What Would You Say To CEOs?

Kent Nichols of Ask A Ninja twittered, "I need your input" and posted a link to a new blog entry where he asks for help as to what he should say about small media to a bunch of CEO's at an upcoming conference.

Here's my comment to his post:

I think I would find a correlation between small media and the word processor or some other tool of democratization and show how CEOs have benefited from previous revolutions and project how they might be able to benefit from this one.

Last night I had drinks with a music producer who has produced over 150 albums for many artists that you have heard of and he was telling me about the music industry when he started producing back in the 1960's at the age of 16. The stories he told about that time made me think of our online video community now and about the time of Ernest Hemingway's A Movable Feast in the 1920's.

The revolutions of the 20's and 60's changed the way people used their artistic voice to write books and write music that had passion and that passion changed those market places to the benefit of corporations.

Once corporations got involved and tried to replicate the passion of the artists with the skill of trained craftsmen the "soul" of the artist's message was lost and the mediums took dives.

As online video creators we now have the opportunity to spill our passion to a global audience with no one standing in our way and it's all thanks to the tools that corporations and individuals have created to use on this thing we call the Internet.

You can ignore it. You can pretend that it is just a fad but as I sit on the couch of my living room and pound out these words using technologies that CEO's approved and sent to market I know that my words will reach 100's of people maybe 1000's and my words will effect people in a way that will bring about change. Maybe these words will inspire some new online video that will lead to something new, something exciting, something passionate and something meaningful...and I'm not talking about a new episode of French Maid TV. I'm talking about something artistic and truly meaningful.

As an artist I've been sitting on my hands waiting, waiting for all the tools to be in place to be able to create and make a living off my art. For me French Maid TV has just been a test in spectacle but now I feel we are at the point that we can tell stories online and monetize them.

I think the new stories that we produce will lead us to new formats and new creative ways of telling stories that use technologies like Twitter, IM, SMS and Video Chat to entertain in ways not possible on traditional TV or DVD.

We are now entering a new age of emotionally engaging interactive entertainment and the CEO's will have much from which to benefit.