Inside Northern hills company, the agency building brands across

By Damilola Fatunmise

Some agencies specialise, and then there are agencies that have developed a capability set so precise and so transferable that the industry becomes almost irrelevant. Northern Hills, the Lagos-based growth marketing and technology agency founded in 2018 by Ayokunle Odebiyi, is the second kind.

The agency’s client list reads like a deliberate exercise in range. Guinness. Unilever. Taeillo. Pawnith. CAFA. Egbaliganza. Dubai Expo 2020. Ehingbeti. Consumer goods. Technology startups. Cultural movements. Economic institutions. Personal brands. Each one a different context, a different audience, a different set of business objectives. Each one served with the same core services that Northern Hills has built its reputation on: growth marketing and strategy, digital media buying, technology and AI integration, and content storytelling.

What connects every engagement on that list is not the sector. It is the outcome the agency is always working towards, what Odebiyi describes as irrational loyalty. The state in which a brand’s audience relationship has moved beyond rational preference into something emotional, durable, and genuinely resistant to competitive pressure. That is what Northern Hills sells. That is what it consistently builds.

For consumer brands like Guinness and Unilever, the work is about maintaining and deepening the kind of audience relationships that these businesses have spent decades building, in a digital environment that changes the rules of engagement faster than most large organisations can adapt. Northern Hills provides the strategic agility and digital execution capability that allows established brands to move at the speed their audiences now expect.

For technology startups like Taeillo and Pawnith, the work is about something different but equally critical, building a real audience from a standing start, converting that audience into customers efficiently, and retaining those customers long enough to generate the compounding growth that turns a promising startup into a sustainable business. The agency’s combination of data-driven media buying, AI-informed analytics, and content strategy gives it a toolkit that maps directly onto what early-stage and scaling technology businesses need.

For cultural and institutional platforms, Egbaliganza, CAFA, Dubai Expo, Ehingbeti, the work is about credibility, reach, and the ability to tell a complex story simply and compellingly across the digital channels where the relevant audiences actually live.

Different briefs. Different contexts. The same standard of output.

Northern Hills was founded in Lagos in 2018. It operates across West Africa and beyond. It has spent the better part of a decade building quietly and consistently, not as the loudest agency in the market, but as one of the most trusted. The brands such as Diageo, Guinness Nigeria, Unilever, CANON, Vantage Markets, Unicaf, AMVCA, Golden Penny Foods, Olam, Cashtoken Reward Africa. Access Diamond Bank, Polaris Bank, 9Mobile, and technology companies, including Klasha, INQ, Taeillo and Pawnith are evidence of that trust. The results those brands have achieved are evidence of what Northern Hills does with it.

Northern Hills is an African-based growth marketing and technology agency.