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Obio Jones was ready to make a major life change. The former digital marketing executive turned Instagram influencer was moving from his home town of Atlanta to Los Angeles. But, “I got a price breakdown for the move”, he recalls. “It was significant” — in the region of $8,000. Instead, Jones wondered if he could offset those overheads by securing a sponsored partnership — if he could do it with fashion brands, why not with a moving company. It was all content, right?
“Moving is stressful for a lot of people, and the idea of recording it isn’t ideal,” Jones does admit. “But we came up with a storyline about moving across the country to chase dreams.” In exchange for a one-minute video Reel and two Story posts on his Instagram page, delivered to his 190,000 followers within a week of that cross-country move, Roadway Moving waived their charges.
Who in their right mind would be gripped by a visual diary of someone moving house? You might well ask. But I refer you to people posting pictures of their plates of food. Those with semi-significant followings across Instagram, TikTok and more, including celebrities such as model Winnie Harlow, are all in.
There has been huge pressure on moving costs in the past five years, thanks to price rises in everything from labour to fuel, with some costs up by 80 per cent, according to the International Association of Movers; long-distance moves can now regularly cost as much as $6,000, according to Royal Moving & Storage’s 2025 cost trends report. So why not? Firms in the US that now operate formal marketing programmes include Piece of Cake, FlatRate Moving, both of them NYC-based, plus WellKnown Moving in Philadelphia. Roadway operates countrywide. The world is their removal van, you might say.
Roadway offered a 10 per cent off link code to Jones’s followers — and many used it, he says. He doesn’t recall any non-disparagement clauses in the contract he signed with Roadway, but admits that it’s hard to be wholly upbeat. “Movers can break your things, or lose them,” he says, “But [on screen] you do feel a lot of pressure to talk in a positive light.” Still, one advantage of documenting the process is the team motivation to make it go as smoothly as possible.
Roadway marketing director Valerie Fiordaliso helped create its influencer programme; she says the firm has gone from partnering with around 100 individuals over the first couple of years to more than 1,000 per year now. The first partnership she brokered, in 2017, was with Arielle Charnas, one of the original high-impact influencers. Charnas parlayed her social clout, with more than 1mn followers, into a fashion partnership with Nordstrom that same year, before launching her own brand, Something Navy. (Charnas has since become a polarising figure, starting with controversial Covid 19-related posts during the pandemic, though her follower footprint remains in the seven figures.) “It was done in a very organic manner, nothing like how we do it now with a full process and legal teams,” Fiordaliso recalls. “We just had to give it a go and hope for the best.”
Charnas, who was moving with her husband and child across New York City, embraced the partnership with gusto, roping in her closet organiser to appear too, arranging her vast shoe collection and more. The impact was instant, says Fiordaliso. She quickly created a one-sheet form where other would-be Roadway partners could pitch for discounted or complimentary moving services. Selection criteria depend on time of year — summer is busiest, so competition is fiercer. There’s strictly no fee. “Everyone wants to negotiate, but we can’t do $5,000 per post.” She also stresses this isn’t simply a Gen-Z gimmick. “We work with all ages — we just worked with a woman in her sixties whose husband passed away from cancer and she got remarried, so she’s moving, and we could tell her story.”
Story-lined sponsored content like this might be stressful to capture during an already fraught experience but influencers will likely already have planned to document it in detail, says Mae Karwowski, chief executive and founder of influencer marketing agency Obviously. Since influencers often document their every activity, a house move is just more “content”. “It makes a ton of sense,” she notes, another “plot twist” for the account. Given that it’s a momentous life event that most people experience, she adds, one that is both costly and infrequent, people are likely to be seeking recommendations.
Roadway has worked with Jones not once but twice more. Last December, he was ditching his first LA apartment — “It was not ideal and I broke the lease, so I added a comedic energy to it” — and once more when he moved in with his now husband, actor Jermelle Simon, in April. “That added a little texture to it,” he says. Jones expects he might move again in the next couple of years, but isn’t sure he’ll keep re-upping that deal. “I would do it again, but if it’s too stressful, I might see the value in paying for it myself.”
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