I Help Talents Understand Target Audience
From the early days of influencing, to the growth of a media and management empire, Olufemi Oguntamu has defied alloddsandwrittenalifepathembodiedbyexcellence,integrityanddistinctions.Fromhandlingcampaignsforglobal brands such as Google, Bolt, Red Bull, Microsoft, to managing one of Nigeria’s biggest comedy export, Broda Shaggi, he is surely bound for heights beyond the skies. In this interview with Tosin Clegg, Oguntamu talks about his journey in influencing, talent management, media relations, youth empowerment and much more
HMy values ardwork, being consistent, having good integrity, a good name are my values. I can work anytime of the day and I also have a good work life balance. I travel a lot, I love to have fun and even when I travel for work, I try to have fun in between. Anywhere I go, I try to make contact and relationships as I’m very big on that.
I have worked with several brands, talents
One thing I have learnt is that in as much as you have value to add, people will always come back to you even if they feel you are expensive. I have also learnt patience especially when you work with talents. So, I have learnt a lot and some clients would not like you to say negative things about them as they only want to hear only good things. From one client to another and experience to another, you build and grow your experience. At the moment, I don’t think there is any brand I can’t work with because when you do a good job it affects you positively. Again, when your client is happy, you are also happy. I have learnt that in as much as you are doing a job, you are investing in yourself also.
Penzaarville will be seven this year by God’s grace
Penzaarville has grown from being a personal project to what I will call an empire and we have
grown from being an Influencer, Marketing Agency to a PR and Talent Management company. We have handled several projects for global brands like Bolt, Red Bull, Microsoft, Google, YouTube and Several others. We have also worked on big talents like Broda Shaggi, MC Lively, Adedimeji Lateef, Mr. Macaroni and several other brands. For us, success stories
further confirm how far we have come and we hope that this is just a stepping stone to greater things to come.
I didn’t even just become a talent manager
I had talents come to me to say they needed me to take them from point A to point Z. So, looking at my experience in the media space and how I have grown my company, I was technically ready for talents management tasks. Truthfully, before you manage someone, you also need to be able to manage yourself efficiently. In managing talents, you need to be good at ensuring that there is structure and a good flow of activities. I will say that my vision for managing talents in Nigeria and beyond is to help them build a better and visible structure in line with their career projections. What I have realized so far about talents in Nigeria is that everybody is just doing their own; they don’t really bother about any other thing aside creating content. But myself and my team members continue to help talents understand their target audience; make them understand the kind of content their target want and how to effectively annex that and also aside Nigeria, globally also. We go further to look at possible ways of how their contents can be accepted globally. Many talents have come and gone but what would make you stand out is the quality of your content, the quality of what you have done and the team. Most poor talents do not have a great team around them, they do everything themselves and eventually when they get into one issue
or the other, they fall.
The rise of creative talents today
First, because of the state of things in Nigeria, everybody is looking for ways to survive and the entertainment industry has come as a form of survival for people so I won’t blame a lot of people going into it. We need to also understand influencer marketing is big and because the skit makers make a lot of money from what they are doing, we have a lot coming into the industry. So, it’s helping us economically as people are earning more as skit makers. And statically have shown that Nigerians are number one in the world in the use of social media and we consume content more.
Nigerian talents are accepted with elegance globally
Through the effective use of social media in recent years, we found out that it is helping us positively in this line of global recognition, acceptance and interaction. It can’t take up to 24 hours for someone to just blow up from Nigeria and become very popular and become a sensation across the world. It goes down to how viral the content of that person is at that particular period of public engagement online. As a result of this, we can see that we are now having more continental tours and local tours. It is apparent that, people are consuming our content more, specifically in the field of entertainment. I will say that it is a huge one now and the acceptance is great.