He is an American video producer and director who has worked for Spike TV, Nickelodeon, and MTV as well as for creative ad agencies such as Crispin Porter, Razorfish and JWT.
In this position he helped develop the re-launch of the network's on-air branding and directed and edited the Cyber-ID campaign which he co-developed and co-produced with Jeremy Fernsler.
[1] At Spike TV, he ran advertising campaigns for Unilever’s Axe, Burger King, Geico, Campbells, T-Mobile, Boston Beer, Snickers, Jeep and many more clients.
He also conceived of the pro-social initiative True Dads in Uniform, an effort in partnership with the USO to maintain connections between U.S. troops overseas and their families back home.
[1] Papola, a longtime resident of the greater New York City region, moved in 2011 from Vernon, N.J, to the Austin, Texas, area, where he established the headquarters of Emergent Order.
[3] Papola has described Emergent Order as “a visual content development and production company focused on bringing complex and important ideas to life in entertaining, playful, and irreverent ways.” The company was “launched...essentially on the viral success/impact” of the rap videos that he and Russell D. Roberts, a professor of economics at George Mason University, had made about the differences between the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich A. Hayek.
Papola explained the success of those videos by saying that he and Roberts “seemed to be the first people to bring classical liberal ideas to life in a way that was entertaining, scholarly, and uncompromising while remaining even-handed.” The viral success of the videos, Papola has said, “seemed like an entrepreneurial opportunity that had to be pursued.”[citation needed] His view is that in a highly partisan society, “there is a need for playful and thoughtful content that tackle[s] important subjects.
The film is described as follows: "Filmmaker and omnivore John Papola, together with his vegetarian wife Lisa, offer up a timely and refreshingly unbiased look at how farm animals are raised for our consumption.
[15] In a December 2012 essay written in connection with the video “Deck the Halls with Macro Follies,” Papola took on the idea, “first popularly asserted by Thomas Malthus,” and later resurrected by Keynes, that “savings, the opposite of consumption, is bad for growth.” He noted that “Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say and Friedrich Hayek viewed savings as the vital lifeblood of economic growth,” for “savings aren’t simply taken out of the economic system, but become the source of capital that entrepreneurs use to create new goods and increase productivity,” and it is the latter that “is the key to a wealthier world.”[16] Papola has called Keynes “our modern Macro Santa,” for “today’s Keynesian economists believe that when we’re in an economic rut, government spending transforms into a magical debt-financed multiplier sack, able to create a limitless bounty of goodies.”[17] Papola won the Gold Promax Award for his "True Dads" Pro-social campaign; the Silver Broadcast Design Award for Art Direction and Design of "Nicktoons Scribblesonic ID"; and the Gold Broadcast Design Award for the "Jimmy Neutron Rocket Race" integrated promotion.
[3] He also won the Gold Promax and Broadcast Design Awards for the Jimmy Neutron “Gotta Blast” campaign, which he wrote, produced, edited and directed.