We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Levi Rodgers. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Levi below.

Levi, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Alright – so having the idea is one thing, but going from idea to execution is where countless people drop the ball. Can you talk to us about your journey from idea to execution?

Our story starts with three friends walking in parallel paths within the creative and marketing world: a designer (Cuau Romero), a marketer (Jack Weakly), and a media director (me, Levi Rodgers). Each of us had various experiences creating and strategizing for different companies, and I noticed a common theme with each successful project or campaign: emotional engagement.

When emotionally engaging an audience was prioritized, goals were met, and people became inspired and loyal to the brands. It was beautiful and fulfilling for everyone involved.

Over the years of my career, I developed a dream of starting a creative agency and my opportunity to grow at my previous job became very limited. So, I began to conceptualize a creative agency built fundamentally on emotional engagement and true connection between audiences and brands. I brought the idea to Jack and Cuau and they bought into the vision. We wanted to see a world where marketing, branding, and content creation could be more than chaos, white noise, and product shoving. We truly saw this as an opportunity to connect and inspire people, to help others feel less alone.

The branding for Linger was completed months before we decided to start an agency. Originally Cuau and I were working on an art project that had a very similar purpose, but it wasn’t focused on working with businesses. We had been sitting on the completed brand but hadn’t had the right gut feeling to launch it. When the idea for an agency came, Linger’s brand clicked right into place.

I quit my job and we did all the legal paperwork to officially form Linger in September 2022. Within weeks our first client came to us asking for help with their New York Fashion Week debut. It was a daunting project, but we were ready. This is what we had been dreaming of and quietly working toward for months. We developed their brand video, and several other deliverables, and they decided to use the brand video to introduce their runway show. I remember standing in the audience and holding my breath. Everyone became captivated by the video, and a massive ovation followed as the video ended. That was incredibly surreal, to see the idea of emotional engagement work right in front of my eyes. The client was extremely happy, and we are still in a relationship now.

I wish I could say after New York was easy sailing, that we had herds of people coming to us. We hadn’t officially launched Linger yet on our own platforms and hadn’t networked even half as much as we should have. It was a very quiet winter.

During that time we honed our processes and skills while building our own launch campaign, preparing the fields for rain. The most important process was making sure we had the tools to understand an audience enough to create for them.

We started our launch campaign in January 2023 and it went well. Marketing is a process of consistent small wins building on each other. We chose to trust the process and kept working as hard as we could.

In March we began to see the fruits of our labor, our first wave of new clients. Each of them desired emotional engagement within their content and marketing. Each of them hard-earned through our own marketing. Months of journeying together, deploying radical hospitality and emotionally engaging marketing, has shown that emotional engagement works.

Now almost a year old, we are here facilitating connection through emotional engagement. And we are nowhere near done. We want to see Colorado become a state known for its creative excellence, we want to continue seeing businesses authentically connect with others, and we want to create beauty in people’s lives.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

As a kid, I was always obsessed with cameras and lighting. Always carrying a point-and-shoot or one of the flip USB video recorders and making videos with my friends. That carried to when I was a teenager and I decided I wanted to fully send into the industry.

I sold my Xbox and bought a DSLR and then took almost any gig I could. A couple of nonprofits let me learn while making them free videos and through that, I met a director from LA. He took me under his wing and had me help him on his short film sets. I soaked everything in and started to leverage what I had learned into being a production assistant on commercial film sets. I was having to Uber to every set because I couldn’t even drive yet.

High school became a hurdle with all of this, so I convinced my mom to let me homeschool whenever I wasn’t working. From there a production company hired me to work with them on international documentary work and domestic commercial film work. I was sent all over the world to film in unique and inspiring cultures to tell stories. It required a lot of learning very quickly, but it was an invaluable experience.

After spending almost a year at this production company, I moved to Colorado where I became a senior media producer at a non-profit. All of a sudden, I was responsible for not just all the videos at this organization, but photos, and strategy around what I created. Again, another opportunity that required fast growth. The strategy side of the job started to really intrigue me. To create not only content but also the experience around the content became a new obsession.

With that my desire to build a holistic marketing experience grew, harnessing multiple mediums (photo, video, graphic design, copywriting, etc.) to say one thing very well and engage an audience. This non-profit allowed me to creative direct a few campaigns and concept others. It was such an exciting time, and it was when I began to see the power of emotional engagement in marketing.

A cumulation of all these experiences led me to start Linger.

Linger is a creative studio empowering businesses with content, direction, and design to emotionally engage audiences and cut through the white noise. We serve our clients with branding, marketing, campaign production, and visual content creation.

Marketing and the creativity that fuels it solve three main problems: a need for more sales, awareness, or donations. Our way of solving those problems is through emotionally engaging marketing and content. We prioritize real connections and make sure we understand an audience enough to facilitate that. We pair that method with radical hospitality, walking closely with our clients on this journey.

I think the marketing industry has a lot to learn from fine-dining restaurants. From what I have been learning, they are masters at pairing radical hospitality with excellent creativity. It has been a strong source of inspiration for me and our team.

I am most proud of how our work has consistently been the highest-performing content and campaigns for our clients. We are seeing emotional engagement work within the context of Linger and our clients couldn’t be happier. One recently told me, “Choosing to work with Linger was one of my best business decisions.”

I hope potential clients know that we are here to serve them with our proven approach, that we will listen and mold around their specific needs, and that they don’t have to do this alone. It’s hard to do it all alone and we consider it a privilege to walk with anyone in need of us.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

Most of our clients are based in Colorado Springs. It’s where most of our team lives too.

We had been reflecting on the idea of “Watering the grass at your feet,” instead of looking for greener grass. Out of that came a posture of thankfulness.

So we built a social media campaign around that idea and celebrating our city. It was structured as a multi medium open letter to the city, exploring meaningful moments. We based it on very specific moments our team experienced there, hoping the macro can be seen in the micro. We wanted people to feel seen and inspired by this.

It was a strong success for us. People connected with it, some even teared up seeing the flagship video for the campaign. It also pushed us further with some key leads we have been pursuing. I truly love seeing human moments authentically driving business objectives. It feels more rewarding and down to earth for me.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

You have to love the journey.

We just finished reading Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, the founder of Nike. Our business coach assigned it to our team and asked us to observe the journey as the book takes you from Phil’s college days to retiring from Nike.

There were so many ups and downs, Nike didn’t turn a profit for a long time. Phil didn’t just endure; he embraced the path. He loved selling shoes, a true passion drove him.

It helped us articulate that if we can healthily create and strategize to connect with others, that is what we want to do. We love what we do with a passion and this book taught us to embrace the journey we are still beginning.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.thosewholinger.com
• Instagram: @thosewholinger
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thosewholinger/

Image Credits
Chris Willis Levi Rodgers Steven De La Roche