Don’t believe everything I say, also check out Rich Nadworny’s post on our advertising agency Honesty at the Digital Strategy Blog. Thanks for writing Rich!
/W.
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“I did not have sex with that woman… miss Lewinsky” is not a good strategy. Why? Because it’s untrue. If you think back at the Clinton/Lewinsky-affair, the big issue wasn’t really that Bill was unfaithful, but rather that he kept lying himself into a corner. Tiger Woods did the same thing.
In Sweden we have a politician called Fredrick Federley who is using the exact opposite approach. He’s being brutally honest and says precisely what he thinks about anything.
Here are some examples: He has admitted trying cocaine and pot, opposed the FRA-legislation, is homosexual and dates a person from the Let’s Dance jury, has an alternate drag persona called Ursula, parties hard and is pretty open with this in a variety of images. For example this one:
Imagine being a politician trying to get away with all this while lying! Pretty hard, right? Now however, with the brutally honesty approach he has, it all just blows past. In fact, it actually strengthens his brand. Honesty works.
On top of this, Fredrick Federley is a social media natural. He is very active on twitter and on his blog, and does it incredibly well. I you know Swedish, you should look and learn. Also, check out this amazing performance in a television interview. This is how you do it!
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I often get questions about our new Stockholm based advertising agency, and about what work we have done for clients. The reason for asking varies. Some ask because they’re curious, some because they want to shoot us down, and some because they genuinely care. Whatever the reason, I figure it may be about time I answer the question here on the blog.
Yes, we do work. Yes, we do it for clients. Yes, there is work out there already that has created real results. No, we generally don’t talk about clients.
I say generally because we probably will at some point, and we generally don’t have any objections about clients talking about us, even if there are exceptions there as well.
There are reasons for this policy. Let’s break it down and start with why we are in the first place:
Honesty is useful precisely because we make our clients interesting, we make them make more money, and we increase their value. That’s it. How does talking about who we work for and precisely what we do for them help in doing the above? Simply put – it doesn’t. So we don’t.
Much of what we do is also more effective when we don’t run around bragging about it in the local advertising mags. Like I said in my last post, I see us as brand shrinks helping out in bringing out the best in our clients. Our work belongs in their bottom line, not in “campaign of the month”. Showing them off in “campaign of the month”-format is also difficult since the visible stuff is only one part of the package, and may not make sense if you don’t see the whole thing.
If we want to, say, raise gross traffic and conversion rate multiplication of this traffic for a client, our top line communication (that you WILL perhaps see as a kick ass advertising concept) spikes gross traffic numbers, but also leads to discussion, sparking embeds and posts that build links, raising page rank, raising organic search traffic, creating more gross traffic long term.
To raise conversion rates on that traffic, we tweek landing pages, set up user tunnels, lead back systems for banners and drop-basket systems for email marketing, and so on, and so on, and so on for another three pages…
This is how we reach our goals and make ourselves useful. The forum for this stuff is, like I said, neither case movies nor business gossip sites, it’s the situation room and the result feedback loops.
Let’s watch the bottom line results instead of bragging, shall we?
Starting a couple of years back, contests surfaced as the big reason for going to ad school in Sweden. Schools like Berghs School of Communication won more awards than any other school in the world. They competed in everything and made GREAT-looking case movies for every submission. I used to think of this as the demise of ad schools, but now I’m not so sure.
I’ve switched my stance on ad school contests because it seems like they glue together new cross-disciplinary teams from different schools. Rather than competing school against school, ad hoc teams get together to make kickin’ submissions for One Show, D&AD and other contests. This is a good thing.
Sure, students then don’t see or care much about the entire system for boosting the client’s bottom line, but when weighing these things against each other, it seems to me that we can teach them this latter part when they get here. The incentives students get from competing is valuable enough to warrant this trade off.
In the real world however, it’s really not. Look at the case I described above. How would we compete using that?
This is what we would do if we had a contest hard-on (excuse my french) instead of a result focus: We would send in a highly polished case movie showing off the top line concept. Period.
The rest of the system would be too complicated to show. Not to mention incredibly stupid to give out the details on. When we work for a client, we compete for THEIR team, against THEIR competitors. Not for OUR team against OUR competitors.
Thus, I think that contests are fine while you’re in school, but really questionable out in real life.
