David Adedeji Adeleke (Davido)’s We Rise By Lifting Others (WRBLO) concert at the 02 Arena, in London, may have come and gone but the story of how it became a smash hit on the music streaming platform lies in the efficient use of data, says Chidi Okeke, founder of the company.
The concert which was held live at the sold-out 02 Arena on 5 March 2022, was streamed to music audiences in Nigeria and other parts of the world through the Udux platform in collaboration with MTN.
The data report of the concert from the platform showed 718,368 viewers from around the world watched the live stream making it what the company describes as the biggest livestream music event across Africa. Chidi Okeke presented the data at the ongoing second edition of the MTN Innovation Programme, at the School of Media and Communications, at Pan-African University, Lagos.
Prior to the concert, Okeke said he and the organising team needed to outline their strategies. Data played a major role in creating the strategy for the live stream. The objective was to ensure that as many people as possible tuned in from around the world.
The first step was to tap into Davido’s more than 20 million followers on social media. The followers consisted of people from different works of life, class and ages.
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The musician also had a sizable number of followers from outside the continent which would prove strategic to attracting more people to the event. This led to the recruiting of Morgan Freeman to do a voiceover of an advert targeted at the overseas audience. This proved a masterstroke that blew up the viewership figures.
MTN’s collaboration was also quite significant. UduX platform, for example, saw 4.1 million unique users visit to the site with MTN users making up 82 percent of traffic. This translated to 589061 unique users across Nigeria.
Okeke also pointed out the role SMS played in bringing viewers to the stream.
“MTN was sending out messages that looked like it was coming from Davido. Inside the SMS was a link that once you click the video takes you straight to where you will watch the video. The difference was analysing the data and understanding where your audience will be. I see people taking influencers just because she has a large number of followers. But you have to analyse her audience to understand the type of audience they are,” Okeke said.
The traffic to the uduX platform was also influenced by the timing of MTN’s activities and marketing activities. In less than 2 hours to the concert, 2.7 million people came on the platform and spent an average time of 3.07 minutes. Okeke said the company’s payment site for the UK audience crashed because the payment operator was not sure whether they were witnessing fraud activities because they had not that volume of traffic and consumers wanting to pay the five pound subscription fee. They needed to get confirmation from uduX that the transactions were real before opening up the payment channel for people to pay.
“The WRBLO2 event managed to increase brand awareness for both companies in over 100 countries. With users interacting with content from every country in the world,” Okeke said.
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