Big Brother Naija, A Game Changer For Africa Television
Hazel Oyeye Onou now popularly known as White Money days ago emerged the winner, sixth season of reality series Big Brother Naija, sub-tagged Shine Ya Eyes edition after 90 days and nights of living in the house alongside other contestants and housemates for the entertainment of the fans.
The show a social experiment turned total game changer and social disruptor in Nigeria's media space making celebrities and influencers out of otherwise relatively to completely unknown young individuals changing their fortunes within a 90 day or less incubation period as the winner takes home millions in Naira and other winnings, like in White Money?s case running up to over NGN90 million while breeding trolls, fun memes and loads of conversations among millions of viewers.
The consistent and growing success of the BBN show has made it attractive fertile grounds for advertisers and brands to plant their visibility, with ambitious fintech companies like Payporte, Flutterwave, Kudabank and now Patricia and Abeg app making big impressions on the young audience that will make up their primary customer base among several other brand sponsors.
The show which has a viewing audience of mostly generation X-Z is estimated to have over 300 million viewers, within Africa alone then there's the diaspora and this season votes according to the MD of Multichoice John Ugbe, was over 1 billion from different platforms, showing growth from the over 900million votes from previous year and somewhat shy of 900M in the year before that - the viewership and engagement has only gotten bigger even amidst shades of criticism.
This makes BBN the most successful Big Brother franchise as the format didn't even quite take off at all in some other places; and is doing more numbers than any live tv show in the continent and possibly any where else in the world.
Title sponsor for BBN 6 is reported to have been settled at NGN2 billion, followed by NGN1 billion and NGN 200 million and then down to NGN 50 million ponied up by other category sponsors to get on, making it a major money spinner. It is quite certain it turns over good returns on investment for the advertising brands as conversations online and offline would indicate.
It may or may not be noteworthy that this season 6 is so far the only one without a disqualified contestant.
The apparent however is Big Brother Naija will be here for sometime, racking up numbers, causing huge social raucous and creating starry bread winners and we?re nothing but excited to see this playing out.
-by Ugo Mordi