The bottom line is that our work is NOT about being able to communicate what we’ve done in a compact, easy to digest, contest friendly 3-minute format. Industry bragging requires this format. Contests do too.
Instead, our work IS about coaching the client’s team, providing them with kick ass innovation, technology and gear, useful product- & service ideas, top-line story, ambient story, performance tracking, and continuously revised strategy and tactics. And that’s why we don’t talk much about clients or work.
This does not mean however that we close up like clams. We are in fact quite open when clients are not involved. We presently have 3 fairly large blogs about conversion and social media, about SEO & SEM, the one you’re reading now about strategy and philosophy; plus a couple of smaller ones. You can also follow me (@walternaeslund), Jesper Åström (@jesperastrom) and Simon Sundén (@joinsimon) quite closely in our Twitter feeds. The three of us are also frequent speakers at schools, corporations and conferences in Sweden and abroad.
You’re more than welcome to call us and ask us about whatever. We love discussion. Just not about clients. Perhaps you agree och disagree with me on what I’ve just written? Bring it on in the comments!
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I’ve spent quite some time now working on communications strategy for different brands. Some would call what I’ve done “planning”, “design strategy” or “brand strategy”, but really, I think of myself more like a shrink counseling a brand stretched out on the sofa, trying to figure out who they really are and what is really attractive about them. Today, we’re going to talk a little about attraction, and what we can learn from the pros about picking up women and men.
I used to work in television. What I did back then was to try to gaze into a crystal ball and figure out what kind of show would be the next big thing. Doing that, I learned a lot about different disciplines, but one that stuck with me more than any other was “pick-up-theory”, that is, the theory of picking up girls (or guys for that matter if you’re so inclined). The same day that “The Game” by Neil Strauss was released in the US, it was on it’s way over to me in a package from Amazon. To me, that book was the PERFECT television show back then. For some reason, I never managed to sell anyone on the concept, but if I had, we would have aired it just as the Swedish translation hit the market, and that book just went ballistic over here.
Anyway – I never managed to pull that project off, but the concepts I learned in the research stayed with me like glue. Perhaps not so much as a way to pick up girls (even though I managed somehow snatch this magnificent creature), but for all that it brought back to me in terms of putting me on the path of behavioral psychology.
Basically picking up girls works like this:
Besides being a very useful model for all kinds of relationships, it’s also an extremely useful model for business, and one that many businesses don’t live by. Here is why:
The traditional marketing model taught in business schools (yeah, I went to business school too) goes like this:
If you compare that to my picking-up-girls-model above, you’ll notice three major differences. First, they’ve split up “Create Attraction” into two different stages. Second, they’ve entirely skipped past “Create Comfort”. Third, they don’t even have marriage and kids on the map. The AIDA model is basically a bad one-night-stand kind of deal.
Let’s work through these three problems one by one:
In my mind, interest without desire is bad. Because if you have reached this state (according to the model something more than attention) without having created attraction, you’ll have reached something resembling “let’s just be friends”. The initial curiosity triggered in the attention stage is wasted. Interest should arise along with attraction every time. Otherwise your marketing is off, and your conversion rate will drop.
Moving straight for the kill without establishing a relationship will probably result in your not getting laid at all, and if you do, buyers remorse will be much more likely to occur. You may perhaps manage to seduce somebody once, but that means seduce in the worst sense of the word, and the buyer/lover will be likely to end up feeling cheated into it.
If all you’re interested in is getting laid once, then fine, you might be able to pull that off. But in the marketing world, you’re really not aiming to sleep with ONE woman/man, but rather marrying several thousand. And as we all know, if you’ve delivered once on your promise, you’re likely to get return customers, and perhaps even very fruitful life-long relationships.
So back to pick up. What did I eventually learn about picking up girls? Well – I learned that there are no techniques. There is no way to succeed when just conjuring a magic outer shell while pretending to be something that you are not. There IS, however, one silver bullet that you CAN use to pick up basically any girl that you want, and it’s this one:
If you develop yourself into a congruent, honest person that has integrity, brilliance and style, and that you’d love to hang out with any day of the week, you’ll get laid as much as you can possibly want – up until a certain point: when you fall in love. Because when you fall in love, you’ll not want to sleep around any more and you’ll want more than anything to stick around with the one person that you love.
While most brands don’t end up wanting to hang out with just one customer for the rest of their lives, they should definitely heed the advice of genuinely developing themselves instead of creating thin golden shells around them. They should be honest and they should be congruent. Doing this successfully can be hugely effective for them – even more so now that they have the web strapped on as a V8 boosting these basic human drives.
