Those of you who have followed this blog for a while know about my love for hotels like Ace and Michelberger, and hotels in general for that matter. And now, finally, I and my agency Honesty get to work with an entire chain of hotels! After a demanding pitch, the hotel chain Scandic selected Honesty as their new lead agency for the Nordic markets, and I can’t wait to get to work on this true classic of a brand spanning 160 hotels, 6600 employees and  29910 rooms.

Scandic is also really special to me since they felt like a brand that is truly tailored for the Honesty model because of their integration between brand, product, traditional advertising and strong online sales in a really tough vertical. I know we had tough competition in this pitch from the very best Swedish agencies, and I’m just super happy that Scandic decided to give us the chance to unleash the entire Honesty repertoire in concert. It’s all very exciting!

As lead agency we’ll work with everything from overall strategy to creative expression and tonality. A lot of the focus will be on strengthening emotional values but also on creating an even greater customer experience online and off. Thank you Scandic for choosing us! This will be fun!

Dagens Media on the Scandic pitch.
Resumé on the Scandic pitch

Honesty's first office. In a corner cupboard in my apartment.

When I founded Honesty AB on Valentine’s Day 2009, I had just started on a brand new relationship with an amazing girl. It’s somewhat telling I guess that I am now, two years later, celebrating Valentines Day on my own with tacos and a movie. I don’t want to blame it on work, but there is something about entrepreneurship that just consumes you, and I can understand if that’s something that can be a pain to be around sometimes.

I am also celebrating Honesty’s 2-year anniversary alone. Not really because I would have had to perhaps, we are fifteen people working at the office today after all, of which five are partners, but I somehow feel that this particular anniversary only applies to me. The first partners after me came in when I had been working on Honesty alone for 7,5 months and for them, that date (somewhere in October) is when it all started. I’m sure they will want to celebrate Honesty’s 2-year anniversary then instead, and I can understand that.

But still, this date, February 14 2009, will remain in my heart as one of the most important dates of my life. It’s the date when I took a pretty scary leap of faith, when I said to myself that no, I won’t go for that safe employment, and no, I’m not sure I’ll be able to support myself financially or even keep my apartment.

Still, I went for it, and even though it has cost me a lot personally, it has also completely changed my perception of what I believe to be possible. Starting an ad agency from scratch, without a single cent in financing, was something that I wasn’t sure was possible, at least not if you want to become a large agency and be eligible for the larger accounts, but today, two years into the game (or 16 months if you ask my partners) we are indeed up there competing for the biggies, and winning. Considering our current size, this is pretty amazing. I’ve launched many projects before Honesty, but this is the first one that I would consider strikingly successful, not only as a start up, but as a company. It’s the first one, but I don’t intend it to be the last.

So will I celebrate next year’s Valentine’s Day alone once again? There is no way of telling. But I do feel that Honesty is not in it’s infancy anymore, and that there are now many other amazing people that I share the responsibility of entrepreneurship with. So who knows. Maybe this year will also be one of love. Not only of Honesty.

So I finally got my first day off from work in what feels like a lifetime. It also feels like a blink of an eye. So amazingly much has happened this year, and at the same time, I have never had a year pass this quickly on me before.

I’m sitting here at one of my favorite cafés on Skånegatan in Stockholm trying to write some sort of re-cap of one of the craziest years of my life.  (Read part 1 here). Here it goes:

How 2009 Was Like a Bad Action Movie and Almost Brought Me To Bankruptcy

The difference between 2009 and 2010 was almost ridiculous. 2009 was probably the toughest year of my life. It started with a throat surgery and an extremely uncertain startup existence where I borrowed the 100 000 SEK necessary to legally start up Honesty AB and went on to setup Honesty’s first office at a cost of over 20 000 SEK per month. You can imagine what that did to my private economy.

I rented Honesty’s first computer with my apartment as collateral because I couldn’t afford to buy one. I ran out of money completely twice and had to leave the first office and move back home to my apartment to which my very dedicated project manager intern Emelie Evenstedt had to come to work every day despite the fact that it didn’t even have a kitchen at the time. I even had a real estate agent come to my apartment to tell me how much it was worth so that I would know if I could sell it to bail me out of my loans (It could. Barely). Needless to say, starting up Honesty was pretty bare bones. I guess hardcore is a better word actually.

