The story behind OLab
Marketing has always favored the biggest budgets. A brand with millions to spend gets polished campaigns, prime placements, and guaranteed reach. Everyone else makes do.
We think that's broken.
College students are already creating content every day, funny, raw, real content that actually resonates. And brands are spending fortunes trying to manufacture that exact feeling in a studio. OLab exists to close that gap.
We built a marketplace where opportunity is the product. Where a student at USC can get paid to do what they were already going to do, and where a brand, big or small, can reach a college campus authentically without an agency, a production crew, or a six-figure budget.
We believe the best marketing doesn't look like marketing. It looks like a real person, on a real campus, genuinely excited about something worth being excited about.
That's what OLab is for.
Meet the founder
Austin Merolla
Founder & CEO
I'm a marketing student who kept noticing the same thing, brands spending crazy money on content that nobody believed, while students around me were making genuinely great stuff every single day for nothing.
So I built OLAB. A marketplace that connects brands with college students who create real, on-campus content, and actually pays students for it.
I started this because I wanted to be on both sides of it. As a student, I wanted to get paid to create. As someone who studies marketing, I knew brands were desperate for exactly what we were already making.
OLab is the opportunity that both brands and students need.