5 Minutes with… Arif Miah
Arif Miah is co-founder and strategy director at mud orange, an independent creative agency that works with brands to develop culturally relevant and effective creative ideas that connect with diverse audiences.
Inspired by the speed that culture, demographics, and behaviours are shifting, Arif and co-founder and executive creative director Ala Uddin set out their vision in 2019 to make sure brands are cutting through and engaging the right people. As an agency founded by British Muslims, connecting brands with the over 4 million people in their community laid the foundation for the work mud orange did, but it has since broadened. Using the agency’s proprietary strategic approach, ‘the mud mix’, along with its insights platform the London-based team hopes to create culturally impactful ideas that effectively stand out for its clients.
Over four years into his journey as an agency founder, LBB’s Alex Reeves caught up with Arif.
LBB> Where did you grow up and how did you end up in advertising?
Arif> Born and raised in London. Ala, ECD, is from York but he moved to London about six years ago. Our careers were in very traditional agency design studios. Our journey has been pretty interesting because we're two visibly brown guys working in a very white industry. And loving it to be honest.
I made the jump because I studied economics. I worked in strategy consulting, at a very boring suited job at EY. I hated it, wanted to make the jump, took a 70% pay cut and joined Ogilvy. Because I really wanted to do something creative. When I went there, you know, obviously it was a huge culture shock because of the way the industry works. The industry's got an obsession with gen z and urban and cool, but it's the antithesis when you get through the door. It's the complete opposite, but I really enjoyed it.
A few years later, myself and Ala bumped into each other while he was freelancing at some of the agencies I was working at. And we thought, you know, let's do our own thing.
LBB> How did mud orange find its niche and style as an agency?
Arif> We're four years in now at mud orange. And it's been a really interesting journey. Starting off we knew we had to find a way to PR ourselves. So we thought, what can we do that the industry doesn't have? This Muslim stuff. Let's really take this brown thing because we know it's gonna grab attention.
But I think that does a little bit of a disservice to what we do. Because I'd say probably about 30% to 40% of our work is in multicultural groups. The rest is not. We work with a lot of tech brands, dating brands, finance brands, real estate, development companies working on brand projects, positioning, campaigns. But we knew that that was a sexy topic that publications would want to cover. CMOs at big supermarket brands will think, "Let's get them onto the roster, even if we don't give them briefs." We knew that that would work. And it has worked.
Maturing through the years we're doing a lot more international work, which has been really great. Being based in London, it's always been an attractive thing globally, from Singapore to Saudi Arabia.
LBB> It’s interesting to hear you being so honest about capitalising on your point of difference as two brown Muslim men as a business asset.
Arif> When it comes to DE&I in marketing, it's always shrouded in this package of activism, shoulds and oughts and let's do better. That's not us. I'm not gonna sit in front of you pretend that I am a social activist trying to champion the progression of Muslim inclusivity. To be honest, no. There is a business opportunity which brands are stupid for not looking at. And I'm very open about that. When I speak to CMOs and marketing directors, I'm not trying to say this should be from your DE&I budget – this should be from your marketing budget, this should be part of the marketing calendar.
We're a great agency, I'm a strategy director, my job is to make businesses money, and we can't pretend creative agencies don't do that. That's our job – to make some cash.
LBB> What sort of briefs has that positioning brought your way?
Arif> It's always opportunity led. Sometimes we get briefs where they want to speak to South Asians in New York. We say, "Hang on a minute. Is your product even right for that?"
We had a really funny brief come in from a crisp brand. They wanted to promote their new smoky bacon flavour in the month of Ramadan. I know it's suitable for vegans, but it's not the appropriate language. Let's not do that. Let's just do a regular campaign. You might want to target the urban areas of Manchester with some out-of-home placements. But I think ultimately, it's not about activism for us. It's about opportunity.
LBB> What sort of clients did you set out to attract when you started and who are you most excited to work with now?
Arif> We want to work with emerging brands. We don't want to work with the biggest brands, we don't want to work with the best brands; we want to work with the number threes, the number fours or the next innovations.
For example, you've got all these new fintech banks. We're currently working with a Sharia-compliant fintech bank who got a huge amount of series-A funding and want to launch globally. That's us. They're not going to be Barclays, but they're going to make a stamp.
Over the last four years, we've been working with so many tech brands and startups and also mainstream brands. We get to see the inner workings of startups. We're incubating our own company within mud orange, so we just treat it like a client, but it's our own company, we are the shareholders, we've got a tech team working on it. If we're making these guys money, why can't we launch our own company? It's like the story of Acne Studios. They were a design studio, and then they shot off to become a fashion house. Why can't we do that? Being agency owners gives us the flexibility to say we're going to incubate our own companies to sell off or expand and do interesting things. Why do we always have to be working on briefs from others? We can create our own as well.
