How the hell can you end up in a seduction lecture, an emergency landing, a fire truck and an ambulance plane, all on the way to a client presentation? And can you still pull off the presentation? It sounds incredible, but this is that story:

A few months ago one of our biggest clients asked us to come down to Gothenburg to present our latest communications concept for them. The presentation was for the top marketing executives from all international markets, so needless to say this was a key presentation for us.

As fate had it, this meeting ended up being scheduled only two hours after the end of a speaking engagement on “Basic Seduction Theory for Marketers” in Stockholm that I had accepted an invitation to several months earlier. If you know anything about Swedish geography, you know that getting from Berns in Stockholm to the Gothenburg harbor is not something you do in two hours unless you’re EXTREMELY lucky with your flight times. We weren’t that lucky.

So I canceled the speaking gig, right? No. Canceling speaking gigs is not something I take lightly, and rescheduling the client presentation was not an option. What to do?

I started calling around to see if I could get hold of anybody with a helicopter or a plane who could fly us down to Gothenburg (always the optimist). We actually did get hold of one friend with a plane, but it turned out that he didn’t have a “cloud license”, something that I had never heard of in my life before, but which apparently meant that he couldn’t fly if there were clouds in the sky. Hoping for clear skies seemed a bit brave since we do live in Sweden after all. I’m not that optimistic.

I am however stubborn. Ridiculously stubborn at times. This was one of those times.
– Let’s book a business jet, I said to Emil (Honesty’s account director) who looked at me in disbelief.

Business jets are not exactly cheap, but after some calling around I managed to find a plane that was slightly cheaper than the others. I booked it. I guess I should have known better. Keep reading.

The talk in Stockholm went great. After I finished I rushed out to a car waiting outside with the motor running. We had to have our own car since taxis like to keep speed limits (stubborn bastards) and we really didn’t have time for trivialities like that (If you’re a policeman reading this, I’m only joking. Promise.). As we zoomed towards Bromma Airport I tried to clear my head to prepare for the next presentation.

You get what you pay for, and I suppose I should have realized what kind of plane to expect, but what came rolling out of the hangar was this tiny piece of junk propeller plane. The pilot wore jeans and a windbreaker. But there was no turning back now. We rushed aboard the four seat plane, put on our headsets and buckled up.

As the plane took off we felt immediately that something wasn’t right. The plane bounced around in the sky and sounded like an out of tune sewing machine. We held on to our iPhones for king and country. The pilot bravely pushed on for five minutes that felt like an hour before his voice came on in our noisy headsets:

– As you can hear there is something wrong with our engine and we have to turn back to the airport.
At this point Emil was starting to become really nervous about not making it to our super important meeting and asked politely (Emil can only ask politely):
– Ehrm, Mr Pilot, We’re in a bit of a hurry and…
The pilot cuts Emil short.
– That’s the least of our problems right now! We need to get this plane back on the ground!

This situation was definitely not improving.

We came down towards Bromma Airport for a proper emergency landing followed by a parade of ambulances, fire fighters and airport security cars. When the plane came to a stop, some kind of emergency procedure started with debriefings and reports. Emil and I were so worked up about not missing our meeting by now (we had after all just risked our lives to get there) that we somehow managed to convince the plane rental people that we needed to go on the fastest plane available to Gothenburg like… right now.

To this day I still can’t figure out exactly how this happened, but minutes later, after a short ride in a fire truck, we were taxing out to the runway aboard an ambulance jet (I shit you not) and took off for Gothenburg to the roar of jet engines.

Rocketing across the sky in what must have been close to 1000 km/h we tried to finish up the presentation keynote.

The interior of the ambulance plane consisted of three seats and a stretcher, plus two ad guys with MacBooks. It’s no exaggeration to call this a strange scene.

