Belva Digital, in partnership with WildMango, has been awarded a Distinction for Innovation at the AI & Tech Global Hackathon for developing Belva OS, an AI-powered prototype designed to empower marketers.
The achievement was announced during the hackathon, powered by advertising agency PMG and held alongside the prestigious Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in France. The two Kenyan teams competed against over 120 registrants from more than 30 countries, including innovators, marketers, technologists, and creative leaders.
The winning prototype, Belva OS – Creative Pulse, was designed during the intense 24-hour hackathon to tackle a growing challenge facing marketing teams: bridging access to intelligence-sourced campaign data with the creative development process to shorten concept generation and execution.
Belva Digital Founder Fred Kithinzi explained that the creativity tool combines historical campaign performance, cultural relevance, and brand guidelines to generate creative concepts that empower marketing strategies for brands.
“Creative Pulse bridges the gap between campaign intelligence and creative execution, enabling brands to understand why previous campaigns succeeded before creating the next one,” Kithinzi said. “That means better decisions, faster execution, and more impactful marketing.”
The prototype helps marketers analyse campaign performance, interpret emerging cultural trends, and generate creative concepts. It sources information from social channels on what drives performance and what the human eye might be missing, generating a “creative DNA” anchored on what drives engagement for a product.
WildMango co-founder and Belva Digital CEO Serah Katusya emphasised that the tool will now enable marketers to enhance the creativity of their campaigns while maintaining human oversight.
“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,” Katusya said. “Creative Pulse demonstrates how brands can create more relevant, data-driven campaigns while maintaining human oversight at every stage.”
The hackathon challenged participants to tackle how AI can accelerate creative production without compromising strategic thinking or human oversight. France-based Christophe Conil of The Garden of Emergent Organisms also received the same distinction in the category for his unique approach to solving the complex nature of the brief within a tight, single system.
Judges for the hackathon consisted of representatives from Reddit, Luma AI, Koddi, and PMG. According to PMG, WildMango, alongside four other winners in different categories, won a share of the $500,000 prize pool.
The prototype allows brands to run product drives to specific audiences, making it easier to define objectives and anchor an intelligence layer on what they want to achieve, positioning Belva Digital and WildMango at the forefront of AI-driven marketing innovation on the global stage.
