Mediaboss Marketing

Olumide Gbenro has never called one place "home" for long.

The 33-year-old entrepreneur grew up in Nigeria until he turned six, when his minister parents decided to move to London. Then, seven years later, the Gbenros were granted visas to immigrate to the United States through the country's green card lottery so Olumide, his parents and two siblings relocated to Columbus, Ohio.

"Being a person of color, I felt that there were certain times in my life where I just didn't feel valued as a human being," Gbenro tells CNBC Make It of growing up Black in the Midwest. "I always felt left out."

Gbenro wanted a creative life: one that was filled with travel, art and opportunities to meet people from all corners of the world. But his parents wanted him to become a doctor, lawyer or engineer.

In 2016, he finished his double master's degree in epidemiology and behavioral science at San Diego State University. He found himself caught between two paths: go to medical school and become a doctor or travel the world.

"All of my life, I just followed the rules, whether it was from my parents, religion or society," he says. "But deep down I knew that if I took the position in the PhD program, I could never go back, I could never travel abroad I'd be stuck to a lab, so I decided to say 'no.'"

Gbenro packed up all of his belongings and left the United States to see the world but it would take him years to land in Bali, his forever home.

Gbenro's first stop was Berlin, where he had friends from graduate school. He spent three months there on a tourist visa bouncing between friends' couches and hostels.

When Gbenro left the United States, he had "almost zero savings and no plan." He quickly grew his Instagram following posting travel tips, dance videos and other content. Gbenro decided to monetize his hobby: He would message other creators and businesses on Instagram and offered to help them improve their social media strategy for a fee (often $250).

Starting a remote business was "really tough in the beginning," Gbenro recalls, but soon he had a full roster of clients and enough income to make social media his full-time job. He took an online course in social media marketing that helped him structure his business, and an old friend in San Diego referred him to his first two clients.

Once his visa expired, he traveled to Mexico for four months, then went back to San Diego. "But I realized I wasn't happy living in America still," he says. "There was something about living in America that made me feel like I wasn't growing."

He continues: "As a Black man, there was a psychological trauma and pressure I felt living there, especially as an immigrant too, feeling like I didn't fit in."

Gbenro officially launched his social media marketing business, Olumide Gbenro PR & Brand Monetization, in 2018 while he was still in San Diego,collaborating with celebrity chefs, real estate agents, business coaches and more. Though he was thriving at work, Gbenro still craved a change.

One afternoon he was scrolling through Instagram and stopped on a photo of one of his friends who was traveling in Bali. She was relaxing on a beach, surrounded by lush palm trees, with a coconut in her hand.

'It looked like the perfect place to live," Gbenro says. "The difference between Bali and every other city I researched is that it seemed very peaceful all the locals, in photos online, looked genuinely happy and like they spend a lot of time in nature."

In 2019, he found an apartment in Bali through an acquaintance on Instagram, booked a one-way plane ticket and never looked back.

Since moving to Bali, Gbenro has been able to spend more on travel, dining and other hobbies as well as boost his savings. "I'm never worried about money anymore because Bali has a much lower cost of living than the U.S.," he says.

For his first nine months in Bali, Gbenro used a tourist visa. Indonesia offers tourists a single entry visa that is valid for 60 days and allows for four 30-day extensions, adding up to a six month stay.Gbenro would fly to Singapore or Malaysia for brief trips once his visa expired, then renew it upon his return.

Soon after he switched to an investor visa, which requires proof that you are contributing to the local economy. Gbenro expanded his marketing business to help people advertise their properties in Indonesia to qualify for the visa, which he renews with the localgovernment every two years.

As an entrepreneur, Gbenro earns about $140,000 per year. In addition to his consulting business, Gbenro hosts several conferences for digital nomads, including the Digital Nomads Summit, which attracts thousands of people and will be hosted in Bali this September.

His biggest expenses are his rent and utilities, which together are about $1,010 each month. Gbenro lives in a one-bedroom apartment in a building with a private gym, pool and restaurant downstairs.

He spends about $600 each month on takeout and eating out, often ordering food from local restaurants on a popular app called Gojek. Gbenro's other larger expenses include health insurance, transportation (he rents a motorbike) and travel.

Gbenro likes to travel at least once each month and often ventures to Uluwatu, a small region on Bali's southwestern tip famous for its surfing.