When we walked into the meeting we were a mere fifteen minutes late. We walked in, trying to breath normally, apologized for being fifteen minutes late and fired off our presentation. It was one of those moments from an American high school movie when everything is in slow motion and the fat kid scores the winning goal in the football finals. *Musical score fading up*

On my way out from the meeting I looked up and met Emil’s eyes. I could tell that he was thinking the same thing I did, “I don’t know what the hell just happened, but somehow we pulled this off”.

We had made it! The concept presentation was a great success and today we are rolling out that concept in Sweden and internationally. When the evaluation came back from the speaking gig at Berns, it was all top marks there as well. Somehow we had managed to execute what seemed like an impossible plan.

So what’s the moral of this story? Well – I guess I can summarize it in this single sentence: “Impossible is a mindset”. There is always a way to get things done if you put a bit of extra effort into it, and I think that sticking to this conviction is an important ingredient in succeeding with anything. And besides, getting some adrenaline through your veins every once in a while keeps you young and peachy.

But don’t take my word for it. Go out and try it for yourself. Pick out an impossible project and just go for it. You’ll be surprised how far a little bit of stubbornness can take you, let alone a lot.

Life of an ad man may not be physically challenging (except for yoga class), but it can be quite psychologically tough. You pitch a lot and work really hard to get to deliver out what may seem like quite small units of product. Especially in the beginning, you can work for months and months only to get, say, five films out the door. For us, even though we haven’t actually lost a single pitch yet, we have had other things happen, like us withdrawing for different reasons or clients backpedalling their plans.

If you’ve seen season 2 of Mad Men, there is this one episode where everybody works like crazy over the weekend to win the American Airlines account, only to have the pitch vanish before their eyes. These things happen.

If you’re in some other line of business, say sweeping floors, the floor is done when the floor is done. Nobody will come steal that reward from you. Or say that “yeah, this floor is fantastic, but we can’t run it for legal reasons”. Or whatever.

Sometimes I wish I had a job on the side, a job where what I produced was produced and delivered and where I could move on to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing… I guess it could be something like baking bread (tried it at a bakery this summer) or selling ice cream. Or it could be something where I could write short chunks of text and deliver them instantly to an audience of hundreds of people and even have them comment back and discuss with me. Wait… I guess this blog is that job.

It’s time to round up the year in more ways than one. Our advertising agency Honesty’s first fiscal year just ended a month ago, and I’ve been treating myself to some well deserved vacation on a sailboat in the Stockholm archipelago. And for those of you who have never been here, it’s quite a place:

It has been a strange but amazing year. Definitely tough. Probably the toughest year of my life. In February 2009 I had just left McCann (been fired is probably a more accurate description actually, I was a bit of a pain). I was on the street with no job, no financial stability to speak of and, in the typical ironic style of the game of life, no voice since I had throat surgery planned for the day after I left McCann. I couldn’t even call anybody to tell them about my predicament. Probably just as well as I was pretty high on painkillers as you can see below. Nevertheless it was what one could call bad timing.

At this point all options were open. I guess I could have joined another agency, I could have left the business altogether for something else, or… I could start something of my own. But as I was laying there in the hospital bed, I made a decision. I knew the concept we had at Verymuchlogo (the agency I left) was basically right, though somewhat crude, but the project was slightly off center in the staffing since we were missing an important piece of the Ocean’s 11 team and we were lacking the right production philosophy. Now was the time to make it all perfect from the start. But it was not going to be an easy ride.

In February 2009, still with pain in my throat and strong painkillers to fight it, I filed all the papers to start the advertising agency Honesty. To this day, I still have the original sign on the door of my apartment.

Shortly thereafter I moved into Honesty’s first office located in Forsman & Bodenfors’ old office on Hötorget in Stockholm.

Here I was hanging out with amazing people like Louise Hamilton and Daniel Jouseff, ping-ponging ideas and meeting tons of people.

Great meetings were held with everything from creatives and strategists to potential financiers and clients. The office was an expensive place for only one person to pay for, but looking back, it turned out that it actually paid for itself many times over.

