Arafat Kazi's Ads for a Dollar

Note: the cool links are at the end of this post. Most of this is just me ranting about how much I hate Flash (and I didn’t even go into its nonintuitive interface, how it fails because it tries to do everything, how it sucks worse than Java did in the 90s, etc etc etc).

Edit: Holy shit, when I was writing this I had completely forgotten about the mobile web and how Flash had failed there as well (thanks to the iPhone’s popularity and Adobe’s complete failure to provide a solution). But that’s a different issue and TechCrunch and Gizmodo write an article on it at least once a day. Here‘s a recent one from LaptopMag.

So AdFreak posted about what everybody knew years ago, what *I* certainly fought for (and lost) at least a dozen times in my life: fuck Flash. God, I have so many positive things to write in this post (it’s been a while, I’ve been busy, I know you’ve been hanging on the edge of your seat just like Freddie Mercury asked you to), but I remembered that I had the link open in a tab to use as an opening gambit, and now I’m all frothing and fuming, martyred and mussed, feeble and fussed, thinking of all the needless megabytes wasted in trying to create an entertaining “Sorry our site sucks, wait while it loads” progress bar.

I really, really believe in using technology and not talking about it (unless it’s like, time travel or something). I don’t mention Logic Studio or the Adobe suite in my resume because if I’m looking for a job, then I should be smart enough to figure it out in a week even if I haven’t seen it before. Really, is Illustrator that hard?

But I’m kind of alone in this and even I have felt the lash, yea I have buckled under the motherfucking whip when it rained on my back with the bite of a thousand compressors and limiters when The Watson Brothers were recording Ohom.

And it is my sorrow that my chosen field, advertising, is a fucking playground for tech demos. There are idiot offenders like those creepy supermarket whispering things that you read about every few months, and then there are borderline cool things like Old Navy’s Booty Reader or Coke Zero’s Facial Profiler which exist as excuses to get corporate funding to push the limits of web technology. (Hey, if this is old tech, don’t blame me. I’m an idiot.)

For a while there, when every agency wanted to show their web design prowess (which unfortunately meant Flash), every agency website was a Flash-heavy processor-killing avant-garde piece of shit. Even when it didn’t try to be avant-garde, cause it would always depend on the vagaries of different browser implementations (WebKit wasn’t there in the earlies, bunky). So the interaction would be jerky and they’d never get the timing perfectly right (lolllz like watching YouTube on a Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro amirite guyz) but by golly, they would have some fucking Flash. I worked on the site for an agency in Bangladesh where I begged and begged for a text-based site since it was 2007 and the few people that went online had 56K connections or less. No. We would have an animated tree of words instead. So I somehow got the web design people to keep the intro page to 750 KB and even then the site took three minutes to load. Oh well. At least we weren’t as bad as the old StrawberryFrog site or the old Leo Burnett site. (Note: OH ALLAH THEY STILL HAVE SOME AWFUL SHIT GOIN’ ON.)

now that's a shame.

But anyway, that is behind us now, and I hope to god that the next big thing isn’t nearly as annoying.

Which it isn’t, honestly, ’cause social media is the new Flash, but social media is actually wonderful. I mean, it’s not wonderful to read FourSquare updates on Twitter, but I like social media because what it’s done successfully (I posted about this some time ago) is brought back the advantages of a small society. You know, stuff the 20th century took away, like being able to get in touch with people, knowing what your neighbors are doing without having to peep through holes, getting recommendations for places in the neighborhood, shit like that. Except it’s happening on a truly global scale, so you can find somebody willing to put you up in their couch if you go to San Francisco for the weekend.

One of the best things about it is that it’s reestablished trust in one’s fellow human, and at the same time, it’s also established great creepazoid filters. A reasonably intelligent person can tell if her or his internet friend is about to slay six with axe.

I wanted to write about my pal (I met him once) Edward Boches’s list of lists, and I will, but since we’re on the topic of word of mouth and so on, here’s an interesting thing that happened. In short, Mullen CCO went to a Marriot and his room sucked, so he blogged about it, and the hotel manager apologized (see comments). And an apology is something, even though it doesn’t have paragraphs and doesn’t define what they can do to actually rectify the situation.

That’s an example of the immediate effects of social media. But the more important aspect, the side which doesn’t often get talked about as much is how this whole social movement is getting us to talk to each other.

I subscribe to ForbesLife because I like to fantasize about being rich, and in it I recently read an article about the Panama Hat Company, run by ex-creative director Brent Black. The man sells some of the most exquisite hats in the world, and some of them are expensive as hell. (His finest hat will cost you $25,000). The website, thankfully free of Flash, is full of really interesting information about the history of these hats, the craft, the best artisans (the greatest weaver in the world is Mr. Simón Espinal), and most importantly, Brent quotes Warren Zevon.

But the greatest thing is that you can feel his passion, not just for Panama hats, but for the Ecuadorian people who dedicate their lives to the art. Simón Espinal, the poster child of the craft, was a fisherman because he couldn’t make enough money weaving. Brent discovered him, and now (as I just learned from an email response to my giddy appreciative note), Mr. Espinal owns his own house and is one of the richest people in his town.

I feel like this is the kind of communication that, though it’s not directly related to social media (I imagine rich people have a word of mouth club all their own), is what really encapsulates the spirit that the social media movement is good at creating. The feeling that we’re all in this together, humans and all.

OK, I’ve crossed a thousand words. So here are the other things I needed to mention. Maybe I’ll get a chance to expand on them later.

Books, blogs, ideas and people to follow. A fucking awesome post by my pal Edward.

A great video on our brand ecosystem by Faris Yakob, who is a bigwig at MDC Partners and has hair as loud as mine.

I made a radio ad for Radio Foorti (for free cause I love them). It’s basically President Obama saying that he loves Radio Foorti, wears a Foorti shirt, listens to Foorti in the morning etc, until another person points out that Obama can’t speak in Bangla so this is a pathetic attempt at making a radio promo based on lies.

I wrote a song. It’s about my friend Farhan. It was his birthday gift. It will be in my album. Sorry about the vocals but after 60+ takes I was like, fuck this shit.