Most of my time reading is spent on blogs. I still love picking up a magazine every now and then, and when I do my favorites are Fast Company, Monocle, and Guns & Ammo (just kidding about the last one).
I rarely read the print versions of our local Swedish marketing press, but today I picked up a couple-of-weeks-old copy of Dagens Media (which I guess translates into “Media Daily” even though it’s weekly, go figure). One article caught my eye on this sunny Sunday evening. It’s a discussion between Andreas Dahlqvist, Exercutive Creative Director at DDB Stockholm, Karin Ernerot, Creative Director at Tewonder (which I have actually never heard of, though their tagline is the very modern “We’re a Digital Agency. Building Brands for The Next Generation.”), Camilla Tienso, Marketing Director at Svensk Fastighetsförmedling, and Fredrik Thors, Marketing Director at Renault Sweden. It’s a four page spread, and I thought it might be interesting to dig into it and see what the state of the union is.
After plowing through a confused discussion where effectiveness and creativity were put in opposite corners (This ALWAYS makes me burst out in laughter. It’s not an art contest guys.) I found this strange quirk:
Karin Ernerot makes the case that Tewonder works in a different arena than DDB, since Tewonder works in the digital domain, and thus on a global arena. This to me shows a lack of understanding of the state of the digital domain. “Digital” is the only way of doing truly local efforts, since you can pinpoint down to the level of individual/time/location/context/state of mind/prior history/etc. Try that with a local newspaper, outdoor or event if you can! I’m not saying that the local newpaper is useless, but claiming that Tewonder would be working in a different arena than DDB is ludicrous, especially when considering that Tribal DDB may very well be the new center of gravity for DDB. Also, I wouldn’t say that digital is a separate media channel at all. There are media channels in the digital domain, but there are also dinner table conversations there, lover’s rendezvous’, water cooler gossip, and a thousand other interfaces. Local or global? That is more a matter of topic than of channel. And to be fair, geography is one parameter governing which topics interest us.
Andreas says a lot of the right things in the article, but really not much that is surprising, new or controversial. It’s a bit like listening to the obligatory mainstream marketing blogs of Sweden feeded back to you from the pages of this 4-page article. From what he’s saying however, I do think that there is a sharp mind behind the fluff, and I would love to see some of his original thoughts. A Google search for “Andreas Dahlqvist DDB blog” came up with zilch however. All I learned was that he has been very active in different juries. Perhaps a bit more blogging and a bit less jurying would unleash this untapped potential. I think this is a general problem of the Swedish marketing industry. Let’s be frank for a moment and call it by its real name: navel–gazing.
Anyway, it was interesting to dip ones toes into this discussion, though I also think that the time spent reading these 4 pages would have been better spent plowing through some #socialmedia. But hey – it’s easter sunday after all. Can’t be working all the time.
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Monocle är världens fräsigaste magasin. Gör som jag! http://www.monocle.com/Shop/Items/Prints/Monocles-Happiness-Index-print-limited-edition/