And it was an important time, albeit painful – being on my own like that was a quite scary experience since I had nobody but myself to rely on for basic stuff like food and rent. It was important because it forced me out on the ledge. If I would have taken the safe route, Honesty would have been dead and gone a long time ago. Instead, I spent time digging through our industry and surrounding industries, like SEO, social media consulting and business consulting, to figure out what was being done right and wrong in our industry, or put into business terms – where the inefficiencies were that could be exploited. I saw (and see) the music industry as related and wrote a lot about that too back then. Check out the walternaeslund.com blog posts from February here.

Besides doing some smaller consulting gigs to stay afloat, my persistent bloggin was starting to pay off with more readers coming in every day and public speaking gigs starting to pop up, both in Sweden and abroad. I fell in love with the stage and it’s still a great marriage!

I also helped out as a consultant where I could. One of these gigs that I’m really happy and proud to have been a part of was the “Sweden’s Most Swedish Job”-campaign that Syrup planned for during the spring and executed in the summer. It was an awesome campaign, not least PR-wise, where we sent around a guy all over Sweden to rediscover the country and stay at STF’s (the client’s) hostels.

It was also an opportunity for me to work with the fantastic Henrik Frenne who is, by the way, a one-man-agency in himself. (Grab him if you can afford him).

My lifestyle at this point was anything but luxurious. All my money went to my expensive office and pitch projects and living expenses. There was one exception however: Our oyster Thursdays. Here me and my friends met up for oysters and discussed life. These Thursdays did chip away on my lean budget, but still I really think they helped keep me sane.

Around this time we started to throwing the epic Daniel & Walter-parties at the Stockholm club Collage. At least we thought they were epic. We always had a great dinner at the club before firing up the turntables and partying until 2-ish. Also a great way to keep my spirits and creativity up (we had a new theme every week).

Summer came. In many ways this was a huge frustration. The ad business slowed down and went into vacation state. All I wanted to do was work, but things around me were slow. Looking back I can see that this was actually really good. I fixed up my apartment and read up on a lot of stuff that I didn’t have time for before, like evolutionary psychology and the psychology of attraction, themes that are now at the core of my lecturing and overall strategy.

In September I wrote a blog post that exploded like a bomb. The post was about Forsman & Bodenfors’ campaign for The Church of Sweden and was intended as a clear and good example to show what happens when you design for man as man was fifteen years ago, in the pre-Google era, rather than designing for man as man is today, including the augmentation of the mind that search engines provide. Over the course of that week, my blog traffic doubled, tripled and quadroupled before hitting the Swedish advertising press in the form of an article in Resumé. At most I had six times my ordinary traffic on the blog going to that particular article. A week later I wrote about Lowe Brindfors’ new site, just to show that it is really not a Forsman & Bodenfors problem but an industry problem. Agencies need to get on the bus and design for man as man is today! During those two weeks, we had tons of traffic to the agency site as well, with all the big agencies topping our visitor charts. That week several of the biggest agencies where out searching for SEO-experts to hire. Ironically, we ended up on the top list of SEO-consultancies only some weeks later. The question I always get asked is whether the posts were a PR-trick or not, and my answer is: not really. I just told things as they were. Including screen shots. Sometimes a simple truth carries a long way.

Later that fall all the remaining 5 partners in the planned Ocean’s 11 team had signed on to the project, had gotten on board and received their shares. By October we were up and running. The old place was now way small and we moved into Honesty office #2 in Hornstull.

We were pitching small stuff and bigger stuff and were on a winning streak. To date we have withdrawn from two pitches and won the rest. Such an amazing payoff for all this hard work.

One of the ones we withdrew from was for, wait for it, the presidential campaign in the Philippines. That’s one you don’t do every day. This amazing ride was a great adventure including a week long very intense trip to Manila.

Instead we got to work on a dream project with one of my favorite designers Stefan Sagmeister and went over to New York to meet up and do workshops.

I’ve been a fan of his work on stuff for everything from superstars like Lou Reed and The Rolling Stones to small fun projects for a long time and also felt much appreciation for his philosophy and view on life. You can check him out speaking at TED.com here:

As a bonus, I also discovered and fell in love with Ace Hotel in New York. Fantastic place and a place I keep coming back to.

