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Jason Ankeny is an award-winning storyteller, entrepreneurial spirit and lifelong learner with a proven track record for creating highly imaginative and impactful content across a wide range of professional contexts.
Jason owns and operates Tenacious Little Monkey (https://www.tenaciouslittlemonkey.com), a Chicago-based fractional CMO agency/labor of love combining his lifelong passion for the creative arts with professional skills and expertise honed across more than three decades as an award-winning journalist and digital content marketer. Tenacious Little Monkey works with galleries and artists (as well as screenprinters, framers and other arts-focused small businesses) to share stories fostering a deeper, more personal relationship between the collector and the work — evergreen assets that boost engagement and increase revenue long after the exhibition closes.
Jason previously served as the founding editor-in-chief at streaming music application KORD, establishing its editorial vision and voice. He is also the former senior staff writer at Entrepreneur magazine, where each month he profiled business innovators, revolutionary startups and disruptive technologies across a wide range of verticals, including mobile, new media, digital commerce and design.
Jason began his career as a music and film critic for the All Music Guide and All Movie Guide sites; he's also written about music for publications including Rolling Stone, Wax Poetics, No Depression and The Stranger, and contributed liner notes to a number of recordings. Jason covered the formative years of the wireless sector as senior editor of communications industry magazine Telephony and its sister publication Wireless Review, and later served as senior editor of the daily e-newsletters Retail Dive and FierceMobileContent.
It's been 150 years since Impressionism transformed our world and how we perceive it. On April 15, 1874, a collective of upstarts including Claude Mon...
“I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)” and “It’s the Same Old Song,” the Four Tops’ fraternal-twin classics from mid-1965, capture Motown Records at its most meta. Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Eddie Holland, the writing and producing team behind both singles, were no strangers to soundalike sequels: after their “Heat Wave” caught fire for Martha and the Vandellas, H-D-H responded with the near-identical “Quicksand,” derisively dubbed “Son of ‘Heat Wave’” by members of the Funk...
In the wee small hours of Jan. 14, 1970, the night she delivered her final performance as a member of the Supremes in front of a packed house at Las Vegas’ New Frontier Casino & Hotel, Diana Ross retired to the blackjack table to try her luck. The odds seemed stacked in Ross’ favor: following 11 years and 12 number-one Billboard pop hits as the impossibly glamorous focal point of the most commercially successful act in the Motown Records stable, the singer was poised to launch a solo career,...
“Men are what their mothers made them,” Ralph Waldo Emerson famously declared, and with 1968’s Bakersfield Sound bildungsroman “Mama Tried,” Merle Haggard finally came to terms with the man his mother made — not just the transgressions he committed, but also the pleas and prayers he ignored, and the damage that was done.
As a song, “Here It Goes Again” is a footnote. But as a marketing stunt, it’s a milestone — a harbinger of a world where fame and fortune are measured in views, likes and shares, not record sales, radio airplay or downloads. Released online roughly a year prior to the introduction of Apple’s iPhone, the philosopher’s stone of the social media age, “Here It Goes Again” unleashed the power of viral video to chart a new path to celebrity, vividly demonstrating digital media’s unprecedented...
“You’re Nobody ‘Till Somebody Loves You” bottles for all eternity the essence of mid-20th century cool. Dean Martin’s 1960 classic is insouciance incarnate, a singularly swinging evocation of postwar America on the cusp of a new frontier. Sure, Martin’s pal Frank Sinatra was the matchless pop stylist, the Chairman of the Board, the undisputed leader of the gaggle of crooners, movie stars and sycophants known as the Rat Pack — those golden gods in sharkskin suits and tilted Homburg hats who...
No hit single is more symbiotically tied to its hit music video than “No Rain.” Blind Melon’s lone Top 40 entry and its fantastical Samuel Bayer-directed clip linger in the collective consciousness as conjoined twins: inseparable, indivisible, different but the same. Premiering on cable network MTV in mid-1993, close to a year after the release of Blind Melon’s eponymous debut album, “No Rain” made a pop culture sensation of the video’s outsider heroine, the bespectacled, tap-dancing Bee Girl...
“Hook” holds you in contempt for succumbing to its charms. Blues Traveler’s savagely satirical follow-up to its breakthrough single “Run-Around” skewers all facets of the hit-making machine, from creatively bankrupt artists to soulless corporate media outlets to listeners who gobble up whatever tripe the music industry conspires to shove down our throats — tripe including “Hook” itself, as the song gleefully reminds you at every conceivable turn. Whether you love it, hate it, love to hate it...
Somewhere along the way, Bob Marley’s Legend was accepted as absolute truth. Legend, the hits collection released three years after the iconic singer’s death, is by leaps and bounds the best-selling reggae album of all time, moving more than 12 million copies in the U.S. and an estimated 25 million copies globally — a perennial chart blockbuster that for many listeners defines both Marley’s career and reggae as a whole. Legend did not just make history, however: it also changed history,...
If you were conceived anytime after the summer of 1973, there’s a good chance you owe your existence to “Let’s Get It On.” Marvin Gaye’s smoldering celebration of libido and liberation possesses an aphrodisiacal power unmatched in the annals of popular music: no song is more universally synonymous with unbridled lust and longing, and no song has soundtracked a greater number of carnal experiences, whether in the real world or in popular culture. But below its surface sensuality, “Let’s Get It...
Sometimes an ending is also a beginning. Around 6:30 a.m. on Feb. 2, 2006, firetrucks from across Napa Valley raced to the Oakville, Calif., site of Silver Oak Cellars, one of the region's oldest and most celebrated boutique wineries.