Towards the end of the year the Honesty story had taken me from getting close to personal bankruptcy to having meetings with presidential election committees in Manila and weapons traders in dark hotel restaurants (yes, all this sounds completely incredible but is true. I should probably mention too for the record that these people were closely related to democratic governments and VERY far from thugs that you see in movies).

These particular meetings completely shattered my prejudice about weapons traders. At least the ones I met were very warm, caring, friendly and smart people with whom I had late night philosophy discussions and developed friendships. I decided not to work with them in any way professionally since I don’t want to work with tobacco or weapons for personal ethical reasons, but there was always total understanding about this and never any pressure. It’s strange how something like this expands your view of the world. There are so many worlds out there that we don’t have a clue about but that are inhabited by people like you and me with very similar minds, dreams and emotions.

How 2009 Generated No Cash But a Ton of Value

In the face of all challenges, Honesty survived. Last year at the end of 2009 we had the christmas party for Honesty at Carmen, a local (very) low price range restaurant where the beer is half the price from well… everywhere else and where the atmosphere very much reflects just that. Did we go there because that was all Honesty could afford? Not really. In fact, Honesty couldn’t afford even this at the time. Everybody had to pay for their own plankstek and 29kr stor stark.

That is where 2010 started. But even though the treasure chest may have been empty, a ton of other value had been created. We had managed to put the Honesty brand on the map (even if sometimes in a provocative way). We had managed to bring together an amazing dream team of people who all came in to start work in October (for this reason we use this date as the official launch date of Honesty), effectively putting an end to one of the loneliest periods of my life. We had managed to get invited to pitches. And we had managed to set up a new office in an old garage.

2010 Started in Style!

The new year 2010 started in style with me and Martin putting up our brand new sign on the door with our first logo. It was a pretty emotional moment which gave at least a symbolic sense of stability. We realized when preparing the window that we hadn’t invested in cleaning products for the office yet, and you can actually see the bottle of Absolute Vodka that we stole from the neighbor and that we used to clean the window in the bottom left corner of the picture below.

Besides style, the year also started in Cava (one step up from cheap Carmen beer) with the Stena Metall account landing at Honesty. I must say that I’m am incredibly happy and grateful to the open minded and courageous marketing department at Stena Metall for having faith in us despite our lack of other major clients at the time. We have since delivered creative that we really believe in for Stena Metall, working towards charging the brand with emotional values and have picked up a couple of awards along the way. And while awards are fun, I’m most proud of the results we have seen in the metrics. This works. The Stena team will always be part of the Honesty heart and story as something of a modern Medici family who saw potential and invested in Honesty before anybody else. So Ninni, Katrin, Carina, Peter and all the other awesome west-coasters, I want you to know that you have played an important part in the history of this agency!

How Johan Carlsson Led Me To a Hero of Mine

Another important person in this story, at least for me, has been Johan Carlsson. This is a guy who literally walked into our garage office and smacked a brief on the table. “Solve this in 4 hours” was his pitch to us. Johan, besides being a client, has been an important support and inspiration for me personally as we have similar crazy entrepreneurial minds. We also have very different backgrounds so we complement eachother creatively really well. He’s the kind of guy who simply calls up people like designer star Stefan Sagmeister just because he liked what he saw him talk about on TED.com and books a meeting. Me and Johan actually went to New York together to have Stefan as a designer on the team. I’ve always admired Stefan as a designer and person, so needless to say, this was a big moment for me (though, as you can see in the picture, I was jetlagged to death).

In these workshops we created the new brand PFO which is one of the cooler brands I’ve been involved in creating. The product itself is an amazing GPS positioned assault alarm bracelet which looks like a fashion bracelet until triggered. When triggered, a SWAT-like team from G4S finds you and saves you within minutes. All this, which sounds very much like extremely high end celebrity security actually exists today, is patented, and comes at a low price that sounds completely impossible when you first hear it. Not any mind could make something like this happen. And PFO? What’s that? It’s just an acronym which looks cool… until you trigger the alarm. Then it changes into PLEASE FUCK OFF. It’s a wording equivalent of the product.

How Honesty Turned Into a Real Agency

Around February we had started gaining momentum in production and sent off our first invoices. As some cash started to come in we could start investing in very basic stuff like a server (no, we didn’t even have that before), a printer and studio materials. It’s almost hard to believe today that we didn’t even have these things back then.

