Top of the Post 📥  …

• Fastest Growing Jobs in the U.S.

• Music Association Demands Protection from AI

• Podcast: Rahkim Sabree’s Deep Dive into Financial Well-Being

• Success story: Calendly’s Remarkable Rise

• Making compelling ads

Weekly Catchups

News | Industry Insights | Trends

• 💼 Fastest Growing Jobs 
  LinkedIn’s new jobs on the rise list says Chief Growth Officer, Physical Therapist, and Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion are some of the top occupations in the U.S.

•  🎶 Face the Music

  After Hollywood writers, musicians are demanding protection from AI. The American Federation of Musicians (AFM) President Tino Gagliardi said that musicians were making 75% less than they were before the streaming model. The union, representing 70,000 members across the U.S. and Canada, wants to ensure the judicious use of AI in music creation. 

• 🏡 Women Win Real-Estate 

  Sixty years ago, women couldn’t even get a credit card or a mortgage without a male consigner. Now, the share of single women homeowners is eclipsing that of single men. Solo women mortgage applicants made up 18% of the market in 2023, a share that has gradually grown since Maxwell started tracking applicants’ gender and marital status in 2021. 

Nurturing the Leader Within

Personal Development | Success Story

Worth a Shot

In many ways, Tope Awotona is a quintessential founder. The former whiz kid graduated high school two years early, earning admission to a U.S. university at 15. His professional journey started with the best: IBM and subsequently Dell EMC.

He had his fair share of failed startups that fizzled (dating sites, an e-commerce site selling gardening tools) before building Calendly, a modern scheduling software.

But Awotona’s life is a wild departure from CEO stories from Silicon Valley. Tope grew up in a lower-upper-class Nigerian household. When he was 12, he witnessed assailants shoot his father. The incident led to him developing PTSD. The insomnia lasts to this day. With the worst behind him, Awotona was ready to risk it all in the game of business, even if it meant launching Calendly from war-torn Ukraine. In 2014, he was in Kyiv partnering with a company there for his startup’s app. Awotona wanted to test the waters for long-term business. For days during the war, he traveled to offices.

39-year-old Tope poured every penny into launching his startup. He quit a stable job in the sales department of Dell EMC, emptying his retirement funds. He maxed out credit cards and took out expensive loans for a company that had not even posted a revenue yet. He met skeptics along the way. None would have imagined his meteoric rise.

Calendly got a $550,000 seed investment led by Atlanta Ventures, becoming profitable in 2016. In 2021, it took a 350 million investment from OpenView Venture Partners and Iconiq Capital at a price that valued the firm at $3 billion. In 2022, Tope Awotona was named by Forbes as the richest immigrant and Nigerian American residing in the U.S. with a net worth of 1.2 billion. 

The adoption of Calendly for enterprise teams, including 86% of Fortune 500 companies, increased by 61% year over year in July 2023.

Strategies | Tools | Marketing Tips

Ads: From Annoying to Effective

In the U.S., over 50% of adults use an ad blocker on their desktop, as per March 2021 CivicScience data. Worldwide, ad blocking has the potential to leave gaping holes in measuring and tracking ad performance, affecting the revenue generated from advertisements. 

Here are some points to consider before you get cracking on your next campaign:

• The golden rule of 3: People aware of a product but not yet interested get annoyed the quickest. Findings from market observation (analysis of 5,000 customers’ ad views in 2014) reveal that after viewing an ad 3 times, consumers have a 39.6% chance of being put off. People are more likely to notice your ads when they rotate with different creatives.

• Set up frequency caps for the lifetime of your campaign: When creating awareness or reaching people unfamiliar with your business, use a frequency cap of 3. When you are retargeting customers who’ve already visited your page/ signed up for your service, use a frequency cap of 6.

• Using standard banners: If you’re constantly using animated banners, chances are your audience will not be able to follow the message and will feel overwhelmed. 

• Audience breakup must: Effective advertising requires highly targeted segmented audiences. Segmentation tools like Facebook ads make the job easier by providing an approximate size of your audience. Learn about the various kinds of segmentation. 

  • Brand Insights

    💡L’Oreal says that 4 times is the maximum ad frequency they find effective for ads on Amazon.

    💡 Mondolez uses a frequency cap of 3 for its campaigns.

    💡Google lets advertisers limit how often ads appear, optimize targeting, and use up to 15 creatives in a campaign.

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