"I'm probably spending about the same amount of money I would each month if I was living in San Diego, but my quality of living is much higher," he says. "I'm living a life of luxury."

Here's a monthly breakdown of Gbenro's spending (as of January 2022):

Olumide Gbenro's average monthly spending

Gene Woo Kim | CNBC Make It

Rent and utilities: $1,010

Food: $600

Transportation: $98

Phone: $28

Health insurance: $137

Travel: $300

Laundry: $60

Total: $2,233

Gbenro says the most challenging part of building his new life in Bali was battling loneliness. "I was going to the beach every day, drinking coconuts and seeing beautiful sunsets, but I lived by myself and didn't have friends here," he explains.

Once he started visiting co-working spaces in Bali and attending in-person networking events, Gbenro says it became much easier to build close friendships with other expats and locals. He knows conversational Indonesian, but says a lot of people living in Bali also speak English.

"I've really been loved and welcomed by the Balinese," he says. "Everyone's always smiling there's a really genuine, heart-centered tone here that you can't get anywhere else."

Olumide and a friend out to lunch in Bali

Ruda Putra for CNBC Make It

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This 33-year-old left the U.S. for Bali and lives a life of luxury on $2,233 a monthhow he spends his money - CNBC

Inventory Base Academy has launched its new course - how to start your own inventory operation.

The new course is aimed at helping new and experienced inventory providers to understand the business processes and acumen required.

With over 70 lessons, information points and topics, the self-paced home study material covers seven areas.

These are - The Lettings Industry Landscape;Marketing to Landlords, Agents & Tenants; Sales Forecasting & Pricing Reports; Social Marketing & Branding; Business Structure; Continuous Professional Development; and Becoming a Successful Inventrepreneuer.

It outlines the legal requirements of running a successful business, it teaches providers how to create the right impression when developing leads, how to get the most out of their social media presence and build the framework that will start their service business off on the front foot.

Sin Hemming-Metcalfe, Head of Training and Development at Inventory Base Academy, says:The property market is changing and at an extremely rapid pace. Whether you agree or not, the government is intent on implementing what it sees as improvements to ensure tenant safety and hold the PRS even more to account.

The launch of the levelling up plan, removal of Section 21 and a national landlord register are yet more examples of the type of legislation the rental sector is now expected to implement and manage.

We want to help providers grasp the opportunity to build and support their client base by supporting them to respond to these challenges.

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Secrets of successful inventories revealed in new course - Letting Agent Today

On a sports talk radio show recently, a Carolina Panthers fan lamented how long it takes for true fandom to take hold for a new NFL team.

In the first few years of the franchise, he said, people would cheer for the Panthers except when their previous favorite teams came to town. Then theyd revert to being Steelers or Raiders or Packers fans again. It wasnt until a generation of children in the Carolinas grew up as Panthers fans that the team developed an intensely loyal fan base.

Thats one mans theory, but it makes sense. And its something the National Football League seems to understand on a molecular level. For professional football to remain profitable in the long term, it needs not only the devotion of grown-ups, but of children.

This is a problem for the NFL, since young Americans are increasingly uninterested in professional football, and in other sports as well.

A 2020 survey found that fewer than a quarter of Generation Z watch a sports game weekly and nearly 40% dont watch sports at all. They might tune into the Super Bowl at 4:30 p.m. MST this Sunday, but not necessarily to watch the Bengals and Rams. More than any other age group, young adults are the most likely to say they only watch the broadcast to see the commercials and possibly the halftime show.

As a 2019 article in Sports Illustrated said, Youth appeal is a bigger NFL business concern than protests or concussions. As such, the league is aggressively marketing itself to young Americans, using social media such as Instagram and TikTok, and the video game franchise Madden. A little more than a year ago, Conor Orr wrote for Sports Illustrated, The attempts to reach younger viewers are not yet at the level of outright pandering.

One might say the pandering arrived with the NFLs partnership with childrens network Nickelodeon, which has broadcast two games replete with animated slime cannons that celebrate touchdowns. While the broadcast might have been aimed at children, one of my colleagues reports that she has 30-something friends who watched and loved it. Nickelodeon also has a series called NFL Slimetime that features child-friendly game highlights, interviews with players and segments highlighting teams.

Will it work? As with the development of the Panthers fanbase, it will probably take a generation to see. But for all the NFLs clever marketing, the league has kid problems that are tougher to solve, the first one being that, when not sanitized and edited for Nickelodeon, the games themselves are not always child-friendly.