Honesty’s fiscal year is broken on the last of june which means the first fiscal year of Honesty is actually a year and a half between February 1 2009 and June 30 2010. This also means that we closed our first fiscal year 6 months ago. The first year ended with a turn-over of about 4 000 000 SEK with 2 480 000 SEK in profit. At this point none of the partners had received a single salary, hence the large profit margin. For me personally, this meant almost a year without income and I had survived on my new speaking career that was spawned out of necetity and sheer survival instinct. Looking at this financial result gave me a ton of hope. Indeed, this would be a tiny step for a normal agency but it was a giant leap for Honesty.

The Halebop Story

Besides making sure to really deliver results to our main client Stena Metall, we literally worked our bums of for another key project in the Honesty story – the pitch for mobile network youth brand Halebop. I have made a promise to myself to never count the actual number of hours we put into that pitch, but it was A LOT of hours!

We also put in a lot of people on the case and the garage office was becoming very very very crowded as you can see in this picture.

We decided to move and ended up in a much bigger place slightly closer to the city.

In May of 2010 – Halebop stepped into our new office with huge smiles on their faces and two magnum bottles of Champagne. We had won!

Halebop was a major turning point for Honesty, and today, there is a lot of love between the two of us. We are similar in culture in a way since we’re both underdog challengers, and perhaps that is part of why we can push the envelope quite far in what we do for them. We have created advertising that’s so far from convention we seem to have shocked the market into a renewed interest in the brand. The interaction around the Halebop communication is fantastic as you can see in the linked post and all across the web if you try for example a YouTube search for the brand name. And it’s just as much thanks to the marketing department at Halebop who had the vision to see where all these crazy sketches that we showed early on could land with the audience. Annika, Karolina, Åsa, Rune, and all the others bad ass marketing minds in the magical bat cave on Ringvägen – I applaude you for your courage and vision! You are the ones who made the metrics we have both seen possible.

We have also won several smaller accounts over the year and one major new account recently that I will tell you about soon. We are also involved in a few pitches. And of course we are looking at some new hires to manage the new accounts. We are not rushing new pitches at the moment though, because I believe that priority number one always has to be to take care of our current clients. Our regulars. They made us happen. They’re family.

How Setting Impossible Goals Creates Impossible Results

Next week we’ll be half way through Honesty’s second fiscal year and we did set a bold goal for this second year. We said that we were going to grow at least 500% and I did get a lot of mocking comments about that in Dagens Media when I said it in an interview. I have no hard feelings about that. I would perhaps have thought the same, but we are now half way through the fiscal year already and are starting to see something crazy on the horizon.

We actually seem likely to not only reach that goal of 500% growth, but surpass it. We are ahead of the curve and are now looking at close to 600% on a linear prediction. And as a lover of bold goals, I’ll hereby revise my goal up to 800% just for fun so my critics can have something new to mock me about. It really doesn’t matter. 250% would have made me just as happy. Looking back at where I was a year and a half ago – broke, without an office and with my home up as collateral – I think that I will now head off to enjoy my first day of vacation in a long time and perhaps treat myself to an extra large hot chocolate.

Drop me an email or something if you want to meet up with me during the Christmas holidays. I’ll probably stay in town and  always enjoy meeting new people.

Merry Christmas and a ton of love to all of you who have been a part of this! You know who you are. I love you all!

__

Ps. Update: Thanks for all the amazing support, emails, SMSs and comments on this post (and during these two years of course)! It really warms my heart. One of the most common questions has been what we chose to replace Carmen for Christmas dinner. The answer? Dinner party at our office actually. It has become quite a comfy place these days. And the food? Catered from Bistro Voltaire of course.

Last week we started rolling out the new concept for the Swedish youth mobile brand Halebop. The reactions that came back to us were as expected – mixed. It’s a love hate thing and very few inbetweens. And here’s a hint: Love-Hate-tension creates discussion.

And what does it look like in concrete terms? Well – we created hundreds of sketches and threw away most of them. We actually produced tons of semi finished material that we also threw away. The things we kept had a spontaneous, improvised look and feel that we loved, and we established a way of working that kept generating fresh ideas that felt like they came straight from the street. And in reality, I guess they did actually come straight from the street.

