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clients

Lowe Brindfors Copy the Forsman & Bodenfors SEO Mistakes

by Walter Naeslund on September 15, 2009

Last week I wrote about how Forsman & Bodenfors don’t understand how the internet works. In absolute terms, the description was fair, but in relative terms, they are not worse than most of the advertising business. Yesterday we got another painfull piece of evidence to that effect.

I’m talking about the brand new website of Lowe Brindfors. But to discuss the site we need to separate two things: Design and communications efficiency.

Design

It’s a matter of taste of course, but I think this page is very well designed from a print designers point of view. It’s excellent print design, but awful interactive design. Because it is not interactive. It’s like designing a very pretty car with only passenger seats. And just like such a beautiful but useless car, this site belongs in a museum. Which leads me into point 2:

Communications Efficiency

This thing is a very pretty printed catalogue in digital format. It’s what websites were in the late 90’s. The entire thing is a big Flash-page, with text that you cannot copy, films you cannot share, posters that you can download as PDFs (!) but not share with anyone, and invisible coworkers that you can only reach via email or telephone. No wonder they have this disclaimer on the site:

Apparently they think that the elusive internet out there is about technology and gadgets, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Because really, these new technologies are VEHICLES of ideas. Nothing else. But the ideas have to be made for a world of transparency, not to fill expensive media plans. And for you to come up with such ideas, you have to know how this transparent world functions.

Search and SEO is ONE important aspect to understand in order to get people “to spend time with the brand” (to use Lowe Brindfors’ own terminology), and this is what the brand new Lowe Brindfors site looks like to Google:

According to Google, what’s most interesting about the new Lowe Brindfors site seems to be their webmail (!), followed by pages from their old site, and a PDF press-release from August 2008.

Disclaiming your way out of obvious lack of knowledge about the psychology and behavior on the internet with something general like a “Hey, boy slow it down”-disclaimer becomes embarrassing when confronted with clients who know the internet – something that becomes more and more common every day thanks to knowledgeable rebels and speakers on the topic like Johan Ronnestam, Simon Sundén, and Björn Alberts, just to name a few. [Edit: + Jesper Åström]

Things don’t improve when I read what Peter Willebrand our Swedish ad-business press Resumé has to say about the new site:

“Resume.se thankfully notes that the trend is the same as in other digital communication: simpler, faster, and more head on”.

This statement is very general, and also wrong. The site isn’t fast. It’s a heavy Flash film with a loader from hell. The trend of the internet is not “simpler, faster, and more head on”. The trend, or rather the permanent shift, is to social participation in dynamically coordinated institution-less groups, which means that a site needs to support that behavior. You need to love people, not just say you love them. The new thing about the internet is not that people can now talk back to you, it is that everybody can talk to everybody and coordinate discussions and topics without necessarily involving you. If anything, this is more complex, not simpler. Grasping the entire strategy for this more complex system requires a more diverse skill set ranging from behavioral psychology to technology.

The bottom line is that you can have the prettiest house in the world, but to make friends, you have to meet them. Or else you’ll end up being very lonely.

“The School Web is Not Primarily a Matter of Communication…”

by Walter Naeslund on September 3, 2009

Thanks to all for your interest in yesterday’s post about Forsman & Bodenfors, Svenska Kyrkan, and Google. It led to many interesting conversations both in the comments of the post, on Twitter in my email inbox, on Facebook, and over the phone. Wasn’t quite prepared for that kind of response. So, thanks!

Today I want to talk to you about something else. I want to talk to you about clients. Because even though it is our responsibility as consultants to provide know-how and ideas, clients also need to take their share of responsibility. In short – everybody needs to do their job.

Yesterday I met a prospective client who had great knowledge and understanding of communication and the internet. He almost cried over how he had to actually teach his expensive consultants how to do their jobs. Clients such as this one are a pleasure to meet, and the projects with them always turn out great. They have passion and they understand their role in a successful project.

But sometimes… just sometimes… you bump into something dark and completely different. Let me tell you one of these stories:

On one April morning earlier this year I sat on the balcony with at cup of coffee and a copy of Dagens Nyheter in my hands. I started reading about a topic that I have a particular interest in – computers and learning. The project described in the article is called Skolwebben (The School Web) and is intended to be an information hub for teachers, students, and parents alike. A great idea to be sure! The internet could be an amazing tool to move
learning into a whole new era, but only if competence and ability is
blended into the mix. Here, this didn’t happen.

As I continued reading, I almost choked on my coffee. This project took on enormous costs. 17 000 000 SEK was poured into the project which was to be carried out by TietoEnator. For anyone of us who has ever worked with communication systems 17 000 000 SEK is a huge sum. For that kind of money we could create amazing strategy, amazing tactics, and amazing implementation. The money would be put into streamlining efficiency for the users based on their actual behaviors, and would be built on open source technology. But this is not what TietoEnator does. Instead, the produce a buggy, complicated and expensive system, hated by teachers, students, and parents alike. From what I could tell from the article in Dagens Nyheter, the project was on it’s way to the garbage can and would then be restarted from scratch.