I’ve worked as a brand strategist on many projects by now, and if there is one thing that I’ve learned it is that graphs and strategy documents kill passion. You can work out a 200-slide presentation and charge a couple of hundred thousand dollars for it, but I am highly skeptical that this will make your communication better in the end.
At Honesty, we have a method of keeping these smoke screen slides to a minimum, and instead focus on two things: simplicity and humanity. Or perhaps better put, clarity and emotion. If we can figure out very clearly what topic we want to activate and figure out what emotional triggers will make this topic fly, no diagram in the world will beat this. In fact, most diagrams will dilute this clarity when you start compromising to honor your $100 000-Powerpoint.
I love this way of working, and I’ve really never produced better work than now. Simplicity is king, emotion is it’s kingdom, and when it comes down to it, we’re only human after all.
Ps. If you’re in Stockholm in March, come see me speak on this topic at The Conference at Berns March 16.
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I love headphones. Why? Two reasons. For one, they’re a crucial part of my mobile office working environment. In this respect my MacBook Pro and my headphones ARE my office. Second, I’ve grown up with music and there is just something about a good pair of headphones that is magical. It takes you inside the music in a really special way, and if you’ve ever listened to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of The Moon in a good pair you know what I’m talking about. Besides, a speaker system of equal quality is ten times more expensive.
So, this said, you’ve probably figured out by now I’ve spent quite a bit of cash on headphones in my day. I’ve tried countless in-ear, around-the-ear, and on-ear phones. I’ve hated many, liked a few and loved a handful. Here are my favorites:
You can look at headphones technically and oooh and aaah about frequency response spectras and whatever, but to me, there is really only one good measure of what is a good headphone: A good pair makes you want to listen to your entire music collection all over again. That’s it.
The Beyerdynamics DT990 Pro is a mega favorite of mine and it’s one of those headphones that make you want to re-listen your entire Spotify-collection (oops, that would take a while), and sure, their specs aren’t exactly bad either (see FR-curve below), but that aside, these just sound great. Listen to, for example, Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” and marvel over how these phones churn out a really clear yet meaty bass, while having excellent resolution all the way across up to the leaking hiss of Cash’s voice and beautifully catching that pressured tube distortion towards the end. It’s just mega amazing.
The DT990’s are exceptionally comfy open headphones which, besides keeping your ears cool, also gives the sound a roomy openness to it that you can’t get from closed cups. You sacrifice some low end punching power, but that is really not what these babies are for anyway. This graph says it all technically, but you really have to hear them to believe them.
[Edit: These babies are really not done justice without a headphone amp driving them. Calculate one into the total buying cost].
While the Beyerdynamics are hard to compete with in many ways, they do have their drawbacks. Being open, they don’t close out barely any ambient noise, and they leak quite a bit to the outside. They are also very big and sort of fragile thus basically hopeless to bring along anywhere. Wearing them on the subway would look amazingly corny and would not work very well. For mobile use, office use, working at café-use, airplane use and whatever else that might just pop up and that you cannot prepare for we need something completely different. Here is what I need from a product like that:
1. Foldable with a good case. Highly mobile.
2. Sturdy.
3. Microphone for iPhone use.
4. Noise reduction.
5. Killer looks.
6. Killer comfort.
7. Ok sound, even though this will clearly be part of the compromise.
As it happens, there is a pair of headphones just like that. They come from high end cable maker Monster and are made in collaboration with DrDre.
The second you open the box there is just instant love. The box itself is near Apple-class packaging design, and the headphones really stand out as top class design and workmanship in every way.
And that’s until you put them on your head. These babies sit perfectly over your ears with a snug fit. Very different from the Beyerdynamics, but the purpose is also a completely different one. I’d say these are just perfect mobile office headphones when it comes to fit and looks.
The noise cancelling works ok and shuts out the world around you well enough. Unfortunately there is a disappointing hissing sound that REALLY shouldn’t be there with phones in this price range, but besides that the sound quality is more than ok. Sure, they are far from the Beyerdynamics in sound quality, but these are, like I said, a compromise. For my kind of use, they are more than ok. The FR-graph here shows you sort of what to expect. It’s good, but you have some odd dips in the high end and a slightly annoying bump in the midrange. The bass is beautiful though if slightly emphasized. They beat the Beyerdynamics in one respect – being closed they have a punch to them that I mentioned lacking in open headphones. This is not something you want all the time, but it’s nice for a change. Overall, they just work.
