DIRECTOR | PRODUCER | ENTREPRENEUR | EDUCATION + SOCIAL ACTIVIST
John Papola is an award-winning director and producer who has been working in short and long-form film and TV production for the past decade for major networks and brands including Spike TV, Nickelodeon, and MTV as well as cutting edge ad agencies such as Crispin Porter, Razorfish and JWT. He is the co-founder and creative director of emergent order™, a content development and production company dedicated in part to the exploration and exposition of the values and virtues of a free and peaceful society.
His interest in economics and philosophy began in earnest during the financial crisis of 2008, where an interest in trying understand what was going on lead him to discover Austrian economics and classical liberal philosophy by way of Russ Robert’s “EconTalk” podcast as well as many other sources. He has spent the past several years teaching himself macroeconomics and the history of economic thought, having taken exactly one formal economics class in high school. Yes, John reads textbooks for fun. Yes, he knows that it’s weird.
This interest and concern for the state of economic understanding lead John to team up with Russ to create EconStories, a groundbreaking new media brand dedicated to re-imagining economics education through creativity and storytelling. John co-wrote, produced and directed two hip-hop music videos about the economy, “Fear the Boom and Bust”, and “Fight of the Century”, which have become global sensations, garnering mainstream international press and over 4 million combined views on YouTube. Both videos are being used in classrooms all over the world as well as winning the prestigious Templeton Award for innovative media.
He also blogs about related issues at Forbes.com in their “Business in The Beltway Blog“. Through his assorted media efforts, John hopes to advance civil dialogue and understanding about social cooperation and progress through peace, tolerance, voluntary civil society and mutually beneficial commerce.
Professionally, John has been a leader in new media creative production and marketing with a number of other viral hits under his belt including the “Look Closer” cross-media campaign for the 2010 Video Game Awards and the Back to the Future viral campaign featuring Michael J. Fox for Spike TV’s Scream Awards which was featured on Entertainment Tonight and garnered over 2.5 million views in 3 days.
With an extensive post-production background in editing, compositing and motion graphics, John is also an enthusiastic adopter of new techniques and technologies. His broad effects background translates into high production value and visual innovation from concept through final execution. This has meant embracing the latest in digital acquisition and desktop post-production tools to achieve results that visually exceed the budgets that fund them.
While at Spike TV, John played an important role in re-branding of the network as well as the network’s highly successful, industry-leading integrated brand marketing campaigns. The brands for which John has directed campaigns include Unilever’s Axe, Burger King, Geico, Campbells, T-Mobile, Boston Beer, Snickers, Jeep and many more. He is also the creator of Spike’s award-winning pro-social initiative “True Dads in Uniform”, an effort in partnership with the USO to keep our troops overseas connected with their families back home.
Some of John’s other successes include Gold Promax and Broadcast Design Awards for the Jimmy Neutron “Gotta Blast” campaign, which he wrote, produced, edited and directing. He has also been awarded a Silver Broadcast Design Award in the highly competitive “Image Promotion” category for a series of live-action/CGI spots entitled the “Cyber IDs” for the Nicktoons Network re-launch. John produced and directed “The World Cyber Games” series of long-form documentary specials which garnered attention within the industry for it’s entertaining look at the world of competitive professional video gaming.
John’s career as a director began at MTV Animation Development where he directed the animated series pilot “The Mall Show”. John then moved to Nickelodeon where he co-created, co-wrote and directed “Robo Ralph”, a story-driven interstitial series as well as numerous promos and commercials since.