Ztories exists to tell our clients' stories. Here is a gallery of their comments.
Perry Robinson
Vice President and Director of Admissions,
Denison University
"Ztories has been a great help to our admissions efforts. The DVD they produced has been a very effective yield piece that encourages accepted students to matriculate; our parent and alumni admissions volunteers use it enthusiastically in their presentations or as a leave-behind; our international recruiters love its ability to get students who can't visit an exciting glimpse of campus life; our coaches keep clamoring for more and more copies to give to their recruiting prospects; and our students love it.
Owen RIchard Kindig captured the Denison distinctives, listened carefully to our input, responded to our content critiques and institutional priorities throughout the production process, and gave us exactly what we wanted -- an exciting, compelling, emotional and yet realistic movie experience that works great with the sophisticated and media-savvy students we are competing for."
Roscoe Smith
Director of Admissions
Cedarville University
“I've worked with Owen Kindig on multiple recruitment video and dvd projects over the last 20 years, and I find him to be a uniquely gifted man. He is artistic and creative in his craft but also savvy about the "business" of student recruitment. Video has the unparalleled potential to reach beyond reason and touch a person's emotions. Owen Kindig has consistently delivered videos for Cedarville University that turned the potential into reality, touching both the hearts and minds of prospective students and their parents.”
Steven G. Kukla, Research Manager, AOL
“Ken Christie offers high-energy drive, focused attention to strategic goals, creativity and flair, a huge network of professional associates, and years of proven experience to draw upon. Entrust Ken with a challenging project, give him some independence and watch him produce results and move your organization.”
Scott Annan, CEO / Co-Founder, Mercury Grove
“Ken is very good at being able to define high level strategy and ground-level execution. His has great ability at managing customer expectation, over-delivering on aggressive timelines, and working in a dynamic team setting. It was a pleasure to work with him.”
Joyce Dreesen, Director, Kaplan Financial
“I have worked with Ken on a number of projects, including creation of a website for CTI Group, an ASP in the telecommunications industry. Ken was given an extremely short timeframe to pull off a website to match Chi’s new brand positioning. Not only was the site a success, but Ken brought the final product in ahead of schedule and under budget. His acumen in the areas of interactive development and tracking is unsurpassed in this, and larger, markets. I would recommend Ken to anyone seeking to complete a project that will exceed expectations.”
Carla Johanson
Marketing Director for Minnesota Online,
Minnesota State Colleges and Universities
(Former Communications Director for
Northwest Technical College,
a multiple-campus member of MnSCU):
Owen Richard Kindig and his branding and production company, now known as Ztories, has been a valued part of our communications efforts since 1994. We found him through exceptional work he was doing for Glencoe McGraw-Hill, which brought him onto our campus to interview our President and several faculty members and students for a nationwide marketing effort along with IBM.
At first we were simply impressed with his ability to get great comments on tape, and to edit them with into an energetic, compelling story.
When we retained his company to help us with our media, we discovered how much branding insight they brought to the table. Since the mid 90s we have engaged Ztories' services time and again to address our branding needs.
For example, in our first major effort we were trying to create a unified approach for 5 campuses that each had distinctive strengths along with confusingly overlapping programs. Ztories worked with our faculty across 5 campuses to create 17 brochures 
which grouped similar courses together into unified marketing modules. They also created an entire campaign, "Get There Faster", including a viewbook, TV spots, radio spots, and additional print materials. Ztories did everything in-house except the printing. They shot outstanding photographs and distilled our disjointed documentation and telephone interviews of our faculty into clear course descriptions which carried our institutional flag for several years.
Bear in mind that this whole project started before the days when branding was a hot button in college promotional efforts. But Owen convinced us to let his company conduct qualitative research interviews of key faculty, administrators and students on each campus, to gain insights into the college strengths and weaknesses. Ztories also made media placement recommendations which we followed with great success.
A few years later, we found changes in the marketplace were affecting the enrollment of most colleges across the state, and so we brought Ztories in again to review our situation and upgrade our brand. The company conducted quantitative research at local malls, as well as qualitative research focus groups involving students, alumni, faculty, and our marketing team. They also surveyed secondary research about our situation in the Red River Valley and produced a complete marketing plan that guided our efforts for the next several years. Owen's leadership and sensitivity helped forge consensus among our geographically dispersed department
heads, and created a new branding approach, "Focused on You". With this effort, Ztories changed the entire graphic style of the college into a fluid, high touch direction.
I still marvel at the amount of work we were able to accomplish on a limited budget. Working with a list of names we supplied him, Owen and his employees interviewed students and alumni by phone, and chose eight real people and their stories to feature in TV spots. Using their actual words of testimonial, Ztories fashioned a script, shot 8 spots on 16mm film in 5 days that involved over 1000 miles of travel, crisscrossing North Dakota and Minnesota. At each location Owen wore two hats as branding consultant and director. He arrived with the script which had been culled from the subject's own words. and within two or three hours had storyboarded the spots, shot them, and recorded the audio of each testimonial. He also shot high-resolution stills for the viewbook and other publications. The "Focused on You" campaign was a huge success, and is still in use at the school which retained the name "Northwest Technical College" in an administrative restructuring a few years later.
Most recently, we retained Ztories to help us with both branding and production for a campaign for Minnesota Online. In this initiative, all the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system have banded together to coordinate their online education offerings. There was no time to conduct insight panels ... we just had to start shooting, without knowing what the branding approach would be. By the second day of shooting, Owen had settled on a terrific positioning statement for us: "Works For Me." By the end of the week we had shot seven cinematic TV spots, each featuring students and alumni who spoke about how online education worked for them. It allowed them to keep working; it allowed them to study at odd hours, and balance personal and family life. To complete the Works For Me campaign, Ztories also edited the spot footage into a long-format marketing presentation for DVD, and multiple video clips for our website. They also created the Works For Me branding logo, and produced banner ads that we use to drive traffic to our website.
Ztories does great interviews. During filming, they have a unique ability to create a comfortable atmosphere for the interviewees. This allows Owen and his associates to gather personal stories in a non-intrusive way. They also glean insights we can use in our marketing efforts by taking a pulse of the media hot buttons of prospective students. What an intuitive ability to ask the right follow-up questions.... I am always amazed by what they tell him!
Working with Ztories over the years, we have been able to grow our enrollment when our other member schools have been flat; we have been able to achieve name recognition for both an old, tired name and a new name; and grow our campuses on very limited budgets. Under Ztories' guidance, we have been able to change the public's perception of our schools from "The Vo-tech" into a credible career choice: The Technical College.
Ztories handled everything: market research, insight panels, marketing plans, branding, design, photography, writing, print publications, video production... and now we're in the early stages of developing our web design for the future.
Having worked with some of the bigger firms in this field, I love the way at Ztories you get expert, hands-on help from beginning to end, without being shuffled from department to department among "specialists" who don't really have a grasp of the whole picture. Instead of breaking up my marketing efforts into little pieces, I love the way Ztories can come alongside, absorb our entire situation... and then deliver award-winning, goal-achieving admissions marketing efforts.
NOTE: You can see two of the TV Spot campaigns for MnSCU on our All Movies page.