ARTIE MEDIA, LLC

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO of the Australian Homestay Network, an international homestay company that started 10 years ago. We operate throughout most of the major cities in Australia and the U.S. Our main purpose is to place international students with host families and manage the entire placement process for their journey into a new country.

What challenge were you trying to address with ARTIE MEDIA, LLC?

We had done a video for the Australian market and wanted to do one for the U.S. as well.

What was the scope of their involvement?

ARTIE MEDIA, LLC came up with a great concept from the very beginning. It consisted of a short movie that’s much more emotional than the Australian video. We loved it so much that we didn’t make any changes to it; we just let them go for it.

It’s a live-action video focused on one of our campaigns. They did all the work, including the storyboard and script. Quite often, these things sound great but aren’t something you would want to go ahead with. Once I read the script, I knew it was going to be different and special. They filmed with one of our host families and a student.

What is the team composition?

I worked with Darrin (Founder & CEO, ARTIE MEDIA, LLC) directly, but we also collaborated with the film crew while filming the video.

How did you come to work with ARTIE MEDIA, LLC?

I initially wasn’t looking at doing a video in the U.S., but our founder met Darrin at an event for international educators and asked him what they could offer. Their script really won me over and it felt worthwhile to do regardless of being very different from what we'd done for the Australian market. We knew we could use it quite widely throughout our campaigns in the U.S.

How much have you invested in them?

We spent around $20,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked with them from June–December 2017. We had a delay in filming because we had to wait for the people we wanted to feature in the video to become available.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We’ve sent the video to our agent and host networks, and it’s also included in our email signatures, so it’s been fairly widely distributed. The people that have watched it have had fantastic comments about it and a greater emotional reaction than from any of the other videos we’ve seen or done.

How did ARTIE MEDIA, LLC perform from a project management standpoint?

Darrin was great. He came up with the script, exchanged emails with us, and followed up to make sure we had all the information we needed to promote the video and make it accessible to our clients. It was a very seamless process marked by good service.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Darrin’s script was outstanding; it really won us over from the beginning and the results have been fantastic. We feel like it’s a very high-quality video, and everyone who watches it feels the same.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The process for making the video accessible was something we hadn’t considered when we first began the project, but luckily, we had Darrin to guide us. If there’s anything to improve, it would be at providing that information from the beginning so that clients know how to manage the distribution of the video afterward.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Let Darrin go with it; he’s very creative. I got the feeling that he liked working with us as well because we let him do his job without too much direction. He was able to get us a better result because he had creative freedom.