I want to save some surprises for later, so I’ll end this post here. Right now we have things like print, outdoor, television and store materials out for the launch of Halebop’s new looks. You can check out som of the films below!

It’s been an amazing past couple of weeks! Apart from the clients we already work with, we have now won not one, but two major long running pitches and are now the strategic lead agency for both Stena Metall and Halebop.Stena Metall is a big and extremely competent recycling company. In a world full of greenwashing and wishful thinking, Stena Metall is a company that actually delivers what other companies only talk about. What is charity to many companies is core business for Stena metall, and that’s a communicative truth if there ever was one! We’re also really happy to have the Gothenburg-based agency Stendahls as a partner in this venture helping us with local production, organization of sales material, sales offers and much more (Stena are also Gothenburg-based). Don’t know what we would do without you guys.Halebop is an awesome brand delivering mobile telephony to the young and beautiful people of the underworld (well… of Sweden rather, but you know what I mean…). Halebop is one of the most consequently executed brands in Sweden and one that has THE most satisfied customers in the industry. It’s one of those accounts that just has it all. Thank you for choosing us! We’re really glad to have you as partners. Because that’s what you are – partners – not merely another client. *Love*

In many ways, these two brands are on completely different ends of the scale, but there are also key similarities: they both incredibly passionate about what they do, and they both have genuine communicative true values at the core of their operations. We always talk about finding the communicative truth, and with these brands, we didn’t have to dig deep to find it.

Again, we’re really proud to have been chosen to represent you. We know our competition was tough and that you had plenty of great options to choose from. Thank you! And cheers!

One of the major benefits of my line of work is that I get to work with a lot of amazing people from all over the world. They are consultants, designers, copywriters, strategists, marketing managers, logistics experts, event people, translators, web developers and all kinds of other specialists. Here are three of the more impressive people I’ve had the benefits of working with so far:

Magnus Lindkvist – Trendspotter, Strategist & Professional Speaker (Sweden)

Trendspotter, brand strategist and speaker of the year in Sweden 2009 Magnus Lindkvist is a one of a kind personality. He’s big, loud, intense and always carries either a big smile or a concerned analytical look that mostly resembles a human supercomputer. Magnus can see the matrix.

I worked with Magnus during my time at Identity Works in Stockholm and had some of the best strategy discussions I’ve had to date. Magnus has also been a great mentor for my own career as a speaker.

If you ever get the opportunity to sit down for a coffee with Magnus (could be hard as he does a couple of hundred lectures per year, including TED 2009) you are more likely to learn something about yourself than about the world. That’s how he approaches things. And that is also what makes him interesting. As a trendspotter, he will try to make you see for yourself rather than telling you what the future will be.

If you have the chance, go listen to one of Magnus’ talks and check out his book “Everything We Know is Wrong – a Trendspotter’s Handbook”.

Stefan Sagmeister – Designer (Austria/USA)

If you’re even remotely interested in design, Stefan Sagmeister doesn’t need any further introduction. He’s one of the great graphic designers of our time, and also one of the easiest people to work with that I’ve met. During a very intense two day workshop in New York a few weeks back we got more work done than I have in a long time, and what I realized is that there is a very productive and rare combination in being a great listener and being very clear in voicing your opinions. And being fun to be around. This is what Stefan is, and it’s a winning combination.

Stefan’s work includes stuff for Lou Reed, Rolling Stones, Adobe, Talking Heads and much much more. He’s also a frequent TED speaker with three different appearances to his credit.

Markku Mäntymaa – Producer (Finland)

You may not have heard of Markku. Yet. And he’s the only one of these three people who hasn’t spoken at TED. Yet. I traveled to Manila in the Philippines with Markku for an amazing week of work where we tried to figure out how on earth to pull off one of the most challenging tasks in my career, and he pulled through meeting after meeting like a machine with seemingly endless energy. I guess it figures that it is this guy who pulled off to get permissions for and produce an extreme sports event for Red Bull on… wait for it… Red Square in Moscow! How many producers do you know who could do that? Not many. I promise you. This is a hard working guy. The fact that he’s also a professional drummer with 20 or so years experience just makes him even cooler.

Embrace Experience. Breath Innovation. Produce Intimately.

