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.
So here’s a quick update, just so that you Arafat Kazi completists can get your full share of this gracious brown man that you love so much.
“What we talk about when we talk about loving brands” on The Next Great Generation.
Interview: Paolo Bacigalupi talks about The Windup Girl on The Boston Phoenix. Originally this was a 6,000 word interview because I felt like it would be really cool to do a long-form interview with someone who’s just begun to be published, and Paolo was incredibly accommodating about my questions. Plus, I’m his biggest fan, so I had a whole bunch of questions about the novel itself. It was really cool. But then they decided to run it in the paper, not just on the site, and my hopes got dashed. 
I’ll ask for permission to put the whole thing up here though.
And here’s the best thing ever, it’s a picture of me that my darling friend Emma drew. I know it’s kinda small (that’s what I told her) but click on it for the full picture. It’s glorious.
I have a soft spot for Radio Foorti. When I was a copywriter at Bitopi, I worked on the pitch team for the brand and I got an unrefusable offer (2.5 times what my salary was then) and I became the first fulltime employee for a station that had a name and nothing else. Working with some truly amazing people, including my childhood friend Daniel (whose birthday gift gift of Iron Maiden’s Seventh Son of a Seventh Son introduced me to music in 1992), we built up the studio from scratch.
I remember how we had empty office space and I raided petty cash to buy remote controlled cars to race on the furniture before it was assembled. The day of the launch, every one of us worked untold hours (Daniel and I had taken to sleeping in the office by then), and everybody went home at 5 AM. Except for me and RJ Apu, god of the morning waves. At precisely 8 AM, Apu played Feedback’s “Moushumi” and Radio Foorti was officially on air. We were hugging and crying. Which would have been odd but we were both confused at the time and we used to hug and cry a lot.
I used to be really proud of the tagline I came up with: “Radio manei foorti!”. For non-Bangla speakers, “Foorti” means “fun.” Being the first radio station, we needed to build the category. Our primary job was to get people to actually listen to radio. We also had a close competitor, ABC Radio, that launched within a few weeks of us. So the tagline, which means “Radio means fun!” is actually a pun on the word “Foorti”, because Foorti = fun = Radio Foorti.
But I didn’t start this post to talk about memory lane. I actually wanted to show you niggaz Radio Foorti’s new print campaign, which I think is absolutely fucking awesome (and it’s spearheaded by my pal Daniel, who is now Head of Programming at the ole place). The new campaign’s idea is “Don’t stop the Foorti!”, which I think is great. Here’s my favorite image, announcing that Radio Foorti is now broadcasting in Barisal too.
First of all, this is fucking awesome. The baby’s holding a taka instead of a dollar, and the joke here (aside from the Nevermind sight gag) is that Barisal is a watery place. It’s called the “Venice of Bangladesh.” (No old buildings though.)
It also made me think of how great it is to live in a country with no copyright laws. I know I’m in the minority here, but I gotta say–it’s really fucking great to use whatever art you want to use without having to go to jail for it. In this specific case, Christopher Ricks would have called it allusion. The courts would have called it copyright infringement.
Foorti took a bold (or lazy) route and just altered the original image. You could draw a cartoon of the same thing but it wouldn’t be as powerful. I guess you could even do a trace with Illustrator and alter it enough to pass a court of law. (Speaking out my asshole here so don’t hold me to this.)
But seriously, isn’t this a cool ad? I thought it was genius.
It also makes me miss living in Bangladesh and being inspired by great works and using them without fear. I am probably in the minority in this, because most people tend to be paranoid about copyright. But I studied English in college and a standard poetical conceit is “imitations” of great poets by others. So Byron would do an imitation of Pope, where he’d try to write like Pope using the same devices and shit. In the 21st century, we have a strong demarcation between art for art’s sake versus art for money. Advertising is on a tangential spectrum, where at its best it’s art for money, but it’s never really art for art’s sake for which one gets paid.
Historically, of course, great art was also advertising. Poets and artists would write or paint in praise of their patrons: my favorite example is Milton’s Comus because of the cum-glue forest throne, but every portrait painter has felt the cognitive dissonance of painting as is versus painting a prettier version of an inbred noble. This was justified by saying they were painting idealized versions, but that’s a relatively small step, philosophically, from say BP saying they’re trying to create a better world by cleaning up the mess they made.
