Local content for digital broadcasting is fast driving online advertising viewing in Nigeria and the entire globe, thus attracting more people to watch online videos on their mobile devices.

For instance, recent statistics from YouTube, showed that the top 10 ads on the Nigerian leaderboard recorded over 17 million views in 2018, a figure, which showed that local and global audience now prefer to watch ads online.

Announcing the top ads of the year in Nigeria and globally for 2018, during an interactive session with the Country Director, Google Nigeria, Juliet Ehimuan-Chiazor, said the top ads of the year represented brands that have executed the most popular ads, as determined by YouTube’s strongest signals of viewer choice – including factors like watch time, views, and mix of paid/organic views.

YouTube has over a billion users, a figure that is almost one-third of all people on the Internet, and each day the users watch a billion hours of video, generating billions of views. YouTube users spend over an hour a day watching videos on mobile.

Analysing the top 10 2018 Nigeria year-end YouTube Ads Leaderboard, Ehimuan-Chiazor, said the MTN’s ‘Traditional Wedding Day’ ad got 2.6 million views, while Jumia Black Fridays 2018 ad got 2.3 million views, and Stanbic-IBTC ‘Enabling You to be You’ got 2.1 million views.

Others were the ‘Enabling Success’ ad from Union Bank of Nigeria, which got 2.7 million views; the 919 Dance Video ad from United Bank of Africa (UBA), which got 1.6 million views; The Takeover ad from MTN MPULSE, which got 1.6 million views; The-Inlaws – Tutorial ad from Airtel Nigeria, which got 1.4 million views; Ariel Assurance ad from P&G Nigeria, which got 1.3 million views; Come Let’s Eat Together – GTBank Food & Drink 2018 ad from GTBank, which got 1.2 million views, and The new Inverter equation of home appliances from LG Inverter ad, which got 1.2 million views.

In addition, for the 2018 global year-end YouTube Ads Leaderboard, Amazon Super Bowl LII Commercial ad from Alexa Loses Her Voice, got 50.1 million views; YouTube Music: Open the world of music. It’s all here, got 39.5 million views; OPPO F7 – Real Support Makes Real Hero, got 31.7 million views; Nike – Dream Crazy, 27.3 million views; Turkish Airlines: Safety Video with The LEGO Movie Characters, got 25.2 million views; Groupon 2018 Super Bowl Commercial “Who Wouldn’t”, got 25.5 million views; Samsung Galaxy: Moving On, 17.4, got million views; HomePod — Welcome Home by Spike Jonze — Apple, got 16.3 million views; Gatorade Heart of a Lio, got 13.7 million views; while Rescue Blue the Dinosaur – LEGO Jurassic World – Pick Your Path, got 10.8 million views.

Giving reasons for the disparity in the number of local and foreign online views, Ehimuan-Chiazor said foreign ads were targeted at global audience, while the Nigerian online ads were restricted to only local audience.

She also said cost of broadband bandwidth is cheaper internationally than in Nigeria, which she said could be a determining factor why people stay longer when viewing online ad internationally than locally.

YouTube, a Google’s company, is the world’s most popular online video community allowing billions of people to discover, watch and share video.

YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers, both large and small.

•Sourced from THISDAY report

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