the agency and the software team — sit in the same room. Very few companies our size can plan a campaign, write the platform that delivers it, and hang the billboard. That is the whole proposition.