[Edit: Speaking of headphone amps, these are slightly amplified in themselves and really don't need one in my opinion – a big plus for mobility].
These in-ears don’t look like much. They’re small, cheap-looking and highly discreet, but don’t let looks fool you. These small gems deliver on audio quality beyond most competitors, a fairly steep price tag, and are actually of good build quality. They have a really balanced frequency response for their price range without exaggerated bass and kick ass clarity across the range.
On the minus side, I don’t like the cables that much, they don’t have a microphone and they have a tendency to fall out if I use them while running. Also, in-ear headphones REALLY get inside your head. The listening experience isn’t even the same breed as open headphones, but that’s really a matter of product category and shouldn’t be put on the Q-Jays’ liability account.
The Q-Jays’ combination of size, stealthy looks and actual audio quality simply make them unique, and a perfect complement to my two other favorites above. If this type of headphones is what you’re in the market for, just buy them. You won’t regret it.
So that’s it. If you have these three products, you should pretty much be set for any situation. Sure, these are all pricey products, especially the Monsters are VERY overpriced when put in perspective of their audio quality, but their combination of features and specs still make them worth their price. And like I said, when you consider what you’d have to pay for a speaker system of similar quality, or if you consider that these babies are actually a crucial part of your working environment, buying all three is really a no-brainer.
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This morning we talked about how Facebook is racing towards Google and Gmail like a bull on acid. And now, already, we read about how Google are planning to unveil social functionality in Gmail, bringing together status updates and other services like YouTube and Picasa to some sort of more open version of Facebook. It can hardly be a coincidence that these two announcements appear almost simultaneously, do you think? The fight is on!
And what a fight it is! This fight might actually end up in the history books as one of the biggies that really changed things for the users. It’s also interesting to note how Twitter is sort of in between and makes out a little bit with both giants.
In the Mashable post about Google’s new social innovation, Adam Ostrow lists Google’s more open social system as a potential drawback for Google. But on the other hand, openness is a wet dream of Zuckerberg’s, and one he regrets not having implemented in the early stages of Facebook. I’m looking forward to following this one!
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Me, I kind of like it. Even though the story is a bit cheesy, the style is perfect for people to remash and make their own versions. I bet we’ll see a ton of these. Simple, yet strategically smart.
Read Google’s explanation for this unexpected Super Bowl stunt here.
Like Danny Sullivan writes on Search Engine Land, “it will be interesting to see what happens how [the view count] changes”. Before Super Bowl the YouTube version had 1.2 million views.
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The other day, rumors started surfacing that Facebook are planning a fully fledged Email-product. That’s right, a Facemail with POP/IMAP-support and everything. It will basically replace Facebook’s standard messaging functionality with a beefed combo that does everything Facebook messages AND Gmail combined does today.
[Edit: Today I started typing a name to send a message and happened to type the wrong name. Take a look at this suggestion that came up. "You can type an email adress". Cool.]
The second I saw this headline, it was just so clear – OF COURSE! Facebook is communication centric. It really makes MORE sense for Facebook to have an email product than anybody else. And while Facebook has been growing ever stronger as a way to identify yourself on the web, your email adress has still remained the default standard. For many of us, this means Gmail, at least in matters of private nature, but now, with Facebook launching something like this, it really makes a lot of sense to use Facebook as your default identifier. Facebook is just way more communication-centric and integrated than Google.
Apparently, you will get a new Facemail adress on the form yourvanityurl@facebook.com (gosh I’m happy I have a unique name), and my bet is that we’ll see a lot of those addresses flying around pretty soon. It just makes sense. Not registered your vanity URL yet? Do it now!
[Edit 2: Trying to email to walternaeslund at facebook.com gives me the following though:
Also noting that they are running Microsoft Exchange... hmm...
]
And what’s next? Of course, Google is still way ahead of Facebook in many ways. Search, maps, and a ton of other Google innovations are beyond the scope of Facebook, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if a “Facebook Professional Suite” was in the works somewhere in a Mountainview basement. Facemail would make Facebook the default communications hub, and a professional suite along the lines of Google Apps would really make Facebook a very powerful professional tool. Or actually, they may leave typing and spreadsheeting to Google and just stick with the project management side of things – remember that Facebook is communications centric – and much of what is needed to make Facebook an amazing project management platform is already there.
