WHAT is Good Morning Nigeria initiative about? The Good Morning Nigeria (GMN) Initiative is a Corporate Social Responsibility project designed to help subsidize the money Nigerians spend on telecommunication.

The goal is to provide some cushion for Nigerians by giving them a platform to make free calls without spending as much as they would have spent ordinarily. And we are doing this through MTN and a couple of our partners including Leadway, Mansard, Coca-Cola, Samsung and Jumia.

So how does it work?
It is a subscription-based service. To opt in, MTN subscribers have to send GMN to 131. The caller will pay for the first three minutes of calls made between 5am and 8am while the subsequent 30 minutes will be free. Our partners, Leadway, Mansard, Coca-Cola, Samsung and Jumia are giving people opportunity to speak to their loved ones at a highly subsidized rate.

After subscribing to the service, can you make the three minutes call in batches?
Yes. For instance, if I speak with my sister for 30 minutes via the Good Morning Nigeria platform, I will pay for the first 3 minutes, and then the next 30 minutes will be free of charge to me. I could then call my mom and the subsidy still applies in exactly the same way.

In spearheading the project, what informed Media Perspective’s choice of partners and what benefits do partners derive from the project?
We wanted to work with corporate entities that already have a relationship with Media Perspectives. That way, it was going to be a lot easier to get them on-board. So virtually everybody on that list has some form of business relationship with us.

Beyond that, we also wanted to work with top brands in Nigeria, which are passionate about helping Nigerians. If you think about MTN, for instance, it has MTN Foundation, which helps more people than virtually any other corporate firm in the country. Coke also has a strong CSR platform. Ditto for Leadway, Samsung and Mansard.

So we wanted a mix of corporate bodies that would be interested in helping people. When we approached them, they were disposed to coming on-board with us.

The partners get to advertise on the Good Morning Nigeria platform. If you make a call on the Good Morning Nigeria service, you will hear an advert basically saying: Good Morning Nigeria brought to you by Coca-cola or any of the other sponsors. What happens is that Coca-Cola is getting the opportunity to speak to 61 million people on the MTN platform.

Thus, apart from the CSR platform, it is also a media-advertising platform for our partners. What Media perspectives has done is to come up with this innovative platform that will provide value to our clients and the subscribers on the MTN network.

What we are bringing to the table is the synergy between advertising and the opportunity for the brands to be responsible corporate organizations.

It is a hybrid form of advertising that gives you advertising and CSR in one package. Hopefully, we will be able to partner with a lot more brands in the future to help our people through this platform.
So how long will this initiative last?

The initial roll out is for the first 30 days after Democracy Day, May 29. We will see if we can extend it further after the first 30 days.

What has been the response so far from the public towards the initiative?
The response has been great, as they have embraced it. It is not every time you see brands coming together to give back to people. More often than not, brands are interested in taking from people. So MTN, Samsung, Coca-Cola, Mansard and Leadway are doing something extraordinary.

Think about this, when a lot of us call our families, our mothers in the village, for instance, we are always in a hurry to pass across our message and drop the call. But now, we can really talk more. We can ask about the farm produce, health and others. That is one of the beauties of this project.

You hinted at some review of Good Morning Nigeria initiative after 30 days. What are the likely modifications that we should expect?
There may be modifications depending on the uptake and how things work out. The truth is that Media Perspective is Nigeria’s number one media-advertising agency because we provide great value to our clients and also provide great value to Nigerians in general.

In line with those two objectives, we will evaluate the Good Morning Nigeria campaign and make a choice after 30 days.

You described Good Morning Nigeria initiative as a combination of advertising and CSR. Isn’t that somewhat contradictory?
In the past, the dominant way for doing good used to be charity. But increasingly, research has shown that charity is not a very effective model because it is better to teach a man to fish than to give him fish. Social Entrepreneurship is a better model because it helps organizations do good while doing well. This is the model for Good Morning Nigeria. It is a globally acceptable model that works for both brands and individuals.

And why is Media Perspectives using telecom platform to drive this?
Simply because telecom platform has the reach that other media platforms cannot boast of. When you look at the telecom platform, virtually everyone has a mobile phone in Nigeria. So as long as you use your phone, you can benefit from the service. That was the reason behind deploying telecoms for the Good Morning Nigeria initiative.

You picked MTN to drive the project. Why MTN?
MTN has the largest subscriber base in Nigeria and Sub-Sahara Africa. There is no other platform in Nigeria that reaches 61 million Nigerians. None!