Tag: Video

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Expensify this

My day job, as you’ve probably noticed by now, involves making YouTube videos for a small business audience. At a small business software company.

Expensify, another small business software company, just won that game with their Superbowl ad:

When my colleague Luda shared this with me last week it had fewer than 500 views; it has 7.2 million as I’m writing this. They’ll be paying an estimated USD$5.25 million to air the ad during the game, and I am so curious what percentage of those YouTube views they paid for. A lot of people are commenting that when they clicked to watch the video, the same one comes up as an ad, so clearly they’re paying more than they should have…

I was only half joking when told Luda I might as well quit, there’s no touching their big-budget over-the-top interactive star power collab sweepstakes approach. Definitely not my style, but still… wow. I catch new details every time I watch (”smoke a bong with a porcupine,” why not?) and I’ve watched it So. Many. Times. I even tried scanning the receipts but couldn’t get any of my blurry screenshots to scan properly in the app, which I already have on my phone because that’s what we use for our expenses. I feel so Silicon Valley right now.

Well played, Expensify, well played.

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We didn’t flood the new carpets / Why it pays to put due dates on your invoices

Scott and I just spent about a week gradually moving out of our old rental and into a new one. The first order of business was replacing the carpets, a project we’d agreed to take on in exchange for not having to pay rent until the lease on our previous rental ran out.

On our first full day in the house, after the carpets were in, we triggered a small flood during a failed attempt at replacing the ancient water filter. It wouldn’t have been so bad except that the main water shutoff valve is broken (now we know!), so it’s impossible to shut the water main off completely. I’ve never been so grateful for my travel towel.

I was expecting to have to pay the emergency plumber Big Bucks for coming out in the middle of a three-day weekend. Amazingly, the invoice he sent later that day came to only $46 NZD (~$31 USD), a small price to pay for having saved the new carpets, yay!

But that invoice was missing a very critical detail: a due date. In fact, none of the invoices I received over the last couple of weeks — one from the plumber, one from the carpet people, and one from a doctor — included a due date! Clearly I need to share my latest video around:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ELeU0HEkOM

Spoiler: Continue reading “We didn’t flood the new carpets / Why it pays to put due dates on your invoices”

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How to raise money for your business – a couple presentations from the archives

I recently discovered a couple recordings of talks I gave when I was in my Finance for Food prime, traveling throughout North America to give keynote presentations and teach workshops on raising money for food businesses.

My book had already been out for a while by then, so I’d had the opportunity to figure out a few things that I hadn’t known yet when I was writing it. More importantly, I’d also given enough presentations (so many!) to learn which things people really wanted to hear about, and what bored people to tears… so I’d like to think that these two videos deliver the best-of-the-best of what I had to offer back then.

Both of these talks were given to audiences of farmers (the Practical Farmers of Iowa Annual Conference and the Virginia Farm to Table conference, respectively), but I made sure to cover financing options for processed food businesses, too… and so many of these options are available to ANY type of business.

If you want to know about your options for raising money for your business and video is your thing, check these out!

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When the medium limits the message

Here are three offerings that really drove home the whole “the medium is the message” message for me this week. I’ll share more of my own thoughts in separate posts; here, I’ll let the artists speak for themselves.

One: Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette [this is just the trailer, you can read more of my thoughts on it here]:

Two: This video essay from Lindsay Ellis [more of my thoughts on this video here]:

…and Three: something my friend Ethan wrote in the description of the Kickstarter campaign for his latest art book, The Evening Pink. [Please give him your support! And I’ve written up more thoughts about slow, thoughtful engagement, etc, here:

I am concerned about the distribution and reach of independent cultural production in 2018. The last time I pre-ordered an edition, in 2012, the cultural landscape was quite different. We used blogs! Artists are now producing more content for less pay, on channels that ask for shorter encounters with artworks. This is discouraging when you make books, and want to facilitate a slow, thoughtful engagement.

 

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Manufacturing authenticity

In her video essay YouTube: Manufacturing Authenticity (For Fun and Profit!), Lindsay Ellis casts a very self-conscious, very critical eye on YouTube vlogs as an “authentic” phenomenon + livelihood… starting with, of all things, an analysis of the evolution of a couple of cake decorating channels.

I realize this one sounds like it’s a lot heavier on YouTube-specific geekery than most people would appreciate, but I recommend this video to anyone who recognizes that forging a connection with your audience (whomever and whatever that audience may be!) is an important way to get people coming back for whatever it is you want people to come back to you for (be it your videos, your music, your writing, your art).

And I especially recommend this video to everyone who has experienced the heightened trickiness of this territory whenever your livelihood depends in some way upon a public image you must therefore maintain.

So many insights into these juicy topics in this video. And in a stroke of brilliance, Lindsay interviews YouTube darling (and one of my faves) Hank Green, in a textbook tactic from Google’s YouTube best practices playbook: Create, Collaborate, Curate!

There’s a really great section on the history of emotional labor, leading into the impact of trying to maintain an internet persona, starting here. And she gets Hank to talk about why he does what he does here:

I want people to get excited about the universe and the world and… thinking critically and hard about stuff. More and more I want to foster some kind of better communication among people, and also more and more I feel like that needs to happen a lot more OFF of the internet than is happening now… we need to occupy the same physical space as other human beings.

I could not figure out how to get a transcript from this video. 12 points for anyone who knows the trick!

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Keeping the baby AND the bathwater

We are complicit with everything we buy and click on and watch.

I’ve been struggling for months (if not years? decades?) to make sense of where to file the work of once-favorite actors, artists, comedians, scientists, authors, thinkers, etc who turn out to have done some very awful things (see: #metoo).