I’m a firm believer in the power of the free market. Monopolies, whether state sponsored or spawned by bad mergers and aquisitions, are bad. But I do believe that as long as they are not protected by law, they will eventually be subject to competition if they stand still for too long. The fight Facebook is putting up against Google is really excellent for that reason. These two giants slugging it out and attacking each other’s territories will make for some really interesting developments in the coming decade.
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I got the question from a client in a meeting the other day: “How do you define social media?” I haven’t thought about that question for a while now since it’s such an integrated part of my reality, both on and off duty, but now that I got the question it got me thinking.
Imagine talking about the web while leaving out social media – what is then left to talk about? To me, the answer was “bad websites”. Social media was a good and necessary word when the non-social web was still kosher, but now, it seems superfluous.
I looked at the client for short while before I got up, walked over to the whiteboard, and drew a nice red big fat X over the words “social media” that were written in the middle of a blue mind map. “There is no such thing as social media” I said. “There are just people and places they are”.
As cliché as this may sound, it’s really true. The digital interface is just another interface for people to interact through, and we really need to stop viewing it as a media channel that we can buy with a separate budget post, that is somehow isolated from other posts like PR or advertising.
Social media is dead. And it’s not dead because Facebook died or Twitter died, but because the term “social media” implies that there is also “un-social media”. But the whole digital realm is now social, unless it’s poorly designed.
Also, with the help of current mobile technology, the online realm is never more than an arms length away from the offline one, making even the offline world social. Unless, of course, it is poorly designed.
The world has always been social, but social technology made socializing more efficient and raised the bar for all of us. Online and offline marketing efforts that don’t take social technologies into account are wasting massive amounts of budget. If we make communication that nobody wants to share with their social circle, it’s just not good enough.
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Every now and then I’m criticized for being too hard on the Swedish advertising business. And sure, I have criticized agencies here for not understanding search marketing, for being ten years behind when it comes to web development and for being so blinded by YouTube views that they forget relevance and the client’s bottom line. I do, however, never say these things out of malice. I always engage in these discussions with one clear purpose – to create direction in this rapidly changing business and to make us all better. Criticism is a gift, so bring it on.
Some people understand this, and here I would like to give extra kudos to Forsman & Bodenfors who I think have taken this criticism very well and actually still talk to me. (We even have an occasional beer together). They understand that this is about playing hard out there on the court to make us all better. They also seem to remember that it is a court, and that it is a game. Off the court, we laugh and hug (well, almost).
Anyway, to show my appreciation for F&B’s constructive attitude, I will give away a free idea for fb.se at the end of this post. Stay tuned!
And what about the results of discussions like the one around SEO? I think that we are all getting better! At Honesty, we know most people in the SEO-business, and thus hear all about how ad agencies are now running around trying to recruit SEO-experts. This is great for our industry, even though I think most agencies still have a really hard time finding good people to recruit. Nevertheless, it shows that agencies are now starting to take search marketing seriously. I think that people will also starting to question if YouTube-views is really a good measurement of success.
On a side note, I find it funny that those agencies who will not find people to recruit, will have to look for suppliers elsewhere, and when consulting Internet World’s list of Sweden’s most important SEO-companies they will find… Honesty! 
(Click to enlarge the picture).
So. Back to my promise. Here comes the free idea for Forsman & Bodenfors
Hi F&B!
I don’t know if you realize exactly how good and potentially useful your URL is? Fb.se is extremely short, shorter than most URL shorteners like bit.ly. Why not use that creatively? Start your own URL-shortener service using your URL to promote good content.
A specialized URL-shortener focused on, say, advertising and communication would be a perfect platform for creating a portal for “top-shared-ads-of-sweden” or even “…the world”. (Now, DDB, don’t steal this. It’s a gift for F&B).
So why, you ask, would people use this one instead of j.mp or bit.ly? Well – when using a specialized shortener for ad nerds a lot of quality traffic to the shared links will be generated. Trackbacks and relevant followers to Twitter accounts used would also be a benefit. And like I said, this would not be just any ol’ traffic, but quality traffic from people interested in your specific area of business. It’s win-win.
And how is this good for you? Need I even answer this question?
Your URL is rare. Use it. Happy coding!
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