We treat it as a client. It obviously is a long-term brief, with everything from website to UI design and brand development. A lot of my time in speaking with investors, angel investors mainly, or VC teams, just to understand what they need from us to be able to get access to cash. It's been super interesting.
LBB> You have a strategy background. That's not a creative strategist’s role. How are you finding that?
Arif> It's not. But I think also running an agency and understanding the business stuff that goes into that really helps. Also, in my past life, spending a few years in strategy consulting for insurance companies, as boring as it sounds, I was able to understand how you do that. I went to the London School of Economics so a lot of my mates work in investment, in VC. So I'm just giving them a ring to see if they can give me an in or something or prep me for a certain kind of pitch meeting. We don't ever see us departing the creative agency world, but why can't we incubate our own brands?
LBB> Over the years, what have been the big threshold moments for the agency…
Arif> In our first year winning the Marketing Week award was a huge moment for us, because we were up against the Royal Navy and huge brands. It was for a Ramadan campaign – a charity campaign. It was hugely successful and the budget was almost nothing really, so we put a lot of our own time into it and won that award. That really propelled us to get onto the radar with a lot of brands.
I get a lot of requests to comment on the diversity stuff. That really gets a lot of attention.
International work has been the most profitable for us. Brands that are based abroad trying to launch in the UK. Because we have a specialism in niche audiences, for brands who have a mainstream audience that they generally talk to, these brands from Singapore or Canada or Saudi Arabia, understand the value of not contaminating the overall brand. But how do we have an approach for the UK market?
We generally worked with UK brands targeting specific audiences. But the whole UK market is a specific audience for an international brand. So we've won pitches for international work, which has been really great for us to be exposed to how we work around the clock, how we expand our freelance network globally to be able to deliver.
LBB> What campaign are you most proud of?
Arif> It's hard to pick a single one, but I'll talk about one for a charity tech brand called Givematch. They're a scale-up now, not in the start-up phase anymore. They work with match funders to double your donation. So if you donate 50 quid they convert it into 100 quid.
For Christmas 2022 they wanted to run a campaign to get donations in. It was a great lightbulb moment when we were brainstorming creative ideas: in October the sales start, you have Black Friday, you've got all these discounts – doubling donation also means half-price donation. It's 100 quid for the price of 50 quid. So why don't we take on the big retailers like John Lewis and Currys and say sod these deals, we've got a cost of living crisis. We've got people on our doorstep in real need. Get the best Christmas deal in town at half-price donation.
We ran an out-of-home campaign, a digital campaign, which did really, really, really well. It was all around Central London, a big sales campaign for charity donations. It was really a nice moment because it was taking on big retailers with a really good message for people in need and supporting loads and loads of people, which was really nice.
LBB> We touched on a lot of the big values of the agency. Are there any other things more broadly within advertising that you find yourself talking about a lot?
Arif> Our industry, I love it. I think we get carried away very easily. I'm pretty sober when it comes to the metaverse or AI. I tend to tread a bit carefully when delving into the trends.
Something I do find interesting is the mergers and acquisitions of agencies that are independent, because we've been approached a few times. It still feels like a very old model. It doesn't feel like it's caught up to how these new, agile Instagram businesses or Amazon businesses are getting acquired by bigger investment firms.
That's an interesting area because you've got the Accentures and Deloittes coming into this space as well. There's a lot more interest in how people get into the marketing and advertising space, in terms of acquisitions. But for us at the moment, it hasn't felt right. With some of our clients who have been acquired, the structure has been so innovative and fair for the founders. It does feel like we're almost selling our souls to the Illuminati a little bit when it comes to the agency world.
I don't know if acquisition would be right for us anyway, just because we like our model, we like the agility, smallness and flexibility.
LBB> Culture is part of your raw materials for your clients. What do you find interesting about situating brands within culture?
Arif> Something that always interests me is how brands very badly reflect popular culture and the fabric of British life. It does feel like there's a blind spot to what the reality of the UK is. I was at the Qatar World Cup. I loved that. I was there supporting England. If someone took a picture of us England fans walking into the stadium right now and put it on the Daily Mail, you'd be so surprised. It just does not look like what a Daily Mail reader might expect. It is so diverse. Some women were wearing an England flag as a headscarf. That is so cool.
I love progression in what modern British life looks like. And engaging with different people within that in terms of broader culture. I love sports. I love football. I love the impact football can have on bringing people together, which we saw in the Qatar World Cup. It was like a festival. It was amazing to see. Yes, Qatar has a lot of issues to solve, but being open to difference is important. There's an entitlement from Western Europe that football belongs to us. And if it goes to somewhere like Qatar, it's not for them to have. But it was the first time I saw a four year old at a football party at 3am just enjoying it. And you will never see that in England.
