Lade Falobi doesn’t wish to save the world. “I attempt to not mission philosophical worldviews onto advertising. I’m not a physician. No person goes to die if a B2B SaaS (Enterprise-to-Enterprise Software program as a Service) product isn’t excellent. We’re simply making issues higher for folks.”
This mindset is the hallmark of Falobi’s journey, a story that stretches from profitable teenage images awards to constructing Advertising and marketing for Geeks (MFG), a neighborhood that has change into a ‘sanctuary’ for entrepreneurs who worth advertising first rules.
The journalist’s daughter and the conceptual lens
Falobi was born right into a cult of studying and writing. With a father, an uncle, and an aunt in journalism, her childhood was spent navigating bookshelves that held concepts far past her years.
Earlier than Falobi transitioned to advertising as an grownup, she was a teenage photographer who believed a digital camera may reveal deeper realities than the bare eye. Whereas she now views that philosophy with fondness, the core intuition stays: reverse engineering, a working backward course of that breaks down the pondering behind a completed product.
Falobi applies this intuition by making an attempt to know and replicate the pondering behind profitable advertisements within the ones she creates.
“Replication is doing what another person did. Reverse engineering is knowing why they did it,” she explains.
This obsession with “why” led her to an internship at The Unbiased, a nationwide newspaper publishing in Lagos, Nigeria, the place she spent her holidays.
The unlearning: From billboards to conversion
In 2021, after the COVID-19 pandemic and an Educational Workers Union of Universities (ASUU) strike stalled her remaining 12 months of college, Falobi took a job at a JK&O, a conventional promoting company, engaged on billboard-scale campaigns. However a message from a founder with a progress company modified her trajectory.
Falobi left conventional promoting for the expansion company serving tech startups. The transition was a tradition shock of the best order.
“I needed to unlearn the concept creativity is every thing,” Falobi admits. “In tech, folks begin from a spot of mistrust. Readability turns into extra vital than cleverness. In case your creativity overrides how clearly you clarify what the product does, you’ve failed.”
This realisation propelled her by means of her stints at Enterscale in 2022, a advertising and progress company specializing in tech startups, the place she moved from copywriting to product advertising.
The transfer from company life to in-house roles at firms equivalent to Motherboard, a B2B Human Assets know-how agency, in 2023, and Rivva, an administrative synthetic intelligence firm, in 2025, introduced a brand new problem: uncooked knowledge entry.
“Immediately, I used to be the one accountable for establishing Mixpanel and Buyer.io from scratch,” she says of information and advertising funnel platforms that in-house entrepreneurs use to handle their prospects.
The transition from advising to “being within the deep finish” meant studying to create occasion monitoring plans and managing third-party vendor integrations that instantly affected product high quality.
For Falobi, this was the place advertising met product progress.
The “Geek” supremacy: Advertising and marketing for Geeks
In 2022, Falobi began writing a e-newsletter on MailChimp about popular culture, however she realised she wasn’t truly within the matters she was protecting.
Then she made a swap: “I despatched a mail to 30 or so subscribers I had on the time, ‘I’m speaking about advertising any further, should you don’t prefer it, go away.’ They didn’t go away, surprisingly.”
She moved to Substack and leaned into the ‘geek’ label, a label she defines as not being an knowledgeable, however being curious about a topic sufficient to hunt data about it. She known as it ‘Advertising and marketing for Geeks.’
Advertising and marketing for Geeks (MFG) wasn’t a calculated private branding transfer. It was a byproduct of her obsessive nature. “At one level, I had a swipe file of over 10,000 advertisements. I simply wished to doc the issues I used to be noticing about these advertisements – why they labored, why they didn’t.”
MFG shares advertising ideas, insights, and analyses into advertising campaigns, methods, and advertisements by means of the African tech ecosystem. It has garnered a following of over 2,000 followers in line with Falobi, and has morphed right into a WhatsApp neighborhood of entrepreneurs throughout the continent.
The transition from a e-newsletter to a neighborhood was fueled by a want to unravel Falobi’s concern in regards to the Lagos-centric nature of the ecosystem.
“The whole lot is in Lagos, all of the meetups, many of the occasions,” she says. “I wished one thing for simply the Ibadan residents. I wished the folks in Lagos to lastly be those feeling the FOMO (concern of lacking out).”
MFG shortly outgrew its borders and now exists as a neighborhood of over 700 folks on WhatsApp in an area the place thought supremacy issues greater than clout. Whereas the members that don’t reside in Ibadan now mockingly outnumber those who do, the neighborhood’s soul stays rooted in Falobi’s first rules.
Her insistence on first rules makes her cautious of the present AI hype, particularly for entry-level entrepreneurs who should not have a agency grasp of selling first rules.
“AI makes entry-level folks outsource their pondering earlier than they even know what they don’t know,” she warns. “Whereas a senior marketer makes use of AI to sharpen a quick, an entry-level particular person would possibly let the AI paved the way. The result’s a major drop within the high quality of the ecosystem’s output.”
“If you happen to don’t perceive person psychology or frameworks like Cialdini’s Rules of Persuasion, you may’t inform when the AI is supplying you with nonsense.”
What’s subsequent? JumpWag.
Falobi is at the moment pivoting into her most bold function but: Founder.
Her startup, JumpWag, is a TikTok progress device born out of her personal battle with video content material. Falobi and her all-female co-founding workforce are constructing a bootstrapped device to assist creators leap on developments contextually utilizing AI.
“I wished to construct one thing I may promote to my very own neighborhood, relatively than simply selling different folks’s merchandise,” she says.
For Falobi, the trail ahead isn’t nearly extra advertising; it’s about constructing the instruments that make the advertising higher.
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