Meet Rayson Esquejo of 2LiveAndDineinLA/Rayson Media in North Hollywood

Today we’d like to introduce you to Rayson Esquejo.

Rayson, before we jump into specific questions, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I knew from a very young age that I loved being creative. Growing up, my parents taught me that if you were creative enough, then you could use that creativity to inspire limitless opportunities! In high school, I took my creativity to print and at age 16 I started my first company. This company was a magazine that focused on promoting local LA brands via advertorial content (articles that promoted as ads). This work taught me a lot about working creatively with brands and talking to their audiences. After four issues, I decided to close it down because of the high overhead costs of printing and staff writers.

How could I use my creativity and the knowledge that I gained from this experience to create an opportunity? Cue the internet and social media. Internet marketing in the early 2000s was the “wild West” of marketing and as an untested medium, a lot of marketers stayed clear away from it. On more than one occasion, I had career counselors, as well as concerned family members, tell me that pursuing internet marketing was not a good idea as a career choice. I, on the other hand, saw it for what it was, an early adopters playground and a place to create an opportunity where none existed. So I decided to focus my full attention on using the internet as a marketing tool and building a career around that.

At the time, however, the only companies really taking social media as a serious marketing medium were music record labels and youth-focused television networks such as MTV. Unfortunately, neither were hiring for people who were eager to get their foot in the door with creative ideas for their Myspace and Friendster pages. So, I did the next best thing. I got an internship at a marketing agency that they hired to handle their internet marketing. After a year of great mentorship at this agency, I took the knowledge learned and began figuring out ways to apply those techniques to local businesses. Since internet marketing at the time was a new concept, businesses were not looking for internet marketers. To solve this I would go from business to business asking if I could do a free internet marketing campaign and if the owners/managers thought my work was worth being paid for, they could decide to pay me. I started a marketing agency and worked this type of business for about a year and ended up with lots of non-creative work, and not a lot of money.

As I wrapped my final client campaign of that year, I decided to close the agency to pursue an opportunity with another agency that did work with various movie studio clients. Working with movie studios in the internet marketing space was a whole different ball game. For one, the budgets were drastically different for those of a small business and with those bigger budgets opened the door for more creativity. I worked at the agency for a couple of years learning how to hack Twitter with Twitter bots and creating “big ticket” ideas, which studios loved until a headhunter from a studio took note of my creativity and offered me a job on the studio side running their social media marketing department. I gladly accepted it.

Being in charge of a movie studio’s department was definitely a learning experience especially since I was so young. Luckily, my boss was an amazing mentor who taught me invaluable lessons. In 2007, I worked on a movie called, “jobs” featuring Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs. The movie had a somewhat negative sentiment around it coming out of Sundance due to its casting choices. We were given orders to be creative on this campaign since the budgets were low for a movie set to be in theaters across the country. I decided it was time to capitalize on a social media platform that was gaining a lot of attention due to its popularity called INSTAGRAM.

For context, at the time, the platform only allowed for live recordings of video content as opposed to uploads being as the video feature on the platform was still new. So, over one of the weekends, I dove into the code and figured out a way to trick the system to ingesting a video that it thought was a live recording when in fact it was something edited together in iMovie (very Steve Jobs-esque). I worked with the in-house creative team to send me a square video of their best performing trailer and uploaded it on the Sunday of that weekend. Come Monday, the hacking of Instagram to upload the first HD trailer went viral. From Vanity Fair to TechCrunch to Good Morning America, the culmination of everything I learned created an opportunity.

I worked on the movie studio side for a couple of years after that and decided to leave not re-sign the working contract with the studio and I parted ways from entertainment shortly after running social on the Best Picture Oscar winner, Spotlight. I decided to refocus my time into creating something new with all the knowledge that I learned. Thus, I restarted my marketing efforts with my new company, Rayson Media. Through this company, I created several brands such as the food brand 2LiveandDineinLA, which focuses on marketing restaurants through advertorial posts on social media and EAT PLAY MOVE, LA’s First Filipino Food Festival (that now happens annually) event which kicked off its first year drew crowds of over 25,000 Angelenos and brought into the spotlight the growing Filipino food culture in LA.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
I have never thought of obstacles as struggles, but really as learning experiences. I have had tons of opportunities slip away because of missteps or wrong timing, but I believe that the perspective of undesirable events determines the outcome of the next event.

2LiveAndDineinLA/Rayson Media – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Rayson Media focuses on creating. Creating smart, data-driven social media marketing campaigns for the large marketing clients, creating awareness focused content for local businesses via 2LiveAndDineInLA, and creating a platform for a community through large scale events such as EAT PLAY MOVE.

What is “success” or “successful” for you?
I personally define success as anything that is created out of nothing, build it into existence and make an impact with people. If someone is being helped by something that I’ve created, then I’ve done my job and it’s a success in my eyes.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.Instagram.com/RaysonMedia
• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: www.Instagram.com/RaysonMedia / www.Instagram.com/2LiveAndDineInLA /www.Instagram.com/EatFilipino
• Twitter: www.Twitter.com/RaysonMedia

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