Things were starting to pick up speed now at Honesty. We added two employees to the staff, one art director and one account manager, and some freelancers and just pushed on full speed ahead. Before long we had outgrown Honesty office #2 as well.

By now we had won the accounts for Halebop and Stena Metall along with a bunch of other smaller accounts, and moved into our present space near Mariatorget: Honesty office #3.

This was a perfect stop for us where we could regroup and search for a perfect space without being too crammed. We have a couple of ideas for where our next space Honesty office #4 should be but haven’t quite decided yet.

Our first fiscal year, which was actually a year and a half, was closed on the last of June. Most of our real business has taken place from February, and that was an important lesson: it takes some time to start an advertising agency from scratch without financing. But when I got those books in my lap I was real proud, of myself, of my partners, and of everybody else who have made this happen. It’s just f*#!n cool that we could make it happen.

Before summer started I bought a piano. I was worth it. That’s where I sit down when I come home from work to clear my head before writing to you. It’s been an amazing year and an amazing ride. If you ever get the chance to do something like this, then do it! And if you don’t get a chance like that, make one.

When I got fired I called my mentor Magnus to tell him the news (well… I couldn’t talk remember, so i mumbled and whispered). I remember very clearly his reaction: “Walter – that’s GREAT news! It’s probably the best thing that has happened to you since puberty!”.

I guess he was right.

Have a great day!

Super happy to announce that I will be speaking at Marketing Week Live at Grand Hall Olympia in London next week June 29. Amazing gig that I’m really looking forward to. For some reason I’ve never had a chance to speak in England. I hope we have the same sense of humor.

The topic of the day will be the same one that I wrote about here a little while back: “Brush Your Teeth and Design for The Google Man”. I guess they liked the title. But on a more serious note I really think that a mindset where we’re lookin at online as part of our ordinary evolution, like fingers, teeth or motorcycles, is key to success in times of change. Not just in our business. This mindset makes us quick. It makes us smart. It makes us efficient. Really looking forward to the discussions after the talk. That’s where I learn. There are always tons of smart people at this type of event.

So if you’re in London on the 29th, I hope you can swing by and say hi! Looking forward to seeing you!

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!

Every gold rush has it’s opportunists. The gold rush of viral marketing is no exception. Before we leave the gold rush phase and move into a more mature market, agencies will keep running around waving YouTube views in the faces of marketing managers to show off how creative they are. But are they really?

There are two problems with measuring success in terms of YouTube views:

1. YouTube view count not a good KPI on it’s own. Measuring success that way temps us to turn to malpractices like clownvertising rather than aiming for healthy business goals for our clients.
2. Focusing on this number encourages cheating.

Cheating can be done in different ways, but probably the most common way is to buy views from sites such as these. Tempting if you only measure your success in views, is it not? Damaging for our industry? Certainly.

So how can you spot a cheater? Well – first you have to check out the view graph. To do this you click on the little button to the right of the view count in the YouTube window.

Second, you take a look at this graph. Here’s what a GENUINE viral graph looks like:

The graph grows organically without strange bumps caused by the mysterious parameter “viral/other”.

An agency or individual that has cheated to spice up their view count will have a different behavior. Here’s a typical example of what cheating could look like:

Especially note the major bump in the beginning. If you dig deeper into this video for yourself, you’ll see that the bump is caused by “viral/other” – a sure fire sign of bought views.

Some agencies have realized this and removed the graphs altogether to cover their tracks. Doing this however is an active choice. The graphs are by default visible. If you take a look at some of your favorite virals and see that their graphs have been removed, this is a sign that something very fishy is going on. Why would you make the active choice of removing this graph if you have nothing to hide?