But god damn it. Do you think Warhol would paint if nobody paid him? Once again, there are two sides–one side would say “Churl, Warhol wouldst have painted even if God fucked the sky into him, because it was in his blood.” Others would say “Sure, but he wouldn’t have spent his life pursuing something which couldn’t keep him in cigars, bitches and bling.”
For us advertising peeps, it’s always hard. I think we make good advertisements because we need to. Sure, consumers like intelligent ads. But if we didn’t use these extremely limited formats–a half-page here, thirty seconds there, though YouTube et al has widened the scope considerably–to create something of artistic merit, we would hate ourselves.
All this being said, let me share with you an ad that I made. When I say I “made,” I mean I wrote the script (events, lyrics, campaign idea, tagline etc) for this ad and it was produced a few months after I left the agency. Well, when I say *I* wrote it, I mean, I wrote it…with a lot of help from my friend Ringo Starr.
Edit: Picasso changed to Warhol (a more fitting example) thanks to Jarett Kobek.
(includes links to work)
My buddy Aldis and I entered an ad for the Hatch Awards. It was for Gustbusters, which are like, the apotheosis of umbrellas. I sent them an email with the Gustbuster comic a week ago, and I got the best possible response–a warm, personal reply from their president, and a package containing four motherfuckin’ Gustbusters. Two camo, two bigass golf umbrellas. I loved Gustbusters before, but this kind of brand experience is the stuff of anecdotes. Here’s a picture of me with my Gustbuster swag:
Of course, as the caprices of Fortuna go, I carried it around for days without rain, and then got soaked today when I left it at my father’s apartment. Oh well. Here’s the link to our Gustbuster ad once again:
http://arafatkazi.com/2010/06/26/our-entry-for-the-hatch-awards/
When I learned that Paolo Bacigalupi was going to be at Readercon, I arranged for events to transpire which led me to cover the event for the Boston Phoenix, with a free ticket for yrs truly. I also spent over an hour asking Paolo every question I had about The Windup Girl, which is like, the best fucking book ever written in the history of the universe with the possible exception of the Odyssey, and that wasn’t written, so it don’t count, and fuck you.
So here’s the Boston Phoenix article on Readercon.
And here are some pictures.
This is a short intro to the value of word of mouth that I started writing for a blog post at The Next Great Generation and then decided to just post here and link it from there, because who wants to read so many WORDSWORDSWORDS?
You know, we’re in the future. Or a version of the future that’s cooler than most of the futures we were sold as kids. Think about it—you’re in a traffic jam, or stuck in the subway. Which would you rather have, an iPhone or a lightsaber? (The right answer is teleportation, but whatevz. If you want to quibble, my laptop lets me watch movies, work on my album, and quote Curb Your Enthusiasm to thousands of strangers.)
I always thought the future would bring us different marketing techniques for our self-lacing sneakers. George Saunders has a macabre book where he describes all of them like it’s a bad thing. But I was wrong, and Saunders is boring. Because what turns out to have happened is, this future that we live in, with its interconnectedness and Google/Wiki omniscience, has created a massive world society with tiny communities. This has le
d to what I like to call the “villaging effect”; which any self-respecting anthropologist will tell you, is not a real concept.
Let me explain. Before the mass media of the 20th century (which was in turn pushed into marketing because of the manufacturing revolutions of the 19th), you would go to local stores. If Horatio Higgenbotham was a shoddy blacksmith (no pun intended), your buddy Ezekiel would warn you off, probably saying “Foorsooth, homie, do not go gentle into the good Higgenbotham!”
But the 20th century came, bringing with it reckless villanelles, radio and television. All of a sudden, the good Horatio was replaced by the likes of Betty Crocker and Chef Boyardee, one real, one fake, both gigantic in their hold on the American supermarket distribution chains and, subsequently, culture. Everything happened on a gigantic scale. It’s fitting that McDonald’s, the greatest symbol of 20th century mass manufacturing and media, proudly claims to have served billions and billions.
This is because communication was one-way. You can watch TV, but you can’t talk back at it.
