Maury Rogow of Rip Media Group: 5 Non-Intuitive Ways To Grow Your Marketing Career

9 min readNov 13, 2020

Maury Rogow

I donate time, resources, and money to charity every quarter by taking a % of every project and putting it aside to help a cause.

Asa part of my Marketing Strategy Series, I’m talking with fellow marketing pros at the top of their game to give entrepreneurs and marketers an inside look at proven strategies you might also be able to leverage to grow your business or career. Today I had the pleasure of talking with Maury Rogow.

Maury Rogow is the founder and CEO of Rip Media Group, a trailblazing video marketing company based in Los Angeles, California. Rip Media Group brings a unique combination of storytelling art and ROI strategy to the field of animation and live-action video. Rip Media Group brings together a team of award-winning storytellers, technicians, and artists to create world-class voiceover, animation, and live-action video to grow businesses of any size.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

Believe it or not, I had always dreamed of directing, acting, producing, in Hollywood. I wanted to be able to create magic and new stories that changed people’s feelings and grabbed attention. But being 2,500 miles away in Pittsburgh, I let that dream slide away and I built a career developing business — sales and marketing for technology companies, from Fortune 500 to Startup.

There were a few magic moments that made me think about what I was similar to Hollywood. One moment was when I led a presentation to V.P.’s of Bank of America, while I was with a tiny startup selling multimillion-dollar software. Instead of rolling out our slick PowerPoint deck, I introduced myself to every person in that room and asked for their personal goal for the meeting. I then took a big risk in front of my own team and ditched the PowerPoint to tell a story.

That story tied almost all of their goals and our solutions together. I wove in how Bank of America was an underdog, founded in a saloon, and how our little company was unique, like their original inspiration. It worked. They awarded us a very large project and ongoing sales for years. With every campaign and presentation, I recorded a list of every success and failure.

The elements that continuously worked are what I now use and teach to help companies grow.

Can you share a story about the funniest marketing mistake you made when you were first starting and what lesson you learned from that?

I have so many funny and embarrassing stories about successes and failures — and I think that is what makes people succeed — having the tenacity to try, fail, and keep going.

My first blunder was as a teenage ‘entrepreneur’ trying to take over the lawn care in my neighborhood. I wrote a short letter to each neighbor as to why I was a better choice than the larger companies and walked around dropping them off at every door for a mile.

My eyes and hands were so tired from personalizing hundreds of hand-written notes, that I started abbreviating, and dropped them off with the headline: “Yard Lawning and Other Oddities”.

I only realized it when a neighbor called laughing and said ‘You’re hired! But, no need for your oddities!’

Are you able to identify a “tipping point” in your career when you started to see success? Are there takeaways or lessons that others can learn from that?

Absolutely. I fully immerse myself in every new brand I have ever represented, learned the products and every aspect of them. Product training was a big part of most companies. In many of the companies I was with, there was a built-in policy to remove the lowest performers each quarter.

What I found: companies love their own product and message. But customers only care about how it makes them better, faster, stronger and transforms them. Simply put: People do not buy products; they buy the story you tell.

If you cannot understand and share your transformation story, your business will die. When I focused on the results and telling the best story, it created massive results in company after company.

What do you think makes your company stand out?

We LOVE helping people that are not able to tell their own stories. Our entire purpose is to learn what makes a company unique and deliver that message to their audience. With a clear message that conveys your value, you will win. We then take these stories and create animation and mixed media videos that work for a brand 24/7.

A few years ago, a multi-billion-dollar company was looking for a new partner; they needed new and fresh ideas to launch a new set of products. We were against global agencies, so our ideas had to be amazing as well as please stakeholders that were fans of our competitors.

We did our unique process and came up with two product launch ideas using video as the core. The customer submitted multiple vendor ideas to the committee and hid vendor names. Days later, she called, and said there was a clear winner and clear back up.

She let me suffer through a bit of silence and then said both of the best were from my company. We now create all their videos and marketing stories.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

In our own way, we are on the front lines fighting COVID-19 with one of our biotech customers. There are three major products that test for COVID in ways that are repeatable and scalable. Our customer is using our video expertise to explain why they are different, better, faster, and more reliable than the other choices. We have many projects that are significant in different ways, but helping people test and stay safe is very gratifying.

What advice would you give to other marketers to thrive and avoid burnout?

