Desedo fam Jordan and Brad went out to Red Rocks and shot this gorgeous commercial for McDonald’s. They worked with Abe Froman Productions and the ad agency R+W. The song, which is quite happily stuck in my head, is by Hungry Cloud.
Tag: Multicultural Markets
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The National: Muslim Consumers
Abu Dhabi’s english language newspaper The National just covered the recent American Muslim Consumer Conference, drawing extensively on Michael Hastings-Black’s research and presentation.
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American-Muslim Consumer Conference
On October 31st is the first annual American-Muslim Consumer Conference. The speakers and audience will be a mix of marketers, businesses and scholars, all there to discuss this overlooked $170 Billion consumer demographic.One Hundred and Seventy Billion Dollars.
That’s a lot of spending power still overlooked by most agencies and F500 companies. At Desedo, we see opportunities in this market gap. So, MHB will be there and presenting some thoughts from his white paper American-Muslim Identity: Advertising, Mass Media + New Media.
Give a shout if you want to learn more.
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Love in London
We are back from London and giddy with excitement. Why? Because we just won Babelgum’s Pixel Pitch award for our transmedia tale Heart of the City!
Given the competition and the jury, we’re still shocked.
Here are some lovely spots of press from ScreenDaily and ARGNet. More news and excitement is forthcoming…:) -
ARGNet: Heart of the City
rainbow goblins eat concrete
Our transmedia tale Heart of the City just won the Power to the Pixel pitch, as reported by ARGNet. -
Heart of the City
What if Kanye West met Lord of the Rings…?
we don’t just dream of flying… The Story
Our transmedia story Heart of the City is a narrative set in the surreal world of urban teens, rife with mischief, rabbit holes and romance. The storyworld encompasses a web series, ARGs, original products and a feature film.
magic hides infront of eyes It all begins one hot day in Brooklyn when our two heroes, Jai and Sash, buy a dusty talisman from the back wall of their local bodega, thinking it might hang nicely from Jai’s chain. But when they discover that it has the power to unlock daydreams – turning them into flashes of reality – the boys find their lives and their path forever changed.
In their mind’s eye and on our screen, they now skate with Tony Hawk, smooch Santogold and freestyle with Pharrell. New York City morphs into a vast playground as Jai and Sash explore its nooks and secrets, joined by a purple sasquatch-dragon and bold fashionistas.
But something’s missing.
They must find the meaning of the talisman – what are its rules, how can it help them, how long will this magic last?
Just as heroes before them have learned, from Dorothy Gale to Peter Parker, with great power, comes great responsibility. Time is fleeting. Evil lurks. And so begins their quest.
mischief in the man and the dog The Market
At Desedo HQ, we are excited. (we just won the Pixel Pitch:))In creating Heart of the City, we wanted to make new heroes for a massive, multiracial audience. Jai and Sash are from the optimistic youth of the Obama generation, from a new era in American history.
These teens are at the vanguard of digital, mobile and gaming. It’s a group whose hobbies include comic books, skateboarding, and fashion. And they were weaned on hip-hop.
As we wrote in Ad Age, most advertising and entertainment that targets this audience does not reflect their many interests. It overlooks both their depth and digital smarts. Yet in a shrinking economy, these minority markets are growing in both size and spending power. It’s a demographic we see reflected and refracted in spaces like Grey’s Anatomy and Kanye West’s collaboration with Takashi Murakami, Disney’s Cheetah Girls and our 44th president.
Heart of the City is the first transmedia property built to engage multiple minority markets. Our heroes and our audience hail from the same world of early adopters, one encompassing Black Nerds, Asian BBoys and Wassup Rockers.
As our characters plumb the city for adventures, our audience sees itself reflected in values and style, in language and in attitude. Jai and Sash are the heroes they’ve been waiting to see onscreen.
Heart of the City is the new hero narrative for this generation.
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Photos by Jason Lewis and The Brink -
Asian Efficiency
One of the best books I’ve read in ’09 is Digitizing Race by Lisa Nakamura. In her essay The Social Optics of Race, she writes that
the racio-visual logic of…science fiction films that depict interface use set up distinct roles for particular races, and distinct ways of conceptualizing the racialized body as informational property… [and that] Asians and Asian-Americans function as the material base for technologies of digitized vision….
I was reminded of it when seeing this Palm Pre commercial from Modernista! in which masses of Asian bodies signify supreme technology. While I doubt that this was overtly outlined as such, I do think it is a product of Western subconscious.
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HT:Sociological Images for the clip and Erin Lamberty for noting it.