A couple weeks ago, someone suggested that I consider integrating both the baby AND the bathwater, rather than trying to figure out what to keep and what to toss. The idea of this approach appeals to me… but how?

This Art Assignment video does an excellent job of both articulating the conundrum and describing what’s actually at stake / why what we choose to do matters. Host Sarah Urist Green outlines a few approaches (including some both/and AND either/or options), and poses some very relevant questions to ponder as we each grapple with how to appreciate someone’s content, even as we condemn their behavior:

In addition to the quote I included above, here are a couple more that stood out to me from the video, but I highly recommend you watch it all if you’re at all interested in these issues.

Who reaps the financial rewards of our attention?

The context of this one was the question of whether or not to watch the latest controversial YouTube video, but the larger point is that these choices have impacts in any genre:

I can’t bear to think that I’ll… contribute financially in any way to that person and their fame. Our attention matters, and it’s also being closely monitored, amounting to ad dollars and influencing boardroom decisions about what kind of stuff gets made.

 

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Clear as mud: Black Willow, Mississippi Mud, and FBI informants

LomaScott very rarely plays songs more than once in a sitting, so the fact that we’ve now listened to Loma‘s Black Willow six times in a row is no small endorsement. I agree: it’s infectiously beautiful, darkly haunting, the lyrics are provocative… definitely worth playing over and over, and there’s something about the album cover art, too.

I finally decided to look for a video and Lo, not only does one exist, it’s in a similar vein as the ones I have posted twice before:

And the plot thickens! The video’s first comment on YouTube is from (actor, producer, and writer) Daniel Martine, who points out that the song sounds eerily similar to a song called “Mississippi Mud,” a Black Blood and the Chocolate Pickles song with a grim history:

In his comment to the Black Willow video, Daniel continues:

The story is about the death of black students who protesting [sic] at Jackson State in Mississippi in ’70. Not long after Kent State shootings happened. But it didn’t get the press of Kent State, because they were black students.

I can google up no evidence that Loma may have meant Black Willow to be a straight up homage to the song and/or a rememberance of the events that took place at Jackson State, not to mention the inequality of the response thereafter compared to shootings of white students. But I could understand that the band could have gone there Continue reading “Clear as mud: Black Willow, Mississippi Mud, and FBI informants”

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Aimless Love: a poem by Billy Collins

Aimless Love
by Billy Collins

This morning as I walked along the lake shore,
I fell in love with a wren
and later in the day with a mouse
the cat had dropped under the dining room table.

In the shadows of an autumn evening,
I fell for a seamstress
still at her machine in the tailor’s window,
and later for a bowl of broth,
steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.

This is the best kind of love, I thought,
without recompense, without gifts,
or unkind words, without suspicion,
or silence on the telephone.

The love of the chestnut,
the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel.

No lust, no slam of the door—
the love of the miniature orange tree,
the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower,
the highway that cuts across Florida.

No waiting, no huffiness, or rancor—
just a twinge every now and then

for the wren who had built her nest
on a low branch overhanging the water
and for the dead mouse,
still dressed in its light brown suit.

But my heart is always propped up
in a field on its tripod,
ready for the next arrow.

After I carried the mouse by the tail
to a pile of leaves in the woods,
I found myself standing at the bathroom sink
gazing down affectionately at the soap,

so patient and soluble,
so at home in its pale green soap dish.
I could feel myself falling again
as I felt its turning in my wet hands
and caught the scent of lavender and stone.

Original source: Billy Collins, Nine Horses, Pan Macmillan and Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2003, accessed via Pan Macmillan on 9 August 2018. Continue reading “Aimless Love: a poem by Billy Collins”

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Dean Fidelman finally getting the kind of attention he deserves (and not only for StoneNudes)

I met photographer Dean Fidelman while living in Yosemite National Park in 1999, and for years I invested everything I had—physically, energetically, spiritually, and financially—into his StoneNudes project. This attempt to build a something that would financially support a complete immersion into art, nature, community collaboration, social activism, and a life well-lived sparked a sense of purpose I’ve been both refining and expanding ever since. Though I ultimately chose to distance myself from the always-fraught business side of StoneNudes, Dean and I have remained very close friends and artistic collaborators.

Climbing podcast Enormocast recently published not one but two entire episodes’ worth of an interview with Dean (here’s Part 1 and here’s Part 2), and they’re fantastic. As someone who came of age listening to climbers’ yarns around Yosemite campfires, and who regularly groans at the media’s lazy sensationalization of Dean’s work, I have to say that it is a rare treat to hear the man himself explain, at length and very eloquently, why he does the work he does.

All other accounts leave out what I believe are the most important elements of his story: his deep appreciation for his mentors, his community (including those who have left us), the places that inspire his work, his commitment to giving back, and the reality of what it’s like to walk in his shoes… the mismatched shoes of our deceased friend Sean, as the case happens be.

This year marks the 20th and final edition of the StoneNudes Calendar, and I’m thrilled that Dean’s Kickstarter campaign is doing so well! Continue reading “Dean Fidelman finally getting the kind of attention he deserves (and not only for StoneNudes)”

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When should you hire an accountant?

When I was running my publishing company, I used my (sadly, rather inept) accountant exactly five times: once to set me up on my accounting software — a disaster through-and-through — and once a year for the four years to do our taxes.

If I had known then what I know now (businesses that use accountants regularly grow their profits 23% faster!), I would have made an effort to find an accountant that was a much better fit, and I would have consulted them far more frequently.

Here’s a video I made recently for Xero that goes over the critical times when it’s a good idea to hire an accountant.