I came to marketing by accident, and stayed on purpose.

I studied geology because I was curious about the earth. I still am. The plan was petroleum engineering, and I got the admissions to go and study it abroad — but not the funding, and then COVID arrived before I’d finished NYSC. Every attempt to leave Nigeria ran into a document that wasn’t ready or a policy that had just changed.

What I found instead was Neo Cloud Technologies, a tech company about three months old, where I took a marketing job I assumed was temporary. It wasn’t. Six years later it’s the thing I’m good at.

The odd part is that I’d already been doing it. In university I ran a page about my geology field trips — writing them up, shooting them, posting them, building a small audience around rocks. I lost the page. I didn’t realise until years later that I’d been practising a career.

What six years actually taught me

I came in from a science background with a rough idea of marketing and no real depth. What I had to learn was the discipline underneath it: how to research properly, how to define what a campaign is actually for, which KPIs mean something and which are decoration, how to find where an audience genuinely is rather than where you assume they are, how keywords work, how to read numbers without flattering yourself.

Since then I’ve worked across most of it. Offline and OOH. SEO. Social. Content and copy. Paid advertising across five platforms. Video — writing, directing, shooting, cutting. Design and motion graphics well enough to build what I need without waiting on anyone. Four organisations, plus side work along the way.

Every role taught me the same thing from a different angle: audiences are more specific than you think, and the job is meeting them where they already are.

I still like it when the numbers come back green. And the further I get, the clearer it is how much more there is.

What I care about now

Building things. I’ve done it at a startup with no audience, at a pan-African network of 500+ innovation hubs, and at a university that grew fast enough to hold its first convocation. Different scales, same job: find the audience, earn the attention, prove it moved something.