Engagements and method
We establish what is being said about you across your state, which of it is spreading on its own and which is being paid for, what it will cost you, and what to do about it. We show you how to do it, and who on your side should do what. Then we stand by for the morning it breaks. We do not manage campaigns, write speeches, produce advertising or operate accounts.
Engagements
Delivered within three weeks of signature. Every live claim about you, plotted by ward and by platform, with the carriers named, the reach measured, and each claim assessed as genuine or manufactured. It tells you what you are actually fighting before you spend a naira fighting it.
The same day, the same hour, every week, for the life of the engagement. What changed since the last brief, what it means, what to do first, and who on your side is accountable for doing it. Two pages, not twenty.
Live through campaign periods and standing by for the morning something breaks. An allegation, a leaked document, a court date, a defection, a recording that may or may not be you. You get a verdict on what is true, a recommendation to starve it or answer it, and if the answer is to answer, the words themselves.
Engagements run the full ladder, from a local government chairmanship to the presidency. Every one carries a ward observer network across the local government areas of your state, and a named analyst who answers your questions within twenty-four hours on working days. During a campaign the response desk runs seven days. The minimum term is six months from signature, or through to the election, whichever is longer. Fees are issued on enquiry.
How we work
Anyone can tell you that people are talking. The work is establishing what they are saying, whether they mean it, and what it will do to you.
Five parts. Four to see it coming, one for when it arrives.
Measurement
We do not count mentions. A mention is not a fact about your politics; it is a fact about a platform’s traffic. We work in narratives, and a narrative has three parts: an actor, an action, and an implied consequence. “He took the money” is not a narrative. “He took the money, that is why the road was never built, and he will do it again with your money” is one, and that is the thing that moves votes.
For each live narrative we establish four things.
Collection
Commercial monitoring tools read the open internet. Nigerian politics is not on the open internet. It is on WhatsApp, on radio phone-ins, in the market, at the motor park, and in the church and mosque announcements. No dashboard can see any of it. So we collect in three tiers.
Broadcast, print and the open platforms, captured continuously and archived with timestamps, so that what was said on a Tuesday can still be proven on a Friday after it has been deleted.
Radio is still the most politically consequential medium in most Nigerian states, and it is almost entirely unmonitored. We listen to the phone-in programmes, in the languages they are conducted in, and log what callers actually say.
People who live in the ward, reporting weekly on what is being said where they live: at the market, at the viewing centre, in the groups they already belong to. They report what they hear in the ordinary course of their lives. They do not join anything, pose as anything, or ask questions on our behalf.
The collection boundary. Our observers report what circulates in shared and public settings. We do not infiltrate private groups under false identity, we do not obtain private communications, and we do not surveil private individuals. We are not an intelligence service and do not behave like one, and a client who wants that is not a client we can take.
Judgement
This is the judgement you are paying for, because the response to each is opposite. A genuine grievance treated as a smear campaign gets worse and takes your credibility with it. A paid operation answered as though it were real public feeling gets funded by your own attention.
We assess against a fixed set of indicators: timing patterns, account histories, phrasing that repeats verbatim across supposedly independent voices, distribution running ahead of any plausible organic path, carriers with no prior interest in the subject, money visibly moving, and reach that does not match the carriers’ real audiences.
Three independent indicators, named in the report, or we do not call it coordinated.
Every judgement carries one of four confidence levels: established, probable, possible or insufficient. The level is stated in the brief, not buried in a footnote. You are entitled to know the difference between what we know and what we suspect, and to spend your money accordingly.
Response
Everything above is diagnosis. This is the part you will call at six in the morning.
A certificate is questioned. A memo leaks. A ward leader defects on camera. A judgment lands. An old clip resurfaces, cut so that it means the opposite of what you said. A recording appears that is either doctored or simply badly timed. By midday the room is having the argument it always has, which is whether to answer it or let it pass.
That argument is expensive because both answers are sometimes right. Answer a story that was dying and you feed it. Ignore one that was building and you hand your opponent a week of free ground. The judgement is worth more than the drafting, and you have hours to make it.
What is actually true, what can be proven, and what cannot. We separate the three before anyone drafts a word, because a response built on the wrong one of them becomes the second story.
Where it first appeared, who carried it in the first hour, and whether the spread since is organic or bought. A story with three paid carriers and no market conversation behind it is a different problem from one the market started itself.
Whether it is accelerating or already dying, and whether it will still be alive on Friday. Most claims die unfed. Knowing which ones is the whole value of the call.
Starve it, or answer it. With the reasoning stated, so that you can overrule us knowing exactly what you are overruling.
If the answer is to respond, you do not get a strategy memo. You get the statement, the person who should deliver it, the channel and the hour, drafted and ready to publish while the story is still moveable.
Whether the response landed, whether the story moved, and whether a second beat is needed or the matter should now be dropped.
A convincing fake of your voice now costs almost nothing and takes minutes to make. The damage is done in the first six hours, before any denial reaches the people who heard it.
We will not claim to detect fabrication with certainty. No honest firm does. The detection tools are unreliable, and a confident wrong answer is worse than no answer. So we work the questions that are answerable: where the file first appeared and how it travelled, whether the event it shows could have happened at all given where you actually were and who was with you, and what a technical examination can and cannot support.
The doctrine is the same as for every other crisis. Say only what can be stood behind, never over-claim, and never let the denial become the story. A denial that overstates its own certainty is a second scandal waiting to be found.
Accountability
Thirty days after every election we work on, we take every judgement we made during the engagement and score it against what actually happened. Which narratives we called correctly, which we missed, which we called coordinated that turned out to be genuine, and which recommendations worked.
We publish the result annually. Firms in this business do not do this, which is precisely why it is worth doing. Over three cycles, a documented and improving accuracy record is a thing a competitor cannot manufacture and cannot buy.
Refusals
We do not fabricate polling. We do not generate synthetic audio, video or imagery of any person. We do not operate inauthentic accounts or purchased amplification. We do not manufacture support that does not exist. We do not surveil private individuals or obtain private communications.
Our assessments are worth what they are worth because we do not do these things. We would rather lose an engagement than the standing that makes the next one possible.
Tell us the office, the state and the timeline. We will tell you whether the race is open and what the work would involve.