Popular TV ‘witnessers’ land lucrative Safaricom deal
Modeling agencies are in trouble as the country’s largest advertiser has changed tack and is now featuring ordinary Kenyan faces in adverts.
The latest Safaricom advert features four faces that gained popularity for their dramatic eyewitness accounts of a robbery, floods, a road accident and kidnapping respectively.
Remember the Nyando woman Jane Anyango Adika famous for her distress call ‘tunaomba serikali, tuko mbaya sana‘? Well, she is among the new faces featuring in Safaricom’s ‘Stori ibambe na storo bonus‘ promotion.
Other faces to feature in the adverts are former street boy James Kang’ethe aka Bonoko, now a presenter at Ghetto Radio, who witnessed a robbery incident in Nairobi.
Joseph Mburu, also known as Jose the Witnesser and famous for his line ‘ni kama drama, ni kama video‘, is also part of the new Safaricom adverts and his TVC (video advertorial) is already airing on television stations.
Alice Wambui, the kifi kifi woman who witnessed a kidnap attempt and became a sensation in popular shows like NTV’s Bulls Eye, will also feature in the adverts.
The concept behind the latest Safaricom promotion is to have popular eyewitnesses give testimonies of the benefits of the bonus airtime.
The four are expected to mint thousands from the promotion that will appear on newspapers as well as on television and radio.
Print adverts have already started running in newspapers,with the four pictured speaking on phone.