I no longer consider myself a full-fledged nerd or a full on geek. At a certain point life just kind of takes over and those things that dominated our perception of ourselves lose some of their traction, as Craig so aptly explained previously. Right now, I tend to refer to myself as a Reformed Geek. Life has staged an intervention for me and forced me into its own 12 step program that has curtailed my dogged determination to be fully immersed in nerdology.
BLOGMASTER 2000: Mr. Ben Kent – filmmaker, programmer, funny person, and genuinely good guy. How are you doing and thanks for being my inaugural interview here on Blogmaster2000.
My main hope with this series of interviews, as we discussed briefly when I reached out to you about participating, is to connect with people I genuinely admire and try to dig in a little bit to get a better idea of what drives them (you) and how you got here from there. So, if you are ready, here we go…
What was your dream job as a kid? How is this different from where you are now?
All of us here at mediaRif and Gangrene Productions would like to thank their friends and clients with this original Christmas song, I’ll Be Home For Christmas (If I Haven’t Blown a Fuse), written by Craig Nybo and performed by Craig Nybo and Larry Nybo (additional background vocals by Curtis Spendlove, Norm Johnson, Brandon Beck, Mike Terrell, and Ben Fuller).
This video was recorded and animated, by Mike Terrell, at mediaRif studios.
Have you noticed on Facebook that not everyone or every page that you are following shows up in your newsfeed? This has become much more pronounced over the last couple of months as FB has pushed through several relatively big platform updates. It becomes especially noticeable if you simultaneously browse your newsfeed on the website and on an aggregator app like Seesmic, or on a mobile app like SocialScope for Blackberry.
When my dad first told me he had hooked me up with a job for the summer at a company called mediaRif, I pictured myself as your typical business woman depicted in movies, going to work in a big office space, dressed in a pinstriped suit, hair tightly wrapped in a bun with a briefcase latched to my side.
This image I had drawn up in my mind totally changed when we first drove up to the office which is an old brick building located right next to the Kaysville Theater in Kaysville, Utah. “There’s the door to your new workplace,” my dad announced amusedly, pointing to an old rickety red door on the back of a building.
Recently, I watched the movie Limitless, starring Bradley Cooper. The movie was about a writer who suffers from creative block. Cooper played a New York, vagabond-looking author with a killer publication contract—a contract so far from realistic that I almost laughed out loud. Cooper was commissioned, as a first time writer, to author a fiction [...]
People often ask me, “Ben, what is your secret to life? To living successfully?” And of course I tell them that it is all about the Benjamins. Or at least one Benjamin, and that one being me.
Ok, so that may or may not be true (no one has actually ever asked me anything remotely like that), but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have an opinion on it. In fact, if you knew me better (and why wouldn’t you want that), you would know that one of my favorite past times is developing random opinions on the fly about most anything that is in front of me. Given the right situation I could build a pretty solid opinion about coffee, even though I don’t drink coffee and have no understanding of the draw, outside of the caffeine.
For those that know me, it should be no surprise that I am very interested in how ideas catch and then spread online in social networks. I really like playing around with that concept and trying to test my own theories on what motivators are primary in the propagation of such instances. For any of us that have email, or participate in online social networks like Twitter, MySpace, or Facebook, we all have experienced them – whether it is a service man’s faith promoting letter of dubious origin or a fund raising request for a dying child that has been circling the internet for more than a decade.
Social media is everywhere. And so are the experts. Twitter is so full of social media experts that I hear they are going to have to start rationing out user names that have the word “guru” in them. According to a recent very important and very prestigious study that I shall not name, the number of social media experts in the US alone is equal to the population of the United Kingdom. Plus they all have very lovely aristocratic twitter accents that are just plain adorable (see @stephenfry for an example).
It slices, it dices, it avoids easy classification (which actually is probably a bit of anathema in the marketing world) for an Agency blog, but what does Blogmaster 2000 really do? Good question. Actually, a very good question. And it is one that we debated internally here at mediaRif quite a bit as we approached our recent exercise in self rebranding.
If you have ever been to more than a few Ad Agency blogs, it is quite quickly apparent that there are a lot of smart people out there and they are all talking about the same things and have all pretty much reached the same conclusions. Which is expected. But what does all of that say about your agency? What would it say about our agency (www.mediarif.com)?
