The Best Thing I Ever Done

Excellence takes time.  Domenico DeMarco has been making pizza at his pizzeria Brooklyn for 45 years.  Margaret Emily MacKenzie has a beautiful little doc about the pizzeria which has been getting a big spike in attention over the past couple days.

The Best Thing I Ever Done HQ from MargaretEmily MacKenzie on Vimeo.

Why is this video popular? I can think of a few reasons why it has 20k views already — It’s well made. It’s about a lifetime of dedication. Everybody loves good pizza.

Green Card Wedding

So my brother and I recently came up with a pretty fun concept for a romantic comedy…

It’s THE PROPOSAL meets NOTTING HILL with Mexican spice.

Logline: An all-American slacker is hired to con a hot Mexican starlet into a sham marriage for a green card she doesn’t even want, but when he finds himself falling for her his plan backfires and he has to risk everything to find out if it’s love.

A screenwriter friend of ours will help shape it into a script.  Interested?  Bidding starts at $2 million.

Trader Joe’s, Hedgehogs and Community

Trader Joe’s is featured on the cover of Fortune Magazine this month.  Over the past several years, I’ve been curiously watching their expansion.  Talking to one Trader Joe’s manager last summer, I was surprised by his genuine pride in the company.  It joins the ranks of companies that have staked their success in offbeat, customer-first service with a corporate culture that emphasizes humor and genuine human interaction.  Southwest Airlines comes to mind.  And Zappos.  And Patagonia.

I currently have Jim Collins’ great book, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t on my bedside table, and the principles he deduces are brilliantly exemplified by the success of Trader Joe’s.

Joe Coulombe, the original “Joe,” started a small store that stocked exotic, “foodie” items at a reasonable price.  He clearly found the intersection between what he loved and what he could make money at.  This quiet business strategy created a feast for customers and Trader Joe’s executives (and parent company Aldi).  Jim Collins calls this a Hedgehog Strategy, named after the fable of the hedgehog who only has one secret weapon, but it works every time.   Don’t know what your secret weapon is?  Collins graph below is designed to help you articulate it.  Hedgehog strategists have a knack for simplifying their business and understanding that a core competency isn’t necessarily the thing that will drive their business to greatness.

Good to Great - Hedgehog diagram

So, to the purpose of this blog, how does one replicate this kind of human-connection and offbeat corporate culture in the entertainment industry?  What’s the emerging Trader Joe’s of the media world?  Okay, this is not a very good question, because media is such a tangled business of production, marketing and distribution.  But whatever the business, I think it will have these characteristics.

1. Market Driver.  It will strive to blaze new trends instead of trying to ride the fickle wave of what’s popular.
2. New Media.  Embrace internet distribution in a big way. And embrace interactivity.  This topic deserves several books.
3. Cost effective.  Much like Trader Joe’s backroom deals with mainstream food manufacturers, the next successful media company will leverage volume (and the long tale) to make content cheaper for the consumer.  Netflix has a great start on this already.

I envision this playing out in different ways for different parts of the media industry.  In production, I think the successful companies will identify huge cost-savings in the cheap HD DSLR cameras (like the impressive Canon 5D)  and powerful post-production software now available.  In distribution, I see opportunity for online streaming.  Netflix has this cornered in a big way.  In exhibition, I see big opportunity for creating family-friendly, mom & pop style movie theaters that offer cheaper tickets and better atmosphere, including better snacks (talk to Trader Joe’s) and more emphasis on comfort and spectacle (after alll, theaters are competing with more screens than ever for a customer’s attention).  And finally, there will be a renewed emphasis on community.  A healthy sense of humor is especially community-inducing because it relies on a shared set of experiences (there’s a reason why humor doesn’t translate very well between cultures).  I see social media as being an important tool in creating more community around media creation, distribution and consumption.