In the last five years, we’ve redeveloped tools for talking back at brands. First, we have websites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. Secondly, the internet is really good for developing arcane interests. For example, if you want to buy a messenger bag, you don’t need to go to a store and look through their limited offerings. You can read messenger bag enthusiast sites and learn about, say, Timbuk2 or Chrome, both of them excellent brands that have grown exponentially in the last decade because of word of mouth and internet sales. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this combination has amplified the power and utility of word of mouth. These days, I never go to restaurants without checking Yelp first.
So we’re kind of back to the Horatio Higgenbotham brandbuilding model, except of course, instead of horseshoes, word of mouth goes into promoting the Anvil movie. (So not much of a change, if you think about it.)
TLDR: The villaging effect is the transformation of a large population into what are effectively small communities tied by interests and locality. On the one hand, a mutual interest helps over-ride geographical limitations (by enabling you to order the best messenger bag online). On the other, these same mutual interest groups help you find the best offerings in your localities.
HOLY FUCKING SHIT. HOLY FUCKING SHIT. HOLY FUCKING SHIT. Are you guys seeing what’s going on today? Someone purporting to be Isaiah Mustafa (i.e. the guy from the Old Spice commercials) posted a thread on Reddit and is using Twitter, YouTube, etc to post immediate responses to user comments. MY MIND IS FUCKING BLOWN.
Follow the Old Spice Twitter feed right now and check out what’s going on.
ALLAH!!!!! Look at your agency, now back to me: the Wieden+Kennedy your agency could be like. Sadly, your agency isn’t Wieden+Kennedy.
oh and holy fuck LOOK AT HOW META THIS IS GOING
Can’t believe I missed this in my Parallel Lines post yesterday (not gonna link to the post cause I’m not a jerk), but I didn’t see it until I was checkin’ out Adweek’s Real Time Cannes site. Is this because Philips’s Parallel Lines site sucks? Verily!
But this is one fucking beautiful short. Watch it now, froods!
Holy shit, none of these things have anything to do with each other. But I’d rather get this over with because things keep on piling up. So, first off:
This should be regarded by all and sundry as a Good Thing, like when your enemy dies and you get a puppy. Two great companies, Woot gets to keep on running itself but has access to Amazon’s superpowers (warehousing tech and Jeff Bezos’s laugh would be my guesses), and shit keeps on goin’ DOWN. I absolutely love both the companies. Fuckin’ LOVE EM. Thanks to shirt.woot, I have a whole bunch of cool and pithy t-shirts for ten bux. And more importantly, Woot’s daily sales have the absolutely best copy in the world. I know advertising’s not about good writing anymore, but it does my heart so proud to read those hilarious descriptions, and that too for a site that’s really defined the new commerce experience.
Nellie Wu talks about West coast oysters.
This is a great video where my friend Nellie Wu talks about how the Pacific Northwest has great oysters. We had a college reunion a week ago, and I actually had the opportunity to eat a couple dozen of all these different kinds of oysters that are shown in the video. I love food, I love Nellie, this is a good video.
Parallel Lines, the Philips TV short film series.
In theory, it’s a nifty idea. Write some dialogue, have different interpretations of it. I liked BMW’s “The Hire” (link is to the YouTube of my favorite one) ten years ago and I’ve liked almost every short movie campaign that’s come out since. Philips seems to be doing it in a big way these days, with “Carousel” and now Parallel Lines.
I like that the Parallel Lines idea actually brings something new to the table: there are a million ways to tell a story, but only one way to watch it. And they show the benefits of the Philips TV that I’ll never be able to afford right there in the browser window. Pretty good, pretty pretty good.
My one complaint is that the dialogue sucks. “What’s that?” “A unicorn.” “Never seen one up close before.” “Get away, get away!” “I’m sorry.” Nigga please. You could have done something more with the words, really made the directors work for their money. As it is, you can practically tell any story in the world with those lines!!!!! And I guess that’s kind of the point, but I for one would have appreciated better lines. The movies are OK, mostly just the product of beautiful cinematography. “Darkroom” is excellent though, so you should go ahead to the site and watch it.
Oh, and what am I listening to now? The amazing “Fake Love” album by the wonderful Debbie Miller!!!!
