When the Confederation of African Fashion announced its partnership with the Lisabi Festival for Egbaliganza 2025, most people saw another cultural event.
Ayokunle Odebiyi saw a blank canvas for the biggest digital love letter to Yoruba pride Nigeria has ever witnessed.
The numbers dropped this week and they are ridiculous. About 135 million impressions, 31 million unique users reached, and. here is the kicker: 95 percent of those users had never engaged with the brand before.
In an era where Nigerian campaigns struggle to break 10 million organic impressions, Odebiyi and his team at Northern Hills Nigeria just printed 13 times that, and made it trend for days on TikTok and X.
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“People kept asking how we did it. The truth is simple: we didn’t sell an event. We sold identity,” Odebiyi tells BusinessDay.
The playbook was deceptively straightforward. Instead of dry press releases and poster designs, Northern Hills flooded the timeline with short-form stories: a 19-year-old designer tracing her aso-oke patterns to her great-grandmother in Abeokuta; a London-based Yoruba influencer wearing Egbaliganza pieces at Notting Hill Carnival; a skit comedian turning Egbaliganza into the new Japa slang.
Every piece of content carried three non-negotiables: Yoruba language (subtitled), recognisable cultural symbols, and unapologetic pride.
The result? Celebrity retweets from the likes of Funke Akindele and Odunlade Adekola, Gen Z creators doing the Lisabi walk challenge, and diaspora Yorubas posting childhood photos with the caption “This is why I’m coming home for Egbaliganza 2025.”
Behind the virality was cold, hard data. Odebiyi’s team used real-time listening tools to track which Yoruba phrases were spiking (“Ẹ káàbọ̀,” “Ìlú Lisabi,” “Aṣọ òkè”) and doubled down instantly. When a single video of an elderly woman praying in Yoruba for the festival crossed 2 million views in 24 hours, they pushed N500,000 more ad spend into lookalike audiences, pure platform mastery.
This isn’t Odebiyi’s first rodeo. In 2022, he pulled 223 million impressions for the Ehingbeti Lagos Summit with a 25.46 percent conversion rate. In 2021, his Dubai Expo 2020 Nigeria Pavilion campaign scored an 89 percent positive sentiment, the highest for any African country. The man has turned impression into a Yoruba word.
Further exemplifying his impact in education and youth empowerment, Ayokunle led the Canon Junior Academy digital campaign, which introduced photography training to Nigerian kids. With over 9 million impressions and over 1,000 kids trained, the campaign emphasized practical skills aligned with future technology trends. His dedication to transforming educational initiatives into standout experiences shone through in the heartfelt testimonials from participating families.
Ayokunle’s campaigns do more than trend, they transform perception, engage communities, and drive tangible action through his unwavering mission to turn every project into an exceptional campaign. His blend of creativity and analytics continues to make Northern Hills Digital a top choice for ambitious brands and cultural institutions alike.
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But ask him about his proudest metric from Egbaliganza and he doesn’t mention the 135 million. “It is the 95 percent first-time engagers. We didn’t preach to the choir. We brought new people into the conversation about who we are as Yoruba people. That is the real win,” he says.
As African brands continue to chase Western validation on global stages, Odebiyi is doing the reverse, in that, he is using global platforms to remind Africans who they are, in their own languages, on their own terms. And right now, nobody in Nigerian digital is doing it louder. His blend of creativity and analytics continues to make Northern Hills Digital a top choice for ambitious brands and cultural institutions alike.
