The Monday AM blogroll is always an adventure. It may be the weekend that allows for people to start thinking outside of the box again or perhaps we just aren’t paying as much attention, but the posts are inspirational and many. One of the original innovation and design trend blogs, CoolHunting just did a piece on the new Palladium video series that hit the interwebs recently.

Palladium, the tire-turned-boot company has always been about being outdoors and discovering new things. “Originally started as a tire brand in 1920, Palladium was known for tires so advanced that most European military aircrafts used them for their fleets. However, when the end of World War II saw the decrease of aircraft production, like many wartime businesses the company decided to take a different direction with the now-famous Palladium boot.”

Like many of today’s brands, Palladium is exposing themselves in a different way, through film. They got together with Virtue (Vice’s creative agency) to create a series of documentaries exploring and investigating the secret and forgotten spots in the cities we live in today. The short films that can be viewed from Palladium’s site, have taken us to hidden oil drills in Hollywood, hidden espionage sites in Berlin, and uncovered secret antennas of radio pirates on London rooftops.

The most recent video, hosted by Johnny Knoxville of the MTV Original Series, Jackass (Ben is getting restless about the upcoming release of their third film) and takes us to Detroit on a tour that we aren’t so unfamiliar with these days. Recently, we’ve been looking at prospective projects, land deals, site acquisitions and existing buildings with a different lens.

We think that there is a new way to make real estate work successfully through the implementation of different ‘apps’ such as arts, urban agriculture, pop-up retail and public markets. Although we haven’t rolled out working models of these new strategies, we find this particular video very encouraging and look forward to making some of it happen here in The Twin Cities.