Michael Kraabel

    Branding - Marketing - CMO - Creative Direction - Minneapolis

    It’s Official – The Bishop+Rook Family Continues To Grow

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    Over a year and a half ago I stepped away from advertising and branding to to pursue something I had always wanted to do: grow a company of my own, develop a brand from the ground up, and be responsible for my own professional destiny. I thought it was going to be a simple creative…

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    Lessons From A Year Spent Outside The World of Advertising

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    A year ago, I stepped away from the world of advertising and marketing (with the exception of a few projects here and there) to focus my energy on building a buisness (and brand) of my own. I started a company called Bishop+Rook – which builds and restores vintage Land Rover Defenders – offering products and…

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    The Friends We Meet, The Lives We Touch

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    My travels have taken me far from home; across oceans, continents, mountain ranges and to distant lands. I am the outsider in these voyages. I leave my friends, family and love interests behind in my quest to find something inspirational, the precious diamond and experience that as a child I could only read about. I…

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    The Near-Death Railway of Burma (Revisited)

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    This is a post from the archives of my former travel blog, UnrealTravels.com.  It was published in a variety of places, including the PilotGuides website (which I did some community/forum development work for several years/decades ago).  A recent article on Jalopnik about the joyless experience of American Amtrak service lead me to re-publish it. NOTE:…

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    For The Love of Marketing Prose

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    I believe in the power of the written word to inspire an audience and to lead them on a visceral journey of self-discovery. I am writer, but I still make mistakes, leave drafts riddled with typos, drop letters from words, invent new words, and militaristically support the oxford comma. But I always try to get…

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    Film Recommendations for Movie Lovers (Part I)

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    Updated: January 23, 2017 Fun and Quirky Films You’ve Never Heard Of I’ve spent the better part of my life watching movies. My first job was at a small town video rental store. I was paid $5.35 an hour, but I got unlimited movie rentals. Nearly every night I would grab whatever was left on…

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    Films: To Watch List (2017) – Part I

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    How many times have I spent hours looking through the never ending list of movies on Netflix and Amazon Prime trying to remember what movies where on my “to watch” list? I rarely like to re-watch movies, which is what always seems to come up. Perhaps that’s a product of me watching every movie that…

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    Visual Storytelling: Four Dimensions of Brand Engagement

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    I love visualizing process. I know this is an odd affinity, but I’ve come to accept that not everyone has a visual brain.  Or rather, not everyone can visualize the chaotic maze of ideas that stream through the mind of creative person. For thousands of years the world was believed to be flat and to…

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    The Power of Brand Films: How Stories Stir Our Souls

     1024 687 Michael Kraabel

    In 1895, two French brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumière, invented and patented the cinematograph—a device that could record, develop, and project motion pictures. The first film ever shot with their creation was a short black-and-white silent documentary that ran a mere 46 seconds , “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory.” Despite it’s diminutive size (800 frames, or…

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