Tired of Hearing Crickets? My Artsy Journey to Discovering the Powerful LAND-WATER-AIR Marketing Approach ©
- Malena Amusa
- Sep 1, 2025
- 6 min read
Updated: Sep 8, 2025
Leaping across stages and streets, I dance to connect, heal, and celebrate culture. That's why I founded Addlife! African Dance Company in 2009, driven by a fierce desire to share this gift—reaching millions through positive cultural exchange, economic opportunity, and artistic development. At first, I didn’t know how I’d pull it all off, but over time, a powerful marketing strategy began to take shape—a rockstar approach that would become my signature LAND-WATER-AIR Marketing Approach ©.
LAND focuses having a strong, unifying vision & mission and boots-on-the-ground connections through partnerships, guerrilla marketing, and face-to-face engagement. WATER channels emotion, building heartfelt connections, nurturing follow-ups, and growing your database over time. AIR is about drumming up the airwaves—radio, TV, and digital platforms. Together, these elements turn marketing into a living, breathing movement that ensures No More Crickets!—only impact, engagement, and growth.
Birthing Addlife! & LAND-WATER-AIR Marketing
We kicked off with community gatherings—free and super affordable classes in the heart of North St. Louis—gaining critical energy, building a team, and recruiting master drummer Andrew Behnen and star dancer Audra Morrow to help grow the company.
Our first shows were super inspirational. People said they felt healed—both cast and audience—from raw, heartfelt performances combining words of power with daring beats and choreography. I’ll never forget our first concert, Immortal Passion!, starring GOAT percussionist Weedie Braimah, and a local force of women who personified various stages of the healing and empowerment journey: Anneliese Hubbard danced warrior-like with her machete; April Warren-Grice twirled beautifully in a biblical-inspired piece. My, my, my, we sure rocked the socks off that packed bookstore venue, just two stones throw from my house.
After Immortal, we stayed engaged with guerrilla marketing—plastering bus stations, coffee shops, schools, and libraries with flyers for upcoming classes and events; performing and connecting wherever we could. Our database began to grow, making it easy to pull together our breakout Mega Dance Class: 100 Dancers Unite, where people from across the region poured onto the hardwood dance floor of 2027 Cherokee St. in St. Louis, Mo. to learn from myself and other elite performers and musicians. This call for unity was made possible through 20+ community partnerships we had established prior. Gaining partnerships also proved invaluable when it came time to launch our super-successful Djembe X Music Conference alongside Earth Rhythms Healing LLC and Better Family Life, Inc.. We pulled together no less than 50+ partners from around the country, resulting in a conference attended by hundreds. Collectively, Addlife! and partners applied the LAND-WATER-AIR Marketing Approach © as I acted as commando, sending folks out to flyer cars and share online. DjembeX caught fire on Facebook too. And once the final drum sound rang, culminating the conference, some attendees ran off and got married; others pivoted into full-time musicianship. DjembeX changed lives.
Perhaps our biggest win at Addlife! was having a finger-on-the pulse to adequately respond to the 2014 Ferguson uprising, with people pouring out their pain in the streets. “No more police brutality!” We joined this movement for justice, bringing drums and movement to the hot pavement, and later choreographed a healing concert, United We Dance, which boldly explored our constitutional rights in this country and envisioned a world where police and everyday people join together in harmony to protect the humanity of all. Audience members cried, wailed, and released during United, making my work feel incredibly worth it and my choice to go into dance full-time fully justified.
We were soon invited by a Los Angeles company to perform at their concert in L.A. The growth, scale, and reach of Addlife! became evident as we evolved into an in-demand, high-buzz troupe requested across the region. My leadership was soon requested for global ventures. We began to manage dance retreats in West Africa, and I answered a call to choreograph for a Las Vegas-based African circus. The Vegas engagement in particular, allowed me to reach hundreds of thousands of people, touring to all 50 states except Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico. Looking back, Vegas had become a full-circle moment.
Addlife! started in 2009 during one of my reporting stints in India, where I saw a need to address cultural bias. I dropped my journalist pen and picked up my dancing quest: recruiting professional Indian dancers from Delhi and local Black Jazz and Kathak performers to tell a story at the Epicentre of Gurgaon, highlighting our ethnic differences in dance and drum, yet being united in movement toward a world of understanding and celebration.
Since India, Addlife! has reached untold numbers of people and truly fulfilled its mission. Over time, marketing became effortless; it shrank as an urgent issue and grew to be a natural function of our company’s being—a lively and loving community interacting and sharing, and a global network of artists energizing their respective locales through the arts.
In 2017, I accepted the call to start a family, and put Addlife! on hiatus. Still, we continue to get requests to perform, teach, and share, and as much as possible, we do. Addlife! was and is a business that will always be in the hearts, steps, and vision of the people we’ve had the honor of being with.
Dancing into Impact: Bringing LAND-WATER-AIR to Your Business
Now that I’m not dancing full-time, I want to share this gift with all: my LAND-WATER-AIR Marketing Approach © to bring your vision to the masses. I created a 2HR coaching session to help anyone with a positive vision make a big impact. Is that someone you? Are you tired of hearing crickets and ready to rock your market like Bono?!
Interestingly, I had the opportunity to interview rockstar Bono, the soulful frontman of the epitomous band U2, for my graduate thesis at Columbia University, exploring the collision of celebrity and global aid for Africa. With his INSPI(RED) campaign to raise millions to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa, Bono exemplified the ultimate application of the LAND-WATER-AIR Marketing Approach ©. His RED campaign mobilized volunteers, ambassadors, and mission soldiers through powerful concerts and partnerships with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Gap, Oprah Winfrey, and many more (LAND), multiplied the impact through a viral merch campaign that let people wear this mission on T-shirts with sayings like ADMI(RED) and ADO(RED), and captured global news outlets (AIR).
As of January 2025, the (RED) campaign has generated over $785 million, impacting the lives of more than 290 million people across Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, and Zambia, according to The Global Fund. Bono’s approach raised rockstar-level capital while increasing awareness and engagement on one of the most pressing global health issues of our time.
Now here’s the key: Bono accomplished what we all can do at our own pace and scale.
No More Crickets! 🔥 Rockstar Marketing to Scale Your Business with the LAND-WATER-AIR Marketing Approach © is our 2HR coaching session designed for you!
In this session, we’ll tap my signature LAND-WATER-AIR approach to uncover your next best moves so that you fulfill your mission to the max and never have a quiet sales day again. Sign up for this session today!
For me, it started with dance. I can't wait to see what's at the heart of your next big move!
Malena Amusa is the CEO and Founder of Artsy-Preneur.com, a business and marketing incubator helping your big ideas achieve maximum impact through coaching, workshops, and powerful learning experiences. A pro journalist, educator, comms strategist, serial entrepreneur, and former nationally-touring dancer, Malena has reached millions globally, helping small and mega firms transform their marketing, engagement strategy, and messaging to advance new market share, embolden brand leadership, and fuel sales and growth. Malena is based in St. Louis, Mo., serving the world.
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