How Samuel Ajiboye is building 2 AI agents to rewire Africa’s billboard industry

Billboards have long been part of the landscape across Africa’s busiest highways and city centres. Brands pour money into them. Audiences pass them daily. But for decades, no one could tell you with any certainty who actually saw what, when, and where.

Samuel Ajiboye saw that uncertainty and decided to close it.

Ajiboye is the founder of Alpha & Jam Africa, an advertising infrastructure company that sits at the intersection of media, technology, and large-format urban installations.

Samuel Ajiboye, founder, Alpha and Jam (L)

Over the past decade, while the global advertising industry shifted its obsession to digital, Ajiboye was quietly repositioning outdoor advertising to compete on the same terms, building what he describes as a data-driven digital ecosystem around the physical screens that define African city life.

He is not simply selling billboard space. He is rebuilding the entire architecture that sits behind it. The inspiration, he says, came from a structural gap no one in the market had resolved.

That sentence, spare as it is, contains the full logic of everything Alpha & Jam Africa has built since.

Ajiboye, who won The Future Awards Africa Prize for Media in 2019, recognised that outdoor advertising in many African markets was largely analogue. Brands booked billboard space through multiple vendors, campaign performance was difficult to measure, and advertisers had limited visibility into whether their creative was actually reaching audiences.

The answer he built is called Candle.

Samuel Ajiboye’s Candle platform: the Google Ads of outdoor media

Candle is a platform that brings automation, measurement, and data analytics to out-of-home advertising. Ajiboye describes it in terms familiar to anyone who has ever run a digital campaign.

The comparison to Facebook ads is deliberate. For years, the central argument for digital advertising over outdoor was precision. You could target, track, optimise, and report. Outdoor offered none of that. Candle is Ajiboye’s answer to that argument.

The platform aggregates and manages content across digital billboards, powers the screens themselves, and tracks anonymous audience data to show advertisers how many people likely saw their campaigns.

Instead of estimates, brands can analyse pre-campaign, in-campaign, and post-campaign data to understand visibility across routes, locations, and time periods.

One of its proprietary tools, CEGR (Car Economic Grading Ratio), profiles the socioeconomic characteristics of audiences encountering billboard campaigns. By analysing vehicle patterns and traffic behaviour, the system estimates the potential income segment of viewers in real time. For brands seeking to reach specific demographics, such insights traditionally required expensive market research, if they were available at all.

The business model follows the logic of platform economics rather than media sales. “Candle is free, not for sale. It’s like Uber. It never asks the driver to pay money before they download the Uber app. It helps you make more money. Just like Uber, Candle does not control your screen,” Ajiboye explained. Independent billboard owners connect to the platform; the data infrastructure does the rest.

Candle has already raised over $10 million in funding and has facilitated more than $102 million in advertising spend. Alpha & Jam Africa’s next step is a retail version of the platform that will allow agencies, brands, and smaller businesses to buy digital billboard inventory directly, lowering the entry barrier for outdoor advertising in the same way social media did for digital.

The physical side of the business is equally ambitious. Ajiboye’s philosophy on built installations comes down to two words.

“Out-of-home advertising is two words in summary that guide our thinking across markets — impact and landmark,” he shared. Nowhere is that clearer than Olympia, a massive mixed-format advertising structure Alpha & Jam Africa developed in Lagos, located beside the National Theatre and the Wole Soyinka Centre for Art and Culture.

The structure combines two static panels measuring 100 by 30 metres each with a 30 by 4 metre LED digital display. Positioned along the Eko Bridge corridor, the site reaches more than 11,000 vehicles per hour, while the nearby Lagos Blue Line rail corridor carries more than 250,000 passengers daily. “It is a landmark. By placing it beside the National Theatre, we anchored it to a symbol of national aspiration and gathering,” Ajiboye stated.

The AI layer that makes Samuel Ajiboye’s vision complete

If Candle is the infrastructure play, artificial intelligence is where Samuel Ajiboye’s vision gets most ambitious.

He believes AI has already changed the economics of content production for digital screens at a fundamental level.

That shift alone has significant implications for the outdoor advertising market, where production costs have historically been a barrier for smaller advertisers.

Candle is building two AI-powered systems to extend that advantage. The first, GenieLabs, is an enterprise content development agent designed to help brands automatically generate advertising creatives aligned with their brand guidelines and compliant with advertising regulations across different markets.

The second, ARGO, is an AI-powered advertising management agent that enables advertisers to define their target audience and allows the system to handle granular media targeting across connected digital screens.

Together, these tools shift billboard advertising from manual planning to AI-assisted optimisation, a category that does not yet exist at scale in any African market.

Against the backdrop of global advertising giants, Ajiboye is clear about where the competitive edge sits. Google, Netflix, TikTok, and the rest compete aggressively for the same marketing budgets that outdoor advertising courts. His answer to that competition is direct. “The trick is the ability to deliver reliable data that helps brands make optimal use of their advertising budgets,” he expressed.

The longer bet, though, is on something larger than advertising yield. Samuel Ajiboye believes cities themselves are gradually becoming programmable environments, where digital screens, public infrastructure, and data systems work together to communicate information in real time.

Billboards, in that future, function less like static advertising surfaces and more like urban communication channels, delivering live content, public information, brand messaging, and contextual updates simultaneously.

Rather than competing with digital media, physical media is simply entering its own digital era. And across the highways, bridges, and cultural landmarks of African cities, Samuel Ajiboye is already building what that era looks like.

Read also: FG disbands Advertising Standard Panel for permitting ‘All Eyes on the Judiciary’ billboards

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