Get Shouty

1. Be good at cutting and pasting
2. Be able to deconstruct the craft
3. Be able to expand (and contract) to fill the space available
4. Be a good, and patient, educator
5. Be cyber-optimist and a hyper-cynic
6. Use the forces of geekdom
7. Don’t hate business, it’s your friend
8. Do things, make stuff
9. Be Non-Stick and Wipe-Kleen
10. Love what you do

UPDATE:

Who’s behind the “Wassup 2008″ Obama ad? Not Budweiser.

Posted by: Burt Helm on October 27

The “Wassup 2008” Obama video: two questions sprung to mind. First, who paid for this thing? The production values are very high – one person from Budweiser’s ad agency, DDB, estimated it could have cost as much as $750,000 (she also said DDB had nothing to do with the video). Second, how could Budweiser possibly be cool with such a clearly partisan advertisement?

After some digging, Burt found out. First, it cost way less than $750k. Second, Budweiser had no clue it was happening until after the video hit YouTube on Friday.

The man with the answers? Charles Stone III, the director of the original “Wassup” commercial and the movie Drumline (and the guy who answers the phone in the first frame of the video). He decided to make it about two weeks ago, he told me, with a crew of about 50 volunteers (all professionals working pro bono). They put it together in 9 days.

It was all possible, Stone says, because Budweiser never owned the rights to the idea. He’d originally made it as a short film independent of the brand, and Budweiser had only leased the rights, paying a mere $37,000 for five years of use. Back then, people gave him a hard time about the low price. Now Stone, a diehard Obama supporter, says it’s more than paid off. “That I’m able to use an idea distributed by a huge company, who made a lot of money off it, so that now when I put out what I want to say, it’s recognizable, and it sparks — that’s worth $1 million to me.”

It came together after emailing with friends about ways they could make a video supporting Obama. Once they’d settled on the concept, he got on the phone with the original cast (all friends of his, who are now actors living in New York, Philadelphia, and LA), and called up his Director of Photography from Drumline, Shane Hurlbut, who brought in his crew. He also signed up Gerard Cantor and Maurice Marible, from commercial production house Believe Media, who co-produced. They shot over two days. The war-torn Iraq setting is actually a preexisting set in Santa Clarita, CA.

After they finished, they uploaded it to YouTube with distribution company 60Frames, set up a website, wassup08.com, and sent links to everyone they knew. As of writing this, it’s been viewed almost 1.8 million times, and picked up across the blogosphere, including on BoingBoing, Daily Kos, and Huffington Post. The final price tag? About $6500 out of his own pocket, Stone says.

Please give me your thoughts! Are they different from who your clients would find inspiring? What would that list be?

In honour of Blog Action Day I’ve made a Kiva loan to Mrs. Hem Chenda’s Village Bank Group Bakery, in Cambodia, who has asked for a loan to buy sticky rice to make Khmer cake.

Kiva is one of the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending websites, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world. These entrepreneurs use their loans to start businesses that lift them and their communities out of poverty. It doesn’t take much and the majority of loans are fully repaid!

• In order to track Blog Action Day fund raising,  you can join the Blog Action Day Lending Team!
• Start Loaning Now

You don’t need to donate money to make a difference today, you could simply donate your time.  Free Rice is a game which will allow the donatation of 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program.

The rice you donate makes a huge difference to the person who receives it. According to the United Nations, about 25,000 people die each day from hunger or hunger-related causes, most of them children. Though 20 grains of rice may seem like a small amount, it is important to remember that while you are playing, so are thousands of other people at the same time. It is everyone together that makes the difference. Thanks to you, FreeRice has generated enough rice to feed more than two million people since it started in October 2007.

Go and play for five minutes and see how many dishes of rice you can send. Then pick up your own banner and spread the word here.

The word innovation is ubiquitous in modern business and political life. Every organisation projects itself as innovative; every country strives to be innovative to compete in a world changing at a dizzying pace.

I was lucky enough to go to the launch of Inside the Innovation Matrix – Finding the hidden human dimensions a book prompted by the Australian Business Foundation . It’s a collection of 14 papers from eminent business people and academics explores the hidden human dimensions of innovation, beyond scientific discovery, entrepreneurial flair or just plain creativity.

• Innovation can give firms a great competitive edge, but it sometimes needs to be prompted by collaboration rather than competition. How can you foster learning networks?
• Innovation in Winning Organisations in Australia: Myths and Realities
• How Australia can maximise the economic and other benefits of our skilled citizen diaspora
• How Intangible Networks Can Boost the Innovation Odds
• New Tools to Map and Manage Innovation Networks
• How an organisation can embed innovation in its very DNA
• The role of innovators and stabilisers
• Facilitating unlearning

You can download the individual chapters here or the entire book Inside the Innovation Matrix (all chapters) (1 MB PDF)

Brilliant! Thanks Jessica:

Tyler Durden has never been a more accurate soothsayer our time (as we, perhaps, seem to be viewing the collapse of financial history) and while his darkly funny neo-fascist dialectic puts its fists against the value system of advertising, perhaps we can learn a little from what he has to say.

• Bit of respect.
  • “Look, the people you are after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep. Do not… fuck with us.”
• Learn. Change. Grow.
  • “I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let… lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may.”
• Talk about something other than yourself.
  • “You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake”
• Have some perspective.
  • “We are not special.  We are not crap or trash, either.  We just are.  We just are, and what happens just happens.  And God says, “No, that’s not right.”  Yeah.  Well.  Whatever.  You can’t teach God anything”
• Fundamentaly- don’t be fake
  • “Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.”

We need to let brands be. Not leave them alone. But let them be human, allow the humans that tell the stories of brands be the brand. If you let go you might just have a near life experience.

I’m building a presentation about the benefits of tapping into the vibrant thinking community in Sydney- I’ll share that soon.

In my travels, I have found that there isn’t really a site that already aggregates all the event-y get-together-y zeitgeist-y goodness that this fine city has to offer- so I’m going to (as per Gav’s crystal ball) chuck something together so that all this info comes together in a readily available place.

These are the sources I’m looking to- please make your additions!:

• http://www.slatteryit.com.au/events.html
• http://www.techevents.com.au/events/category/nsw/
• http://wipa.org.au/events/
• http://webstandardsgroup.org/meetings
• http://www.techevents.com.au/events/category/nsw/
• http://webstandardsgroup.org/meetings
• http://www.digitalministry.com.au/events/events.html
• http://www.aimia.com.au/
• http://www.sydneytalks.com.au/ (this is pretty excellent)
• http://www.aftrs.edu.au/aboutus/NewsEvents/Events/
• http://ice.org.au/
• http://www.popcorntaxi.com.au/