We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful David Roemer. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with David below.
David , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
When I started Campus Movie Fest with a few friends more than twenty years ago, I had no intention of running the biggest student film festival in the world – or a global creative studio. For many years, we just focused on running Campus Movie Fest and empowering masses of students to tell their stories through short films all for free. We partnered with some extraordinary brands that sponsored the events and made it all possible. We quickly saw all the incredible creativity, skill, and passion from the student storytellers. Through the festival, we were discovering some of the top emerging talent – full of different passions, expertise, backgrounds, and geographic locations. We quickly started building an alumni network of sorts, with talents ranging from writing to directing to animation to music composition and more. And before we knew it, we had thousands of diverse storytellers located all across the globe who were hungry for opportunities to work with leading brands and nonprofits. They were resourceful and efficient (meaning they didn’t need the traditional high budgets). At the same time, we realized it wasn’t enough to connect a Fortune 500 brand and an individual storyteller somewhere around the world and hope for the best. So we scaled our internal team to ensure we were providing the highest level of quality and consistency. That’s how Ideas United came to be. Over time, we’ve found a pretty magical balance of the power of our community of talented creators and our exceptional full-time team members to tell stories like no one else.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I’m co-founder and CEO of Ideas United, a creative studio and production company based in Atlanta, GA with collaborators around the world. I’m most proud of our team and our proven capacity to change the way stories are told. Over the years we’ve developed an innovative model for creative storytelling that turns the traditional media structure on its head, empowering creators from the bottom up rather than imposing formulas on them from the top down. Empowering diverse individuals from all walks of life to tell their own stories is what drives me, and I’m incredibly proud of my team at Ideas United, and our global network of creatives in the iU Community, for making that possible. We specialize in a few key areas. First, we partner with premier brands to help them tell their stories differently. Over the years, that’s ranged from helping Starbucks capture content in their cafes in 28 countries in one day to delivering marketing solutions for Disney, PGA, Warner Bros. Discovery, Amazon, and Atlanta-based companies including Equifax, Southern Company, Coca-Cola, and more. Second, we partner with leading universities and nonprofits to help them make a positive impact. That work has included helping tell the Smithsonian’s stories as it raised $1.88 billion (the largest capital campaign of any cultural institution at the time), similar to our capital campaign work for Emory University and now Georgia Tech, in addition to overall storytelling and content creation for St. Jude, Everytown for Gun Safety, Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, and the Arnold & Winnie Palmer Foundation, among many others. And third, we couldn’t be more excited around the convergence of brands, universities, and nonprofits along with original content, such as episodic series/docuseries and feature films. We’ve worked with platforms ranging from Amazon Prime Video and PlayStation to Warner Bros. Discovery to help unleash fresh concepts for long-form content. All in all, it’s been an incredible honor working with such exceptional storytellers – especially those who haven’t traditionally been welcomed into the industry – and phenomenal organizations to make a difference. Our partners find that we’re often more creative, more diverse, more authentic, and more cost-efficient than their traditional solutions for content creation and storytelling.
As far as my path into the industry and career, it’s been quite an adventure. When I was a student at Emory University, my dream job was working for Apple, and I was fortunate to become an Apple Campus Rep, followed by interning in Cupertino for four years. Working around such brilliant colleagues in Apple’s Marketing team inspired me to explore what’s possible at the intersection of creativity and technology. One such example was a student organization I co-founded at Emory with the mission of providing our fellow students with laptops, cameras, and training to create their own short movies. Before we knew it, over 1,500 Emory students had made films in a week, and we set out to grow that one event into Campus Movie Fest, the world’s largest student film festival.
Upon graduating, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to consider my dream job at Apple, but my manager there told me I’d always regret not knowing what could’ve been if I didn’t go after our business idea. Twenty-years later, it seems like it was the right choice as that film festival has grown into Ideas United, and Apple has remained a partner ever since. Thanks to running Campus Movie Fest for so many years, we started discovering some of the top emerging talent around the globe. The best of the best has formed our iU Community, and in partnership with our core team, has had the opportunities of a lifetime to help our partners share some amazing stories.
Twenty years is a long time, and of course the company is very different today than it was a few years ago, let alone at the beginning. We have much to celebrate, including some mistakes and failures along the way. But especially because we’ve invested so much time and energy into Ideas United, it’s more important than ever for us to leverage what we’ve built to make a positive difference. We love the work we do with brands, including a lot of purpose-driven stories. And the work we do with universities and nonprofits has been tremendously rewarding, whether it’s helping them raise over $5 billion towards important causes, or helping them make a meaningful impact such as with Everytown’s Gun Sense University. We know there’s still much to be done.
Personally, I’ve always been focused on helping others tell their stories. As I’ve tried to grow as a leader, I’ve started to recognize that includes me sharing more of my story as well. Whether that’s the nonprofits I’m passionate about, or more authentically speaking as a CEO who happens to be gay, or taking on more leadership roles in the community, or speaking up for others even if it’s not convenient – again, I know there’s still much more to be done.
I think back to those early days of starting the company – the spark, the energy, the passion, the supporters. And while the world seems much more complicated these days, I’m able to build great confidence in the opportunities ahead thanks to the team and partners we have. Here’s to the next chapter.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
Entrepreneurship is full of stories of resilience, and our journey is no different. The first year as a company was quite a wake-up call of what was to come. We must’ve heard “no” hundreds of times (even more if you count the times we didn’t hear anything at all), but fortunately I had some awesome co-founders, mentors, and supporters who encouraged us to keep pursuing the possibilities. When we eventually got a call from Delta Air Lines saying “yes”, we were so surprised we had to ask “yes to what?”. But with Delta and Apple as our first partners, we were off to the races, and quickly learned more than we thought possible. That resilience and learning has continued to this day – whether through recessions, pandemics, battles for social justice, and so much more that impacts our team and our partners. I unfortunately don’t anticipate it getting easier anytime soon, but I also realize how privileged we are to have the opportunities we do to make a positive impact.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
Like most around the world, our team at Ideas United certainly had to pivot early in the COVID pandemic. In February of that year, we were cruising… we had recently raised some growth equity funding and doubled the size of our team. Some of our largest projects at the time included having hundreds of crew members working on original content series for DC Universe and WarnerMedia, as well as major projects gearing up for the PGA Championship, the Final Four, and more. Over the course of a couple days, the live events were canceled, the series productions were canceled, and much of our business ground to a halt.
As we began to assess the situation, including many restless nights, we started seeing some significant opportunities. For example, given our model of having thousands of creators around the globe, we could quickly help our partners safely capture content without getting on a plane. We also began huddling (virtually) with our partners, identifying their challenges and collaborating on solutions. For example, Emory University needed to figure out how to run a virtual commencement ceremony in just a few weeks, and our team quickly rose to the task (including building a virtual event platform that many of our partners use to this day). Speaking of commencement, we also helped YouTube create a global commencement featuring President Obama and other luminaries. In the golf world, we quickly helped our partners at the PGA, LPGA, and more show how golf was a healthy outlet for exercise and fresh air, and have seen the results of that growth of the industry continue to this day. Needless to say, there’s basically nothing from the pandemic that we’d want to ever happen again, but I’m incredibly proud of how our team came together for each other and for our partners.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://ideasunited.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ideasunited/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ideasunited
Image Credits
Headshot credit: Photo by Chase Anderson All other images: Courtesy of Ideas United