The Republican, MA
March 30 2005
Using words and pictures to market products, ideas
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Gil’s opinion is that the Israeli advertising industry tends to rely
more on encouraging slogans – words – while in the United States,
ideas are spread and products are sold through images.
“What you basically see over there, in Israel, is an ad that claims
that that hamburger is the one that everybody buys … Here, in
America, (the) first thing that matters is said hamburger’s picture.
A huge one.”
Gil Duzanski, the 26-year-old manager of MGI, Media Group
International, came to America from Israel five years ago. He
believes in a good mix of words and pictures.
MGI has been around for about a year, offering “creative enterprise
solutions,” which include graphic design, Web development, and TV and
radio commercials, “basically, everything you can think of in terms
of an advertising agency.”
Duzanski studied Web design and communication in Israel, where he had
emigrated with his mother from Baku in 1990.
He was 9 at the time and Baku was still a provincial Soviet capital –
the city where the world’s first commercial oil well was drilled in
the 19th century and where Alfred Nobel’s brothers set up an oil
production company that competed with another local business, the
Caspian-Black Sea Oil Industry Association of Baron Alphonse de
Rothschild.
Today, Baku is the capital of the republic of Azerbaijan. The city
annually commemorates the events of January 1990 when ethnic tensions
between Azerbaijanis and Armenians prompted violence that led
then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to send tanks and troops to
end the unrest.
“We lived then on (the ninth) floor. There was a roof above us where
they put their machine guns. During those several days it was
impossible to sleep or leave the apartment. There was a tank in our
neighborhood playground.”
More than 100 people were killed and Gorbachev is still heavily
criticized for his decision. Later, after the collapse of the Soviet
Union, Azerbaijani-Armenian ethnic tensions developed into full-scale
war over the Nagorno-Karabakh region; the conflict claimed the lives
of tens of thousands on both sides.
In Israel, Duzanski finished school, went to college and then served
3½ years in an anti-terrorist unit of the Israeli army. Besides
Russian, English and Hebrew, he speaks some Arabic acquired during
his military service, although he is a bit reluctant to talk about
that part of his experience.
Arriving in the United States, Duzanski said, “It was like with
everybody else who comes, having left, basically, everything behind:
careers, homes, friends and family … struggling with the need to
learn English and find a job.”
Some time ago, Duzanski, who now lives in Easthampton, met Vadim
Vatnikov, another emigrant, who came to America from Moscow 11 years
ago. Vatnikov, 38, formerly a self-employed interpreter, retailer and
community-care worker, recently began running the Russian-language
monthly publication Russian World and the English-language Friendly
Advertiser Magazine.
So, he says, the advertising agency was just the next logical step.
Their goal is to “stand out from the crowd” by employing “strategic
thinking, fresh ideas and high standards to transform your mere
concepts into a great reality.”
Alex Peshkov, a staff writer for The Republican, emigrated from
Arkhangelsk in 2002. His column focuses on the Russian-American
community. He can be reached at [email protected]