TheAudience is connecting brands and customers across social media platforms via influencers.
Where others see an empty glass, Dave Arnold sees a blank canvas.
With all due apologies to Cheers habitués Norm Peterson and Cliff Clavin, Jay Larson and Sean Patton are the funniest barflies on TV.
Her name is Amelia, and she is the complete package: smart, sophisticated, industrious and loyal. No wonder her boss, Chetan Dube, can't get her out of his head.
This story first appeared in the August issue of Entrepreneur . To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe. There are treasures everywhere you look. Rare things. Exquisite things. Gloriously, decadently opulent things. Over here is a George III fireplace mantel complete with Siena marble frieze, produced circa 1670.
Steve Ballmer is a maniac. Just days into the new year, the rookie owner of the NBA's Los Angeles Clippers took the internet by storm when he leaped from his courtside seat at Staples Center and began wildly gyrating to the music of halftime performer Fergie-a dance described by media outlets as "whacked out," "hilariously insane" and "enraged and ecstatic all at the same time."
Home to many of the world's most influential technology companies as well as thousands of promising startups, Silicon Valley is the launchpad for multiple generations of entrepreneurial talent. But there are skilled, capable founders, and then there are the true visionaries-those lightning-in-a-bottle geniuses whose products and services change the world.
The tourists stream in one after the other, converging from all directions. You can tell they're tourists not only by the cameras and the clothes-sweat-soaked T-shirts, faded polo shirts and drab sundresses no fashionable New Yorker would dream of wearing-but also by the goggle-eyed amazement on their faces as they drink the place in.
Yves Béhar sits in the sunlit conference room of his San Francisco design agency Fuseproject, a massive whiteboard behind him. On the table in front of him is a leather-bound sketchbook, its pages a crazy quilt of random notes, rough sketches and other embryonic concepts, all visible to anyone within proximity.
The longest-running science-fiction series in internet video history begins not with a bang but a whimper. Two gun-toting soldiers outfitted in futuristic armor stand guard over a desolate box canyon, defending their military base from the threat of enemy invasion. "You ever wonder why we're here?" the crimson soldier asks.
Image credit: Photography by Natalie Brasington David Portnoy's Barstool Sports is the bible of bro culture. Rude, crude, sexist and often mean-spirited--even Howard Stern has complaints--the site has become a go-to for young men who say they are disenfranchised by the mainstream media.
Image credit: Photography by Berlyn Photography This isn't Hollywood. This is bliss. An urban oasis nestled on a residential cul-de-sac just steps from Los Angeles' celebrated Sunset Strip, the Sunset Marquis is the stuff dreams are made of.
Image credit: Photography by David Johnson Mike Wolfe is in his element. The star and creator of History channel's hit show American Pickers weaves his way through the vintage motorcycles, folk art and random oddities that line the floor of his new storefront in Nashville, Tenn.'s Marathon Village, a sprawling small-business complex that a century earlier housed the short-lived Marathon Motor Works auto factory.
Image credit: Photo© David Johnson The fake blood splattered across the lapels of Wayne Coyne's gray flannel suit says it all: This is not business as usual. Although his body still paces the offices of Warner Bros.
While corporate-owned multiplexes have faced declining attendance, one indie theater chain is bucking the trend.
Image credit: Photography by Nicolas Maloof WE CELEBRATE AND ENCOURAGE INNOVATION. Innovators push the boundaries of the known world. They're change agents who are relentless in making things happen and bringing ideas to execution. The ratings are in. Americans love TV--and they hate their cable providers with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns.
Image credit: Photography by Marc Royce Sir Richard Branson is in a reflective mood. Almost 40 years after the launch of the Virgin Records label vaulted him into the global consciousness, Branson is in Los Angeles to collect a special Grammy Award celebrating his contributions to the music business, and the honor finds him looking back on his transformation from industry interloper to institution.
Mike McCue thought he was done. Two years after selling his startup Tellme Networks to Microsoft for a reported $800 million-plus, McCue essentially completed his efforts to integrate the company's innovative voice-recognition software into the Microsoft platform.
The right fit means everything to Brian Spaly. When the Stanford University MBA student couldn't find trousers that met his exacting standards, he learned to alter clothes himself. Eventually he designed a line of pants and started selling them out of the back of his car, a sartorial sideline that in 2007 blossomed into Bonobos, an online venture renowned for its colorful, tailor-made menswear.
Image credit: Photography By Ethan Welty Amy C. Cosper leans forward in her chair, a mischievous smile creeping across her face. "Can we add more blood?" she asks, her eyes locked on the projector screen on the back wall of the makeshift conference room.
Forget Starbucks, Caribou and Seattle's Best. Chicagoans in the know frequent Metropolis Coffee Co., an independently owned cafe and coffee wholesaler located blocks from the Lake Michigan coastline in the city's Edgewater district. With its hip, scruffy clientele, amiably funky décor and fervent dedication to organic, small-batch artisan roasting, Metropolis doesn't operate like rival coffeehouses--which means it doesn't market its products and services like other coffeehouses either.
Everything old is new again, thanks to Homage. The Columbus, Ohio-based startup creates apparel that celebrates iconic athletes, teams and pop culture sensations of years past, combining period-correct design sensibilities with contemporary production techniques to turn out original fan gear with that fresh-from-the-thrift-shop look and feel.
Conor Oberst preaches to the converted in Chicago