Late last week, the University of Miami chapter of the Delta Gamma sorority dropped the craziest Greek life recruitment video we’ve ever seen. You can watch it below.
In terms of sheer over-the-top-ness, it’s more insane than the University of Alabama Alpha Phi sorority video that went viral over the summer. There are luxury yachts, hotels, and beach houses. I mean, just look at this stuff:
Meanwhile, there’s an interesting secondary story emerging on the clueless blogs speculating how much such a video would have cost. Elle magazine asked creative director of a New York–based ad agency to speculate how much money was spent producing such a video if done by a professional firm. The ad agency person gave them a mind-numbing number for anything related to college greek life: $400,0000.
“We believe it was shot on a moving rig and one of the newer drones (not a helicopter). The combination of three days at least, a good camera (because of the slo-mo), rented boats (speedboat and sailboat), possibly a rented beach, a rented hotel, and post production, could come to $400K. But even if all the locations were donated (dads’ boats, et cetera), we’re looking at $200K.”
That’s a lot of money. That’s the cost of a single-family home in many places. And there is no doubt $200,000 – $400,000 is how much it costs for a professional video production studio make an aesthetically- similar YouTube video for a brand like Lexus or Samsung.
The U is an expensive school to go to — Almost $60,000 a year just for tuition. It’s not out of the range of possibility that some rich alum or parents coughed up that type of cash to have a professional recruitment video shot.
But sororities are not brands. They have no where near the amount of marketing budget a brand like Pepsi, Chevy, or AT&T has.
$200,000 – $400,000 is no where near the *actual* cost of the production for something this homespun in the YouTube era, even though it didn’t stop MTV and Elite Daily from spreading the story.
The reality is that there’s a a cottage industry of small, independent video producers that make a decent living making recruitment videos for sororities and fraternities. Here at BroBible, we know the guy who made the video. His name is Diego Camejo and he’s a young, talented college-age video producer based in Miami who runs a production house called Artec Media.
In an e-mail, we reached out and asked him to respond to the speculation from Elle and MTV over the video’s laughable cost. production told us that Artec Media did the video for free. Instead of renting a boat for tens of thousands of dollars like a big production company would, some friends let Artec Media borrow their boat.
Camejo also noted that Artec Media is donating all the proceeds from the video going viral to Delta Gamma’s foundation for the blind or visually impaired:
Despite the popular belief that this video cost hundreds of thousands to produce, I agreed to make this video and original song at no cost whatsoever to the sorority as it was my intention to give away all revenue generated from online video views to Delta Gamma’s national foundation, Service for Sight.
That is the very definition of a Bro move.