Here is a little overview of things I have worked on in the past which are no longer (active) parts of my life.
My Marketing Past
I worked in advertising agencies between 1999 and 2004. Then, between 2005 and 2016, I was a partner and manager at trnd, a company that invited consumers and fans to become active participants in the marketing of new products (“word-of-mouth marketing” / “crowdsourced marketing”). I left the company in 2016, and have since very much changed my views on the marketing field. I have written about my change of views in “How an Ad Man Became a Post-Growth Advocate“.
Kaffee & Kapital
I had left trnd a few months before the 2016 US election. When the ‘leading nation of the free world’ elected the proto-fascist Trump as President, I felt a profound shock. Soon, I needed to understand what had happened — and why. So I did what I had done in the past: I set up a blog to explain things to myself and to others, and learn something in the process. The blog (in German) was called Kaffee & Kapital, and I published fairly regularly for two years, then intermittently — until I finally realised that the blog had done its job, and I stopped. Kaffee & Kapital was incredibly helpful for furthering my own understanding and learning.
Zeichenwende
The stories we are telling each other are one of the key problems we must solve to secure a liveable, sustainable future on this earth. Many of our most influential stories come from a past when we did not (need to) worry about social and ecological sustainability. As long as we keep telling each other these stories, we will continue to see meaning in the wrong things, and continue to go down the wrong path. We need new and different stories. In 2021, I wrote a manifesto about this with my friend Jacques Chlopczyk. Jacques is a psychologist, moderator and extremely well read — I learned tons from him. We called the text “Zeichenwende”, a German wordplay which approximately translates to “changing times/changing signs”, rolled into one expression. At the time, we hoped we might get a larger debate going with this — but neither Jacques nor I have the Social Media reach to truly get it out there. We did a couple of workshops with the material, but nothing much has happened since then. I still think it’s a good text, though, full of helpful thoughts. Here is the PDF: Zeichenwende 0.9.
Geldbewegung
A YouTube channel on which I tried to answer the following question: How can we change the way we invest our money to create a positive and truly sustainable impact in the world? And then, ideally, how can this become a movement? When I speak of sustainability, I mean the genuine thing — no greenwashing, no self-deception, but actual future-proof sustainability, based on an honest analysis of the situation we’re in. Of course, this is made incredibly difficult by the fact that we have to do this within an economic system that is designed and developed as the exact opposite of sustainability. I ran the channel between late 2022 and early summer of 2023, and published eight videos (and two shorts) that cover issues and ideas I feel strongly about. But then I realised that it takes more than conviction and urgency to run a successful YouTube channel. The central ingredient is passion. Without passion for the subject, no one can muster the energy and endurance to build a channel over time. The thing is: No matter how important I find the issue, I am not passionate about investing. So I stopped the project after I had said what I needed to say. Here is the YouTube Channel Geldbewegung (in German), and here is the website I made for it: geldbewegung.de (also in German).
Campaign Berlin2030
I was a late-comer to this project, but in early 2023, I supported the incredible team that campaigned for the referendum for “Berlin Climate Neutral by 2030” during the last three months before the vote was cast. I believed that this campaign and referendum could turn into a lighthouse moment for the climate protection movement in Germany. It was the best-funded campaign for a referendum in the history of the country, but unfortunately, we did not receive enough yes-votes to succeed. Even though we did get more yes- than no-votes.
Past Film Projects
I have always liked to experiment with filming and editing. In 2011, I spent three weeks on a concert tour in Japan with the Deutsche Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, as their on-tour video blogger.
I also like to draw, so I have experimented with hand-drawn animation as well. I made my first complete animation short film in 2016: ‘Smartphone Zombies‘. After that, my animation endeavours went on a bit of a hiatus, notwithstanding this or that silly experiment. Now I am returning to animation, and I’m truly loving it.
Since the beginning of 2018, I have dedicated more time to becoming an actual filmmaker. My first narrative film project was a short film called ‘Spare Change‘ which I co-wrote, co-produced, and co-directed with a group of friends in 2017 and 2018.
On this page, you’ll find everything about my current film projects.