I've been really impressed with the various FTL promotional flyers people have made. But for a long time I've wanted one that is tailored to my particular local conditions, namely west coast time and no local radio affiliate.
So I've got this friend who works as a project manager at a
major advertising agency on Madison Avenue. I won't mention any names, but let's just say they're bigger than some countries. He's sympathetic to libertarian ideas, and I was able to persuade him to use some of his resources at his work to develop a new promotional FTL flyer. He had a couple of his designers, copywriters, and persuasion psychologists develop some concepts over the course of a couple months. The results were impressive: photorealistic computer generated images, ad copy that read like a commercial jingle, embedded subliminal messages, the whole bit. When I saw it I said to him, "It's nice and all, but it's just too...
slick."
So we went through a second round of development. This time he took his top people off one of his other accounts, and their effort took about twice as long and was closer to the mark. It utilized the FTL design theme, color scheme, and slogan. But again, it wasn't perfect. It was still...just too overly commercialized-looking.
Felling stuck, we called in the president of the company, who is possibly the most ultimate advertising guru in the world. I told him what I wanted: "We're going for a kind of 'do-it-yourself' sort of feel. Decentralized. Spontaneously ordered. Do you know what I mean?"
This advertising wizard thought for a moment and said to me, "so you want this flyer to look sort of as if you had created it yourself on your computer in just a few minutes?"
I replied, "yes, that's it."
Clarifying, he again questioned me, "so you want it to look sort of...authentically low-budget?"
"Yes, exactly!" I told him.
He paused briefly rubbing his chin, and then made a phone call to an old friend of his now working in the psychological warfare department of the DoD. Together they spent six months listening to the FTL archives, conducting focus groups, and refining the flyer design. Finally it was finished. And when I saw it, I took one look and said "it's perfect!"
http://mackler.org/ftl_flyer.pdf