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Sed ut perspiciatis unde.
We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Damian Maytin. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Damian below.
Damian, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you share an important lesson you learned in a prior job that’s helped you in your career afterwards?
I was just starting out as a junior. I had just graduated from the University of Miami’s digital marketing program, and I had landed one of my first corporate jobs. I spent my time doing high level tasks, planning, “strategizing,” and presenting. Every time I presented something, it got rejected.
“Great idea, Damian, but it’s too high level,” the creative director would say.
High level? I thought. What do you mean? I believed I was doing good work, and I took the feedback literally. I thought my ideas were just too good, too HIGH level.
I went out to lunch and showed my coworkers. They said, “Yeah, this feels more like a school project.”
“Have you heard of the SMART framework?” one of them asked.
I said no.
She then taught me how to make plans that were Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time bound. I learned that no matter how creative an idea is, if you cannot actually get it done, what is the point? An idea that only looks good in a PowerPoint is just decoration.
Damian, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I was 17 and held two jobs, one as a transporter for patients recovering from knee surgery and another as a cashier at KFC. That was when I had my first breakthrough idea, my brand Revact.
I thought I would start a T-shirt business focused on the Cuban community, using designs that reminded people of their childhood in Cuba. I redesigned popular caricatures in a satirical context, while also raising awareness of human rights violations in my country. That was really the start of my copywriting journey.
I created a tagline, “Todos Somos San Isidro,” which led hundreds of people in the Cuban community to add it to their profile pictures to raise awareness of what a group of artists were going through as their work was being repressed. There were other slogans and taglines I worked on that also became popular among the Cuban and Cuban American community.
While working on my brand, I also started running social media for the City of Miami’s first kava bar, Miami Kava, also known as House of Roots. I helped promote kava and tea in Miami and worked with the owners on marketing events and supporting this new non-alcoholic wellness movement in the city.
Fast forward to today. With 10 years of copywriting experience, I have completed work for the top scent marketing brand Aroma360, as well as Marriott International’s hotel brands, writing for many of their websites. I am currently working on several sporting-related projects for the summer, though I cannot share too many details yet.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
There was a time when I did not know which specific path to take in marketing. What I did know for certain was that I did not want to work as a marketing manager, director, or generalist. I strongly disliked how marketers are expected to juggle a million different tasks without ever truly becoming experts at anything.
Marketing offers many paths, so I had choices. Over time, I learned that copywriting is the most important, challenging, and foundational role in advertising. I knew I wanted to go into advertising, but I did not want to be a media buyer, designer, or project manager. That led me to study the greats. David Ogilvy, John Caples, Eugene Schwartz, Joseph Sugarman, David Abbott, and others who taught me both the science and the art of advertising.
They showed me that even in a world increasingly ruled by technology, new and original ideas, and how you communicate those ideas, matter more than anything else. Not recycled work pulled from what already exists on the internet, which inevitably becomes generic and boring over time, as we are now seeing with AI.
What matters is knowing how to frame ideas, find new angles, write the benefits of a product, do research, and learn about what is unique to a product or service, especially the things that have not yet been absorbed and flattened by the internet.
That is why I chose to become a copywriter. I wanted to communicate big ideas clearly and effectively, and to help shape how a business, product, or person is perceived by others.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
One of the biggest challenges I have had to overcome in life has been my lack of interest in being liked. I have always been focused on doing what I wanted, without much fear of rejection or failure.
Over time, however, I learned that my work means nothing unless people react to it. My job is to channel the desires of people into a product. Because of that, my work depends on understanding human psychology.
I would not be able to do this job without caring deeply about what people think, how they feel, and what they need and desire.
What my personal story reveals about resilience is that regardless of personal preferences or personality traits someone may think they have, when you love something enough, you will do whatever it takes to overcome the discomfort of going against yourself in order to become a greater version of who you are.
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