'The greatest TED talk ever sold'

I'm catching up on all kinds of recent media, and one of the most interesting has been this TED talk from filmmaker Morgan Spurlock.

Spurlock used eBay to auction off naming rights to this TED talk to reinforce the concept of his most recent film, "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold," an over-the-top documentary about product placement.

This 18-minute speech challenging traditional marketing concepts is highlighted by some amazingly dumb promotional folks (sorry, Ban, but you need to clean house) and some brazen ideas about how far product placement can go. Traditional content creators will find themselves queasy, but that's Spurlock's mission.

But just when Spurlock has traditional content creators at the point of discomfort, he delivers something of a plot twist by playing off some visual jokes at the beginning of his speech and turning them into sources of inspiration for those wanting to stir the pot. It's a clever trick that turns our initial perceptions against ourselves.

"If you take chances, if you take risks, that in those risks will come opportunity," Spurlock said. "I believe that when you push people away from that, you're pushing them more towards failure. I believe that when you train your employees to be risk averse, then you're preparing your whole company to be reward challenged.

"I feel like that what has to happen moving forward is we need to encourage people to take risks, we need to encourage to people not to be afraid of of opportunities that may scare them. Ultimately, moving forward I think we need to embrace fear. We need to put that bear in a cage."