So why am I showing you this? Well – I am tired of sitting in meetings where people want us to give them YouTube views. We are not in the business of clownvertising, but in the business of creating business value for our clients. This is done by being structured and creative in setting up an awesome KPI-set (i.e. quality embeds and other REAL interactions) and using that to dynamically control our activities. At the end of the day, my job is to boost our clients business. Otherwise I could as well work as… well… a clown I guess.

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.

Money is important to us. Control over our life situation is too. But then, how can we possibly accept Internet banks as they are today. How can we possibly think that it’s okay to, say, not be able to get a visual overview analysis of our expenses and incomes? How can we possibly put up with the long and complicated OCR-numbers or basic search functionality? And how is it possible that we have such user hostile login procedures?

I can’t present all my ideas for my perfect Internet banking experience in just one post, but I can show you three examples of what Internet banking would look like if I had my say, and also what I think it will look like in just a couple of years. Here we go!

Facebook Secure Connect

Logging in to your Internet bank today is more or less of a hassle depending on your particular bank, but it’s nevertheless a hassle. Banks have been lagging behind the times here, focusing on security, but not on usability. The market forces will inevitably push us closer to an optimal trade off between security and usability. We see people leaving their bank today, simply because the login security solution is too complex (using USB-hardware for example).

To creatively solve this problem outside identification providers will step in. On of those will be Facebook. Our online identity is contained in our Facebook accounts, our Google Profiles, Twitter accounts and other services that we haven’t even learned the names of yet. We have come to trust them for logging in to other services now, and since more advanced transactions are taking place using this login by the minute (buying major chunks of advertising for example), a need for more secure identification procedures will arise. A second version of Facebook Connect called Facebook Secure Connect will be launched using secure authorization technology and will eventually be adopted by the banks. One bank will lead this evolution and the others will be both inspired and forced to follow.

Facebook will lead the way in this development, but Google will be quick to follow. To compete with Facebook, Google will go on a marketing rampage for secure OpenID and couple with Google Budget Analytics:

Google Budget Analytics

The amount of control you have over your budget and cash flow today at your ordinary Internet bank is really a joke. You get a list of your transactions and not much else. Besides that, it’s also really messy to go back and check out your history. My own bank has recently made it possible to export to Excel XLS-format, but give me a break – XLS? In 2010?

Instead, when you log in to your bank using secure OpenID all transactions will automatically be indexed, fully searchable and categorized. You will be able to analyze your economy at all levels from the very basic (cigarettes, food, rent) to the very advanced with cluster analysis, seasonal trends, forecasts and goal tracking.

In step two, Google will also launch Google Budget Analytics For Business where you can do your books and account distributions more or less automatically. This will kick ass for small businesses.

Facebook’s reply to this will be to enable sharing services where you can share selected transactions and events in your feed, much like what Blippy does today. Come to think of it, Facebook will probably buy Blippy.

Open Banking API

Finally, banks will realize that they are best at doing what banks do, and will hand over interface design and function to the experts. Banks will release secure API-sets to allow third party specialized internet bank companies to connect to their systems. This will in turn open up the market for hardcore competition. Google will be way ahead already and will release Google Bank which will be an big expansion of Google Budget Analytics. Here, they will also have tight integration with Google Spreadsheets, and will also allow for seamless integration with Google Chat, Google Voice and Gmail for interacting with your bank’s customer service.

And what about Apple – the self proclaimed customer experience rulers of the universe? They won’t remain on the sidelines for long.

Man, I wish I had the cash to go into this one myself. Call me if you know any investors who would like to change the world with me on this one.

Update: Interesting link about the poor quality of internet banking (in Swedish).

Tomorrow I go back to work again after the holidays. Or, well, technically I guess it is today since I can’t sleep and it’s early Monday already. I’m really excited about getting back on the horse though. There is much to do this year.

A lot of things have changed in my work life since October. I went from being an outcast entrepreneur (mind you, I did get fired from my last job) and rogue public speaker to running a company of eight, soon to be nine, people. It’s been a bit of a wild west operation up until now, where we’ve poured energy and brute force all over the place to get rolling, and have survived on sheer will power and the talent of my amazing band of pirates.

