Shot on an iPhone in Rome

Role: Shooter, Editor, Director, Art Director, Designer
Creative Team: Maddie Poulin, Jake Minton, Kira Viola, Cassie Title

As an experiment, a copywriter and I were sent to Rome with an iPhone to see if we could capture brand-worthy content on technology we hold in our hands every day. Usually, international shoots require a video production and creative team of 6+ people. In this test, the two of us assumed all the roles ourselves—production, storyboarding, filming, audio, interviewing, art direction, and editing.

The mission: Create a video profile on Linda, a first-time teacher traveling with EF who won a free spot on one of our international training tours.

The result: Not only did we come home and create a video profile on Linda’s EF experience, but we featured her as the hero of the following season’s giveaway, which acts as a sales lead-generation campaign to introduce teachers to EF.

The final edited video

Shoot Preparation: Proof of Concept

Before we could head to Rome with our equipment, we had to make sure we knew what we were doing with it. We followed our friend and colleague, Mish Peck, to Starbucks and documented her mid-afternoon coffee break—followed by a sit-down interview with our subject. While not perfect, we gained a vast amount of knowledge during this mini-experiment and felt as ready as ever to do the real thing in Rome with Linda.

The Slumps: Proof of Concept

Lead-generation campaign: EF Training Tour Giveaway

When it was time to build the following season’s training tour giveaway campaign, the content we captured in Rome with Linda drove the entire creative direction. Back-to-school season is the most critical part of the sales calendar for EF Educational Tours. Traditionally the business has relied on the excitement of returning to the classroom to talk to teachers about leading their students on an educational tour. But some of those traditions had begun to feel stale.

Specifically, a direct mail piece that had remained unchanged for years, felt bloated, and limited creative execution. Teaming up with a copywriter, I spearheaded a team-wide effort to completely overhaul our approach to the physical element of this campaign, generating a library of new ideas our team could put into practice going forward. The new approach resulted in significant production cost savings and a 10% improvement in leads from the previous year.

Ad spot for EF Educational Tours

Ad spot for EF Explore America