Dochase unveils RETAIN AI agent that cuts ad campaign planning to minutes with as low as ₦30,000

For traditional marketing agencies across Nigeria, taking a client brief from strategy and audience research to live media deployment typically takes between two weeks and a full month. On Saturday evening at the Landmark Event Centre in Lagos, programmatic advertising pioneer Chibuike Goodnews stood before a hall packed with the country’s top creative directors and brand executives to argue that this timeline is officially obsolete.

Speaking at the Brandcom Awards 2026, Goodnews, Founder and Managing Director of adtech firm Dochase, unveiled RETAIN AI, an autonomous artificial intelligence marketing agent designed to compress weeks of campaign planning, creative production, and cross-platform media buying into minutes.

The unveiling marks a pivotal transition for Dochase, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this November. Having spent the last decade building programmatic infrastructure that uses machine learning to automate ad placements across Africa, the company is now moving up the stack into agentic AI.

“Retain AI is an agent. It is like having a genius, smart young school leaver doing something for you, somebody that is going to be learning from things and improving,” Goodnews told journalists during a press session on the sidelines of the event.

As generative AI tools flood the global market, industry sceptics have questioned whether new marketing platforms are merely thin interfaces wrapped around off-the-shelf foundation models. When asked what separates RETAIN AI from basic copy-and-image generators, he pointed to Dochase’s decade-old programmatic data backbone.

Rather than asking marketers to engineer complex prompts, a user simply inputs a product website link and a social media handle into the RETAIN dashboard. The engine autonomously scrapes and analyses the product, identifies the target market, maps out four distinct ideal customer personas, explains their purchasing psychology, and recommends the exact messaging required to convert them.

“Anybody can spin up dashboards. Anybody can spin up things. But can you spin up the learnings? Can you spin up the fast improvements and the intelligence? No,” Goodnews said. “In Dochase, we have access to about 98% of all the people on the internet, and we have proprietary technologies that connect everybody. Retain lives on that to reach everybody on the internet.”

According to Goodnews, that distribution network currently encompasses data touchpoints across more than 55 million internet users in Nigeria and roughly one billion people globally, integrated alongside compliance and security partnerships with ecosystems including Google and Meta.

Breaking the big tech pricing barrier for SMEs

A core plank of RETAIN AI’s commercial pitch is dismantling the financial gatekeeping that has historically locked small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) out of serious digital advertising.

In an economy battered by inflation and foreign exchange volatility, effective customer acquisition has largely remained the preserve of established corporations with deep pockets. Goodnews argued that RETAIN AI solves a market failure that global Big Tech platforms have ignored.

“Advertising has been seen as a game for established brands. Businesses think, ‘If I have to run adverts, I have to probably put in maybe a hundred thousand or a million Naira,’” he explained. “On Retain, you can advertise with as low as ₦30,000 or ₦50,000 and start running your advertising campaigns.”

Instead of burning limited budgets on broad, uncalibrated impressions, the platform spends strictly against high-intent targets. “Retain is not just saying we are advertising to everybody. Retain is going to identify your target customers and push your adverts. So if it takes maybe 10 days for ₦50,000 to get to maybe 100 people, Retain is going to search for them until it gets them,” Goodnews added.

“Putting agencies on steroids”, not replacing them

Unveiling an end-to-end automated marketing machine inside a venue filled with traditional and digital agency heads inevitably raised the spectre of disintermediation. If a business owner can plug a URL into RETAIN AI and deploy a multi-channel campaign in minutes, why pay an agency retainer?

Goodnews pushed back firmly against the idea that Dochase is out to cannibalise agencies, framing the software instead as an operational multiplier.

“Are you not competing with agencies? I say no. We bring to agencies efficiency a thousandfold,” he said. “Typically, you have to go inside the internet, do interviews, and go offline to get data in different repositories. Retain has plugged into all of them to bring all that data to you. Retain comes to say, ‘Hey, I am going to put you on steroids and allow you to do all those things within a very short time.’”

To court established firms, Dochase has built a dedicated agency tier featuring white-label capabilities, allowing large agencies to rebrand the underlying AI infrastructure as their own proprietary client machine, while smaller shops can use the standard interface to slash turnaround times.

Addressing lingering industry doubts over whether synthetic media can genuinely connect with African consumers, Goodnews argued that the public has already moved past the debate. Pointing to the proliferation of AI-generated stories and short-form video series on TikTok and YouTube, he noted that end-users care about resonance, not production methods.

“A few years back, you were like, ‘I know this story is AI-generated; I am not going to watch it.’ But the truth of the matter is, the real consumers who make the final decisions have come to accept what is given by AI, as long as you communicate the message,” he said.

Drawing parallels to the anxiety that greeted the introduction of programmatic ad-buying in Nigeria years ago, Goodnews warned marketing professionals that resisting automation is akin to choosing a horse over a motor car. As AI levels the baseline of execution across the industry, much like it has blurred the grading lines between first-class and third-class university students, the surviving practitioners will be those who transition from manual labour to strategic command.

Looking ahead to 2027, Goodnews revealed that Dochase is already building out its next wave of adtech pipelines, with upcoming products focused on in-game advertising, automated user-generated content (UGC), and executive attribution tools designed to give CMOs and agency heads granular accountability over every Naira and dollar spent.