Sure the world has changed. But I think it’s time to realize that we haven’t changed much. A couple of years ago I was one of the people running around screaming that the world was coming to an end, that the traditional advertising agency model was over and that the world would never be the same again. In a way, we need people running around like that to initiate discussions and spark debate, but I also think we have to look outside our window and see what the real world looks like, because – let’s face it – the biggest and greatest agencies are also doing things right. I believe in taking EVERY piece of knowledge I can from these agencies and adding on everything new I can possibly find from the frontier and then pour it all in the blender. Will it blend? I think it will!

Production Intimacy

Just because an agency doesn’t understand search marketing dynamics it doesn’t mean that it can’t create massive results using television, print, and outdoor. Just because an agency has in-house production resources doesn’t mean it will loose it’s strategic capabilities. Quite the contrary. Personally, I believe in keeping production intimate for two reasons: First, emotion is in the finger tips, and emotion is such an amazingly important part of strategy that outsourcing it lowers communications quality significantly. Second, let’s face it, it’s hard to get the very best creatives on a freelance basis. At least that’s my experience. Feel free to challenge this.

At Honesty we try to have the same people on the production set (and in SEO- & conversion tuning labs for that matter) as we have at the initial strategy workshop. This plays into our philosophy of “Clarity & Emotion” where we try to simplify everything to super clear but emotionally punchy topical packets that inspire people to pass along the brand story. We really can’t outsource that.

Finger Tip Feel Requires Finger Tips (Not Robot Arms)

Occasionally, we outsource specific things like design, illustration or sound design. We’ve recently worked with a very established artist from Sweden for illustrations and a superstar designer from New York for identity, and they’ve both delivered qualities that we could never (and should never) have in-house. But that’s completely different from outsourcing all production and delivery. We can outsource roasting the beans, but we can’t outsource the barista so to speak. Finger tip emotional execution requires finger tips – not robot arms.

From Radical Idealism to Pragmatic Innovative

My journey has gone from radical idealism to pragmatic innovative. For me to be happy, I don’t want to settle with only having super progressive ideas. I want to make them happen. And to do that, I have to look outside my window and grasp the reality my client lives in. I want to create kick ass communication that we know will work in all media channels, while also building Google equity and evolving the brand through design and customer service. I want to take clients by the hand on a journey to greatness; I don’t want to do is insist on trying to teleport them to la-la-land. It doesn’t work, and no marketing manager worth its salt will let you do that anyway.

The Recipe for Success Then? This Is What I Think:

1. Information Clarity
2. Butterflies in stomach
3. Tight team of highly skilled individuals
4. Few strategy slides (tight strategy = consultants assuming responsibility for making choices)
5. Production intimacy

Funky Business Models vs. Great Minds

In the end, our business is all about results, and I think we can all see that advertising agencies are not as dead as some entrepreneurial people thought a couple of years ago (though I appreciate the ambition). There are a lot of great minds at those “soon to be dead” agencies, and a new and funky business model will never beat brilliant people when it comes to consulting businesses. Why? The consulting business is all about – you guessed it – the consultants.

“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!

This isn’t brand new by any standards, but it reminds me (and perhaps you) that sometimes, bad ass is just… bad ass.

The Subaru also seems to carry a bit more fun & punch than those german Volkmobiles, wouldn’t you say?

Thanks to Juha for sharing.

In these times of economic downturn and agencies firing people left and right, perhaps a couple of ideas for job applications could be in order:

I see a lot of people applying for work with us by sending an email with a CV and a personal letter. Most of the time these are people that I’ve never heard of before. I’m sure they are brilliant and everything, but they are missing one thing: We at Honesty are REALLY into communication. We would never dream of recommending our client to send our an unsolicited email containing a sales letter and a spec-sheet. What we WOULD recommend is to build your brand, build interest, engage in conversation, and do interesting and valuable things within reach of the potential customer’s radar.

So. Engage with us. Create value. Move within the scope of our radar. We may not be able to afford you or have need for your particular skills right now, but you’ll become part of our network, our extended family, and our daily reality. That way we’ll have a relationship for the day when we need PRECISELY you, or when somebody else in our network needs you. Or perhaps it will be the other way around by then, and we’ll come knocking on your door. Who knows.

The point is that relationships should be built BEFORE they are needed.

So come on down, get to know us, have some virtual coffee with us on Twitter or whatever other virtual coffee shop, and when we get to know each other better, we’ll have a real cup on Södermalm.