Who’d have thunk it? It looks like some people in traditional Nigerian media are finally beginning to “get” new media. This morning, I happened on a Channels Television video short on YouTube, which was simply captioned “Obasanjo Dances Gangnam Style In Ghana”.
Did you say “WTH”? Yeah, see for yourself.
Our dear OBJ is obviously a feisty old man, many pray they can still caper like that when they get to his age. But to me, that’s not nearly as interesting as the fact that Channels Television is beginning to experiment with viral content. Who do we blame for this sudden bout of new media “silliness”, Buzzfeed or Linda Ikeji?
The construction of the video itself is instructive. They’ve taken a popular personality (Obasanjo), and added him to popular culture (Gangnam style), totally recontextualising the actual event (Ghanaian elections) while simultaneously increasing its LOL factor by many, many orders of magnitude. The video is also just 7 seconds long, ensuring that it is intensely easy to share. In a few days, it’s going to be hopping from phone to phone via bluetooth. Make no mistake — this video was designed to go viral.
And the experiment is working, in the Nigerian context of online virality at least. The video which was uploaded just 15 hours ago already has over 10,000 views. For context, they usually get no more than a few hundred views for their regular videos. Obviously encouraged by their first success, they’ve gone so far as to create an extended version — this time, they’ve looped the dancing part a few times to increase its “Gangnam-ness”. The extended version has earned over 5k views in its twelve hours online.
As far as traditional media outfits in Nigeria go, Channels TV is probably one of the most forward looking there is when you think about it. Their social media stats say it all. 127k Facebook fans, close to 5k videos, 14k subscribers and 3.7 million views on YouTube, 162k followers on Twitter — they’ve been plussed more than 33k times on Google+. They’ve even got a dedicated internet livestream and a slew of mobile apps. No other broadcast media organisation in Nigeria comes close. None.
And it’s not just the nifty tech and affinity for social media. Part of it is that over time, Channels TV has proven itself to be committed to some of the highest standards of objectivity in media coverage that can be found in the country, as was obvious during the Occupy Nigeria saga, earlier in the year. I’d retweet Channels Television without thinking, but an NTA News tweet would require days of scrutiny. Nuff said.
Channels Television’s visual design and graphics aren’t the best, but what they lack in aesthetic taste, they more than make up for in the quality of their execution. If there’s any old media house in Nigeria that’s going to ride the wild internet fueled wave of new media in Nigeria, they are it.
I wonder what Channels TV will do next. Setup a Tumblr and start making viral GIFs? Anyways, if you want to laugh some more, you can watch the extended version of Obasanjo Gangnam Style.
