Wellesley Teen Gives Insurance Customers ‘Something to Laugh At’
Woonsocket, RI. June 29, 2010. Provider Insurance Group, the award-winning life, health and business insurance provider, announced Peter Cramer as the grand prize winner of its 2nd annual “Can You Make Insurance Funny?” video contest. Cramer, a life-long Wellesley resident and 2010 graduate of Wellesley High, was awarded the $1,000 college scholarship at the annual Wellesley High School Film Festival on May 13.
Provider worked with Wellesley High School teachers, Julie Spilka and Rachel Appel to introduce the contest to their respective TV/Video production classes. The Provider sponsored contest challenge was to produce a 30-second marketing video using creativity, originality and humor to promote insurance. Fourteen students submitted entries.
Provider CEO and Wellesley resident, William Darcey, coined the contest idea in 2009, when the agency wanted to produce video commercials that humanized insurance. “We found that most advertising agencies were out of our price range,” says Darcey. “So we turned to the next best thing: Tech-savvy high school students.”
Cramer’s winning video, Time to Say Goodbye, was chosen from among the five most viewed clips on YouTube. It captures the slow-motion destruction of a child’s lovingly-built Lego castle, which signifies how tragedy can strike at anytime, regardless of precautions taken; therefore one must have a trusted insurance ‘Provider.’ The commercial has received thousands of hits on YouTube since April.
The inspiration for Time to Say Goodbye grew from Cramer’s own boyhood experience building with Legos. “I’ve known for a long time that there’s a story behind the tragedy of working on something for months, only to see it come crashing down in an instant. The Provider contest was the perfect opportunity to turn my idea into a marketable message” says Cramer.
Cramer contributes a lot of his success to the Final Cut Pro skills he learned in his TV/Video production class. The rest comes from his boyhood passion for filmmaking. “When I was younger, I’d play in my backyard with a video camera, pretending I was on safari, shooting film of imaginary exotic creatures. I’d create the jungle experience using different camera angles from inside our giant lilac bush” explains Cramer.
Next up for Cramer: College in September at Wesleyan College in Connecticut, where he plans to study film analysis. Cramer says it’s an interest he’s been developing since his junior year film history course.
About the Provider Insurance Group
Founded in 1945, Provider Insurance Group is a Trusted Choice insurance agency that has grown over the past 60 plus years into a world class, client focused organization. After a rigorous examination and fitness review of 17 quality points, Provider was awarded the Five Star designation, which is held by less than 1 percent of insurance agencies in New England. Headquartered in Massachusetts, Provider also has an office in Woonsocket, R.I.
