Here are white papers and ideas that Desedo has published and presented at industry conferences.

Ed. Note: Raafi's 2007 post about new media and black identity went viral, spreading from M.I.T. to USAToday to the Canadian Broadcasting Corportation. His thoughts below are a bedrock of Desedo's approach to engaging multicultural markets within new media. On a late weekend night, two days before the release of the much-anticipated Microsoft video game Halo 3, a group of 8-to-10 black nerds in their late teens walks down [...]

Michael's essay about multicultural markets and new media has been published by Ad Age, Huffington Post, Project 100 and The CMO Council, as well as presented at numerous ad agencies. ...... [T]he proliferation of media voices and sources enabled by the internet has allowed a more nuanced and less gangster voice of young black america to emerge, untempered by market concerns and sensationalism. Because of social media's democratized communication tools, we [...]

Prior to Desedo, Michael worked in urban planning. One thing planners know is that people have an innate need to remix and customize any urban system or grid. Rules will be broken. It's not about if, it's when & how. This is strikingly similar to how people behave within the new media landscape. This presentation is from a Pecha Kucha talk about the parallels between urban amd new media [...]

Michael wrote this white paper for the Contemporary Muslim Consumer Cultures conference at Freie Universitat in Berlin. It has also been presented at the American Muslim Consumer Conference and at Texas A&M's Race, Ethnicity & New Media symposium. In Fall 09, Cambridge Scholars Publishing will include it in their book Muslim Societies in the Age of Mass Consumption. Excerpts from this paper and interviews relating to topic can be [...]