Creative storytelling is taxing, as is running a business. So, I have a ‘mantra’ that I go through every morning with my young child. It is all about balancing life to achieve in different areas. Achieving work and lacking in the other areas is what causes burnout.

We go through the ‘five to thrive’, which are the 5 areas you want to achieve something in each day: Body (Health/Fitness), Balance (Family/Love), Being (Taking breaks and mindfulness), Brains (Learning/Work Success), Bubbles (Laugh and Smile). I’m not perfect every day, but small achievements in each area keep you healthy, wealthy, and wise — and full of energy. We also remind the team that we are the lucky ones, we get to do exactly what we love to do every day.

Great advice. None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful to who helped get you to where you are?

To be at the top, I found that raw talent and technique are not good enough. I had a manager early on that took all that raw energy and added fun. Kevin Keehn showed me the enjoyment is a big part of the job, not something for after hours. He loved customers, loved to have a great time with them, and invited them out because he wanted relationships and partnerships.

This made all the difference. I view each customer of ours the same, I enjoy them, appreciate them, and help guide them however I can…even when it is out of our scope.

Is there anyone you consider to be your hero?

I have many people I look up to and learn from, not just one. I find inspiration in people that find and create the best in themselves. My wife is amazing and a hero to me in many ways as a pediatric cardiologist and amazing mother (I hope she reads that). Steven Spielberg is a kid from Arizona that became a prolific storyteller. Steve Jobs started with a dream and saw the importance of amazing storytelling. RBG created a path to the highest judicial rank in the nation, starting with working-class parents. Bruce Lee was always the outsider, but his magnetism and focus on being the best martial artist catapulted him to incredible heights in cinema. As a tangent, I am a black belt in no small part by watching his movies.

Wonderful. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. There are hundreds of memorable marketing campaigns that have become part of the lexicon of our culture. What is your favorite marketing or branding campaign from history?

There are so many amazing choices here, from Apple’s 1984 and ‘I’m a PC” to some of which I am proud to have created, but nothing compares the success of Nike: Just Do It.

Just Do It helped multiply the revenue of Nike 10x over. It’s simple. It’s the core of all the videos and commercials they create. They stand for athletes in all they do. They do it, and so can you.

If you could break down a very successful campaign into a “blueprint”, what would that blueprint look like? Please share some stories or examples of your ideas.

Because I didn’t go to school for marketing, advertising, or even production, I came at it as a seasoned growth professional. So, I created a list (you can tell I love lists) of successful marketing campaigns, sales videos, viral videos, films, and the best film scenes.

I created a list that we use to evaluate our work as well as others, and I call it “The 10 Commandments of Story”. Some of these are: Being relatable, being the underdog, sell the hole (the result) not the drill, and following the EPIC story structure to win people.

When the commandments are followed and mixed with the right emotions, you will have success.

Companies like Google and Facebook have totally disrupted how companies market over the past 15 years. At the same time, consumers have become more jaded and resistant to anything “salesy”. In your industry, where do you see the future of marketing going?

Clearly, the industry is now driven by algorithms. This is a good thing as you can measure results quickly and effectively, but if you remove authenticity, the campaigns will fail.

Getting your brand story clearly defined is the core, and the next decade will be all about getting your videos to work for you, and instead of salespeople in the top of the funnel, personalizing media for every customer segment and even every single consumer by name, and creating interactive content that engages people that do not want ’to talk to sales’.

What 5 things do you wish someone told you before you started?

Having your company is harder and less glamorous than it looks, until it is! You need to think of a business as a fulltime job, and your child. When it’s young, you will work all day, and be up a lot of the night. As goofy as this sounds, when I started getting ‘gifts’ from vendors, customers, and calls from companies that wanted to work with us, I knew I had something. I had created something that people wanted to be a part of after thousands of hours of hard work.

Get your systems, processes, and people lined up. Build your billing, accounting, legal, and workflow software for where you need to be in 2 years, not where you are today. Plan and build for where you want to be. I had systems that couldn’t grow to dozens of projects, and it slowed us down to the point that I had to say no to projects at one point because I didn’t think we could service them effectively. That is never a place I want to be, so I fixed that immediately. We are now built to be 10x the size we are.

Maury Rogow of Rip Media Group: 5 Non-Intuitive Ways To Grow Your Marketing Career

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