Safaricom, in partnership with YouTube, has kicked off the #ShorterIsBetter YouTube Shorts Challenge which will see up to 3 million customers awarded data and cash prizes worth Kshs 60 million when they purchase a YouTube data bundle or upload YouTube Shorts videos.
The 60-day promotion, which is open to all Safaricom Prepay and PostPay customers, will run from 25th November 2022 to 23rd January 2023. It comes a month after Safaricom, and YouTube partnered to promote and grow short video content by introducing a Kshs 10 YouTube data bundle that gives customers 1GB valid for one hour.
YouTube Shorts is a new short-form video experience for creating short, catchy videos using mobile phones on YouTube.
Launched in India and several countries in September 2020 following the ban of TikTok in India, the popular short video app that it competes with, YouTube Shorts started rolling out to more countries the following year, arriving in Kenya in July 2021 as a feature inside the main YouTube app.
YouTube Shorts are vertical videos that are 60 seconds or less in length.
To participate in the promotion, customers can purchase the Kshs 10 YouTube bundle via the MySafaricom App or via the *544# shortcode. They will be presented with three lucky numbers, and, upon selecting one, they will receive a response confirming a data bundle or M-Pesa win or an option to try again later. Daily prizes include 100MB, 250MB or 500MB data bundles across 60 days, while customers also stand a chance to win weekly M-Pesa prizes of Kshs 1,000, 2,000 or 3,000 across 6 weeks.
Customers can also participate by uploading an original YouTube Shorts video and submit their entry via the Safaricom website or *544#. All video entries must be tagged with the challenge’s official hashtag, #ShorterIsBetter, and must comply to YouTube’s Community Guidelines. Participants will win based on the number of likes the video uploaded has received.
Weekly prizes for the video challenge include Kshs 2,000, 5,000, 10,000, 15,000 or 20,000 M-Pesa for 4 weeks, while a grand draw at the end of the challenge will see 6 content creators win Kshs 1,000,000 each. Winners will be announced every Monday by 6.00 PM on Safaricom PLC’s social media pages starting from 5th December 2022.
The promotion is part of Safaricom’s brand campaign dubbed “Tuinuane,” which aims to encourage Kenyans to uplift one another.