halal chicken can help stack cheddarRelioscope, one of the leading journals for discourse about religion, just published an interview with MHB about the American-Muslim Consumer Market.
So…my white paper about Islam, Identity + Advertising has been getting some pixels round the internets. Did interviews with Religioscope + Agency Spy and Ad Age reprinted an excerpt. And it’s getting published in print by Cambridge Scholars Press, cause you know I’m an armchair academic.
Was invited to a conference about Religion and Media in Iran, waiting on some visa issues. Linking up with Fatemeh Fakhraie, EIC of Muslimah Media Watch, to do content + consulting for agencies/brands. Quite curious to see what’s next….
Spent the last week producing an episode of the German TV show Into The Night for our friends Avanti Media. We ran around town with the econ gurus Joe Stiglitz and Bruce Greenwald. Learned lots.
Now at MIT’s Futures of Entertainment conference. Learning more. Soon my brain will be full. Then what?
Been thinking a lot about our nostalgia for analog and how we use digital to simulate that space, like this photo app. Or this shutter sound. But the real real is always best, which is why I had to snap pics of this here flyer. 10 years ago, I might not have noticed, but now see it as unique.
I’m outspoken, my language is broken into a slang / But it’s just a dialect that I select when I hang. -Special Ed
I’ve been thinking about the use of slang and LOLspeak in advertising and have deduced a simple rule. The logic is as follows:
Standard language is a strategy for communication. Slang is a tactical response to linguistic strategy – a way to speak within the space, yet occasionally cloak or subvert your content, creating a space of insider/outsider. Sometimes slang will cross the fence from linguistic tactic to strategy. An example would be the words bling or phat. Once slang, now OED English.
So with that in mind, if an advert aims to use slang within a communications strategy – to sound like the target demo and be edgy – the slang must do one of two things. Either contain code that employs a real insider/outsider barrier or (better yet) truly be subversive. Otherwise it does not achieve the desired effect of being decoded.
Two examples of deft slang use are the Gossip Girls poster that says “OMFG” (ie Oh My F*cking God) and the Akademiks “Read Books, Get Brain” poster (ie Read Books, Get A Bl*wjob). The target demo knows what these posters are saying and that if the copy were written sans slang, the adverts would not pass the censors. Equally important, they know that many passerby are clueless to their code, yet your brand is in the know.
Fearless director Jordan Alport has teamed up with the cheeky wizards at Hopr to helm a spot en espagnol for the service provider Mobile Bridges as they launch their first consumer product suite in the US.