Now, I feel that we’re entering a new phase. We’ve reached civilization, put a flag on the shore, and will now have to clean up this gang and get organized. Things like workload distribution, resources, and schedules need to be balanced and we need to aim for a leveling of our cash flow curve – something that is always a challenge in start ups. We have to find a good balance in resource allocation between new business and billable time and find balance between what our hearts and our minds tell us. These things are by nature the yin and yang of the entrepreneur genome.

These are challenges to be sure, but the biggest challenge of all is now behind us. Pulling together this unlikely cocktail of talent and seeing them fall in love across cultural borders was just amazing. It was not obvious from the start that this would work out the way it has, but seeing it in full gear now has given me a lot of courage for the journey that this year will be. This is definitely not the time to break out the Champagne, but it is the time to lay out our maps on the table and draw up different plans to reach our goal for this year. The goal is clear, and there is definitely a good cold bottle sitting at the end of that rainbow. First things first.

I’m also looking forward to a good year of public speaking. My last few talks of last year were really inspiring events for me and gave me huge amounts of energy and inspiration. It seems to me that public speaking is like climbing a ladder where each talk fuels the next one. I can’t wait to get up on stage again. My next scheduled talk is at The Conference at Berns in Stockholm in March, but there will certainly be other talks before that. Stay tuned for more. And who knows, there might be a book in the workshop as well. But again, first things first.

This late night post ended up being quite an honest account of where I am in my life right now, but hey, what are blogs for.

Good night.

I‘ve always been interested in economics, because economics is a great way to model, measure and understand human behavior. In a TED-talk I watched over a bowl of indian curry (I got stuck alone in the office over lunch), Loretta Napoleoni explains the economics of terrorism and how it relates to the economics of the rest of us. One thing that caught my interest was what she refers to as rogue economics, where politics looses control of the economy, and the economy becomes a rogue force. Rogue economics “always lurks in the background” as she puts it, and “comes back in times of change…such as globalization”. This is not surprising. Politics is a system, and systems always take time to adjust to disturbances. In the meantime, the disturbance affects those affected by the system.

This talk made me think – could this be exactly what is happening in our industry right now? That the system that controlled and demanded relevance and results from marketing spend looses control when the world of communications changes rapidly? Could it be that clownvertising is the rogue economics of the advertising industry?

I sat down with a couple of our industry’s most respected names the other day at Le Rouge and discussed this topic. What they said resonated with my hypothesis. They, like me, also saw campaigns like “The Fun Theory” as irrelevant clownvertising where the client is blinded by the blizzard of change, where the strategists are seduced by the “how can we make it viral”-love potion, and where the creatives watch in astonishment as they receive the most delicious candy cane of a brief they’ve ever seen (“just make it fun, ok?”). I haven’t been in the industry as long, but according to my discussion company at Le Rouge, the blizzard of change that came along with the introduction of television advertising spurred similar epidemics of clownvertising in television. “The Fun Theory” is by no means the only famous clownvertising example. To me, the Cadbury’s gorilla falls into the same category, even though “pointless but fun” is perhaps more relevant to a chocolate bar than a $20 000 vehicle. A smaller but more recent example is “The Wall of Sound” for Brothers.

But anyway, back to the question of rogue economics. Because what we DO know about rogue economics is that the system stabilizes over time. This means that pretty soon, it will no longer be accepted to just “go viral” with irrelevant humor, and that a much more difficult task will be put on the plate of advertising agencies. In this new stabilized system, you will have to be attractive (in the literal sense of the word), sticky (in the Gladwell sense of the word), re-shareable, and effective in terms of what you want to achieve (which at the very least requires relevance). This is not easy. It will place enormous demands on the shoulders of advertising creatives and it will – and this is what I love about this change – place less crap in the lap of the consumer. It’s time to step up the game.

[Edit: Consequently misspelled rogue. Sorry about that. Le Rouge probably threw me off. Thanks Matthieu for noticing.]