In this, Im not speaking of the gladiatorial nature of the sport and the inherent violence of 250-pound men tearing into each other. Broadcasts are quick to cut away when someone is hurt, and injured players are quickly whisked into tents.

Its the experience of going to games that are famously unwelcoming for families, so much so that on online forums like Quora and Reddit, people ask if its OK to take a child to a game. The answers often note that its pretty much a given that there will be drunkenness, foul language and generally boorish behavior outside the stadium and in the stands, more so at night games. In other words, take your chances, better at an afternoon game.

Of course, fans behaving badly is not unique to football, and anecdotally, there seems to be this lately, from fans verbally abusing players to throwing water bottles to running on the Super Bowl field. Also, theres more opportunity for bad behavior to be filmed and posted on YouTube, like this verbal altercation at a Raiders-Ravens game last September. Imagine sitting by those guys with your 7-year-old.

Five years ago, The Washington Post examined where and when violence was most likely to occur in NFL stadiums (then, the Chargers had the most arrests; the Panthers, the fewest, and the most incidents occurred during evening games). Likely, many of these incidents are related to alcohol consumption; researchers say nearly half of people going to NFL games consume alcohol, and a third report that they start drinking two hours before the game, a practice so common that it has a name: pregaming.

The NFLs biggest kid problem, though, has nothing to do with any of this, but is the fact that, thanks to Americas declining fertility rate, in coming decades, there will be far fewer children for them to woo, on Nickelodeon and elsewhere. If trends go unchanged, American women will have roughly half the number of children they had in the 1950s, an average of 1.78 throughout the course of their childbearing years. This has sobering implications for every aspect of American life, so much so that there ought to be a Super Bowl ad encouraging people to have children, like one Denmark produced a few years ago.

Already, people are looking at what effect a declining birthrate might have on participation in youth sports, in decline because of competition with myriad other activities and concerns parents have about concussions. These concerns will eventually confront the number-crunchers at the National Football League as well, and no amount of green slime will help. Do it for Denmark, that nations pro-fertility ad urged reluctant couples. Do it for the NFL, ours might say.

See original here:
Super Bowl LVI: When is it, and why is the NFL being marketed to kids? - Deseret News

Writers Note: Spoilers for Spider-Man: No Way Home ahead.

Today, it is hard to imagine a blockbuster movie hitting the big screen without an extensive promotional campaign. From interviews to ad spots to teasers and trailers, production houses make sure that going into the weekend of its release, everybody is talking about their movie. Having said that, until not too long ago, films didnt consider an extensive promotional campaign a priority, much less a crucial part of their success.

That all changed in 1975 when the marketing team at Jaws released a poster that would reverberate around the world for years. At the time, Jaws looked like it was going to be an expensive disaster, with the movie taking 159 days to shoot, almost three times longer than what was planned, and its protagonist, a robot shark, barely working. In order to rescue what seemed like a lost cause, Universal, the production house behind Jaws, poured over $1.8 million into the films marketing campaign an amount that took its production budget up to $9 million, more than any other movie released that year. The result: It went on to become the first American movie in history to cross the $7 million mark, paving the pathway for how production houses market their movies to this day.

On Jan. 17, exactly one month after its release, Spider-Man: No Way Home beat Avengers: Infinity War to become the fifth-highest grossing movie in the U.S. box office, making more than $650 million. As of Feb. 3, it sits fourth on the list of highest grossing films in the U.S., making over $730 million. Presumably, those $730 million will go a long way towards making up for the reported $202 million spent by Marvel on the films marketing. Although it is commonplace for movies to use the wide range of social media sites at their disposal for promotional purposes, the latest installment in Peter Parkers misadventures pulled out all the stops, raising the question: How much marketing is too much marketing?

The answer varies from one situation to the next, but the marketing campaign for No Way Home most definitely split opinions before its release. Between the movies Twitter and Instagram, the Official Daily Bugle TikTok and the countless interviews, trailers and promo videos posted by Sony and Marvel, fans were treated to a barrage of content in the weeks leading up to the film. In the 40 days before its worldwide release, the movies Instagram made 59 posts, and has made a further 63 since, averaging roughly three posts every two days. Even online communities far removed from the world of comic book movies found the likes of Tom Holland and Zendaya popping up on their screens, with the duo making appearances at the Ballon dOr (aka the Oscars of the soccer world) and even interviewing players from Tom Hollands favorite soccer team. Spidey fan or not, if you were on the internet in the month leading up to the movie, at the very least you heard about it.

