A creative who thinks in numbers

The short version

Paige Pope is a Detroit media owner and marketer. She is co-owner and Head of Growth at RAW Detroit, an independent media brand with 245K followers and 46M organic views in 2025, and she leads strategy at RAW Digital Group, its commercial production arm. She has worked in social media and content for more than ten years.

The longer version, year by year

1. 2015

   RAW Detroit starts as free photo walks. Shawn Mangenje had just moved here from the UK, and the Detroit in everyone’s viewfinder looked nothing like the Detroit on the news.

   I am not in this story yet. Hold that thought.

2. 2016

   First social media job, at Chili Peppers Tanning. I built the brand voice and the content pillars from scratch.

   You learn fast when the product is a tan.

3. Meanwhile

   I ran my own marketing agency and signed clients while I was still in school, then joined a finance startup when it was a handful of people and helped grow it into a real company.

   That is where I learned the money decides what you are allowed to make.

4. 2019

   Agency side at SMSocial, running several brands at once. The same year I joined RAW Detroit as co-owner. Shawn leads creative direction. I run growth, strategy and the numbers, and I make a lot of what we post.

   We are wired completely differently. That is why it works.

5. 2025

   46 million organic views. No paid reach. A Shinola launch sells out in two hours. I cover the Detroit Grand Prix from the paddock for Pratt Miller Motorsports.

   We have still never taken outside money. On purpose.

6. 2026

   I earn my FAA Part 107 drone license. Voyage Michigan runs a profile.

   Detroit looks better from 400 feet.

How I work

I treat a social channel like a product with unit economics. Every format has to earn its place: short vertical video where discovery happens, photographs with a precise headline where the audience is older, long guides where search intent lives. When the tool I need does not exist, I build it.

Tools I have built

A two-person company publishes every day because the repeatable parts run on software I designed.

Story engine	An automated pipeline that gathers local news and social signals, scores them and queues story candidates for an editor to approve.
Content HQ	A three-screen production board that tracks every sponsored campaign from booking through shoot, approval, posting and invoice.
Trend desk	A digest of rising Michigan search terms, filtered for Detroit relevance and delivered to the team in Slack.
Photo rights toolkit	An audit and metadata tool that checked 887 published images and embeds creator and copyright data before anything goes live.
rawdigitalgroup.com	A 90-page rebuild of the agency site, moved from a page builder to a static build with structured data and automated copy checks.

See the work   One-page resume