How the Islamic State became a branding behemoth

When Robin Williams died last August, people around the world rushed online to mourn the loss of the actor. “Oh dear God. The wonderful Robin Williams has gone,” Bette Midler tweeted. “No words,” added a somber Billy Crystal. “Shame. I liked Jumanji,” tweeted one England-based Twitter user. “Good movie. Loved it as a kid,” replied an account with the handle @Mujahid4life. 

“Mujahid,” for those unfamiliar, roughly translates to “jihadist warrior.” And this particular handle belonged to a 19-year-old British-born guy by the name of Abdullah, who happened to be both a supporter of the Islamic State and a big Robin Williams fan.

Abdullah’s opinion of the fallen star unleashed a torrent of blog posts, most of which marveled at the fact that a member of an organization that openly beheads its enemies could also have the emotional capacity to mourn a U.S. comedian on Twitter. But however surreal it was to watch Hollywood actors and terrorist sympathizers tangle online, those voyeuristic bloggers missed a larger point. That moment encapsulated a key pillar of the group’s now infamous social media fortress: Spreading extremist ideology doesn’t need to start with religious screeds and beheadings. It starts — as a social media 101 instructor might say — by simply taking part in the conversation.

It’s been less than a year since IS burst onto the stage, seizing large amounts of territory and shocking the world with its brutally violent tactics. During that time, the group has evolved into a highly sophisticated multimedia organization, boasting slick social media strategies that could give major corporate marketing teams a run for their money. IS knows how to package its extremist ideology in the form of well-produced videos, attractive graphics, polished magazines and strategic online posts. It’s also strikingly savvy at spreading them online, tailoring their presentation and message to media sites like Twitter, YouTube and Vine. The messages are hypercustomized in language, tone and content to reach as many people possible and ultimately go viral. As Marshall Sella recently wrote in Matter, IS is “an entire brand family, the equivalents of the Apple logo’s glow ... terrorism’s Coca-Cola.” There’s no need to hold an IS-stamped watch or baseball hat in your hands to face the truth: IS is a powerful and terrifying brand that we were not prepared to reckon with.

How exactly did we go from the days of fuzzy, subtitled Osama bin Laden bootlegs to a Travel Channel-esque hub for propaganda and recruitment? As sophisticated as IS is at promoting its message on public platforms, it is deeply protective of its digital tradecraft. Here’s what we know:

Building a digital empire

IS runs all its communications through the official propaganda headquarters it launched in the spring of 2014, the Al-Hayat Media Center. This is where skilled, well-paid IS supporters work with high-tech equipment and the latest editing and design tools to produce recruitment films, propaganda materials like its glossy magazine Dabiq and its most famous product: gruesome torture videos.

Though this is the terrorist group’s central communications hub, its influence extends to about 20 other branches spread out along IS’ claimed territory, according to estimates by Daniel Cohen, a research associate at the Institute for National Security Studies. Local offices are able to take cues from the main center, but they also have room to create location-specific content to more effectively communicate to the fighters in those areas. For example, supporters in France have access to Dar al Islam, IS’ French-language propaganda magazine. Aref Ali Nayed, the Libyan ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, put it well when he told the New York Times that “the Islamists have been very clever at rebranding. They have learned the franchising model from McDonald’s. They give you the methodology, standards and propaganda material.”

Sheer volume dictates that these centers cannot approve every piece of IS-related social media that floats through the digital ether. Rather than try to monitor each message from the community, the media centers offer jihadist soldiers guidelines on the types of messages they should post.

“From the beginning, [members of IS] started to send pictures from Twitter,” Cohen told Yahoo News. “They did it for purposeful recruitment. Instead of showing the fights, they’d show people sitting and eating pizza in their lockers. Or they’d show people watching TV together, playing PlayStation together. They are targeting a young audience and speaking to them in the same language, showing that it’s a pleasant place.”

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Islamic State branding (via The Institute for National Security Studies)

It was perhaps the same genre of audience-based marketing that, in September, encouraged Western-based IS sympathizer Anjem Choudary to tweet a short listicle titled “10 Facts from the Islamic State that everyone should know.” (Number 7: “For every newly married couples are given 700usd as a gift.”)

The all-seeing Oz character who’s behind it has yet to be publicly identified. Senior IS leader Abu Muhammad al-Adnani acts as Al-Hayat’s main spokesperson and public face. However, he’s not widely believed to also be the brains behind the operation.

“Usually the people up on the frontlines aren’t the strategist,” Cohen said. “Just like a McDonald’s ad campaign. Someone came up with the concept and the script. But they’re never the same person who stars in the commercial.” 

More on:http://news.yahoo.com