There is an argument to be made that such an extensive, in-your-face promotional campaign could discourage some viewers from avoiding them and potentially even the movie entirely. Prior to watching the film, LSA sophomore Arjun Arora said, I havent seen any of the trailers. I dont know anything and I actually like that. Nevertheless, Marvel and Sony were well aware of who made up the majority of their fanbase: the comic book community. A community that thrives on speculation, ardent fans of the webslinger and the Marvel Cinematic Universe welcomed the barrage of posters and movie footage Marvel and Sony sent their way. From YouTube to TikTok, the internet was rife with theories and predictions as fans looked into every frame and charted out every possibility to such an extent that the online community became pseudo marketing officials themselves.

What added to all of the excitement were the leaks an eventuality Marvel and Sony, with all their experience over the years, knew was inevitable. However, the spoilers might have worked to their advantage this time around. People werent complaining about the amount of promotional content being released, because with every piece of content that did not confirm their rumors and suspicions, the anticipation grew. For example, although Alfred Molinas (The Da Vinci Code) return as Doc Ock had been leaked months before any real marketing had begun, Marvel and Sony were still able to capitalize on it. Between this leak and the release of the movies first trailer, fan speculation regarding the return of not only Doc Ock, but a litany of old Spiderman villains, was sky-high. No Way Home obliged, and, with said trailer, confirmed all the rumors floating around, resulting in the most successful opening 24 hours a trailer has ever had. It was the perfect way to kickstart a marketing campaign that would remain flawless from start to finish.

Yes, a set of innovative posters would do the trick. Even in todays time, not every marketing campaign needs to be as in-your-face as No Way Home was, and not every marketing campaign requires the use of social media. However, Marvel and Sony showed just how beneficial it can be to a movies success, commercially and in terms of popularity. Not only that, they proved that if your campaign is well planned, bombarding fans with promotional content isnt all that bad an idea, especially when theorizing is one of their favorite pastimes.Peter Parker may be Public Enemy No. 1 in the Spiderverse, but in the real world, the headlines were loving him.

Daily Arts Writer Rushabh Shah can be reached at rushabhk@umich.edu.

Original post:
How 'No Way Home' dominated the social-media marketing game - The Michigan Daily

Whats the most annoying growth hack that you see on Twitter? Overuse of hashtags? Directly asking for likes and retweets? Profiles noting that they follow back?

We recently put the question to the SMT community to glean some more insight into what bothers social media marketers the most in this respect.

Ah yes, the old hashtag every other word trick.

See, the thing is, hashtags connect users to a broader conversation, so hashtagging random words really doesnt help. Because nobodys searching through Twitter and thinking hey, I wonder what people are discussing on the #morning hashtag.

Not only is nobody searching these vague, broad match hashtags, but theyre very unlikely to want to engage with your unrelated tweets as a result. But then again, people have been misusing hashtags since the beginning of the social media era, so theyre probably not going to change their approach now either.

But for those who are guilty of this, heres what you should do:

It also depends on your focus Twitter itself advises that if youre trying to get people to click on a CTA in a tweet, that adding any hashtags at all can dilute your messaging by giving your audience an alternative to click on. If you want to drive traffic towards a specific action, it may be better to leave out hashtags entirely in order to further highlight that element.

But dont just hashtag random words. Its doesnt work, and as these insights show, people dont like seeing it.

Follow-for-follow comes in second, and has become a more desperate looking approach over time. Automated DMs have always been a no-no (and Im yet to see anyone whos used this approach effectively on Twitter), while trying to latch onto unrelated trends can also look cheap and tacky, unless you can do it well.

Which basically means not trying to latch onto totally off-topic discussions. If you can come up with a great, brand-related take on a trend, like Oreos Dunk in in the Dark tweet at the 2013 Super Bowl, that can work in your favor. But it needs to be tactical, and clever to resonate.

Being clever isnt always easy for every Wendys Twitter account, winning over audiences with sass and wit, there are many more that are trying and flaming out, or worse, offending people with their ill-planned responses.

Really, being good at Twitter isnt easy, but hopefully these notes will help you avoid some of the more common missteps and annoyances that users see.

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A Look at the Most Annoying Twitter Marketing Approaches (and How to Avoid Them) - Social Media Today