There is plenty to read about this project and you can find much on Google. Try for example this search. But be prepared to get upset.

As I was sitting there on my balcony, I felt I had to do something. I picked up my computer and wrote an email to Anette Holm, the IT-director of Stockholm City, and also the person who had been commenting the story in Dagens Nyheter, explaining to her my ambition to help out. I told her that I would put mine and my agency’s resources at her disposal to figure out how to turn this catastrophe into something useful. I offered to do it for free*(see edit below).

When I received her answer I had to read it over and over five times before I could believe what it said. I could have understood if she wasn’t willing to involve a new agency into the project, but I had never expected this. It was just too much. Here is the email:

“The School Web is not primarily a matter of communication. Thanks for your offer, but I don’t see the need.” I read in the email.

Not primarily a matter of communication! What?!?! Suddenly it didn’t seem so strange anymore that projects governed by this kind of thinking would make communications projects crash, and take 17 000 000 SEK of tax money with them in the fall. How could anyone with the title of IT-director even write something like this, apparently without flinching? It’s almost Kafta-like.

I sat there looking at the email for a while, trying to figure out what to do with it. It just felt so hopeless. I printed the email and posted it on my wall for while see if I would eventually figure this out. “Not primarily a matter of communication…” echoed in my head. What is it a matter of then? If not communication?

A client like Anette Holm is one that I wouldn’t take on. Good projects can’t emerge from somebody who’s philosophical view of the internet doesn’t include the word communication. I would recommend you all not to take on such projects either. Eventually, we’ll get the clients we deserve, and our clients will get the brilliance they deserve.

Excellence is a business of ideals.

Edit:
FYI, here is a link to the email I sent.

Edit:
The offer was intended as free, though I realize now that I’m looking back at the email that it could possibly have been interpreted otherwise, as commenters “vän av ordning” and Magnus Nilsson have rightfully pointed out. The main point however, is not whether or not we actually did offer our services for free, but that Anette Holm’s thoughts on the project were that “…the school web is not primarily a matter of communication…”.

5 Questions and 9 Answers About The Future of The Internet – My Hyper Island Interview

by Walter Naeslund on August 27, 2009

A couple of days ago I was contacted by students at Hyper Island for an interview about the future of digital communication. Here are their questions and my answers:

1. What do you think will happen in the future regarding digital media? For example real time applications, Flash, Adobe Scene 7, Motion Graphics, Mashups?

Innovation Will Gravitate Towards the Efficient
It is always difficult to say anything about the future. Even the inventors themselves can rarely tell how their inventions will be used. Remember for example that Twitter was created as a way to let people know via SMS where the party was. Their invention then took on a life of its own in the hands of the users. On the other hand, this kind of “Darwinistic” innovation is a key feature of the digital technologies. Especially when it comes to innovation in the realm of open source and open APIs.

What we can say is that innovations will gravitate towards increased efficiency in different fields. And this realization is useful. Whenever you come up with an innovation or a campaign, ask yourself: will this make things more efficient? If the answer is yes, the innovation will stand a chance of succeeding, if not, it may at best become a short lived hype. In particular, innovations making collaboration and coordination more efficient are interesting when it comes to the internet since they promote themselves.

Good Bye Flash, Micro Sites & Poor Indexing
Real time applications will be important because they’ll make things more efficient. “Awesomely cool” but utterly useless Flash-based micro sites have always been a bluff and will increasingly be called as such by clients with a deeper understanding of the internet. Such sites make nothing efficient. Perhaps some people will disagree with me here and start arguing that I’m way too rational and that people buy with their emotions, but my bet is that these critics don’t understand the social web. What is often inefficient about these Flash-porn sites is that they are SOCIALLY inefficient. There is no way for me to efficiently share and discuss the content with my friends.

Recently we have started seeing “share”-buttons thrown into the mix, but these usually don’t tap into the actual behavior of people, and are just there because “social-media-is-the-new-hip-thing-and-therefore-we-need-share-on-Facebook-button“. Again, ask the question – will this make things more efficient in some dimension? They are also often inefficient in that they’re not indexed properly by search engines. The question then is, what are they good for? For inspiration? As some sort of interactive film? Very recently (like, right now) I saw one such campaign where they were actually showing commercials for the campaign on television! Making advertising for advertising must be the ultimate proof of failure and inefficiency.

Flash in general will get fierce competition as we will want sites to be more application-like, fast, optimized and useful. HTML5 will be a primary technology and may well put Flash and Silverlight in the shade.

Mashups & Commoditization
Mashups will continue to be super important because the idea of mashups resonates with the basic idea of innovation: take the best of what’s around and make it better. Since the costs of interacting with other open API innovations are so low, the total value of all parties in a mash up interaction will increase. We all benefit from mashups. If somebody has made the best map, like Google Maps for instance, there is not much point in using energy making a copy of that, but rather put our energy into innovating a new service and use their map. They win, and we win. More than anything, users win.

A lot of what required coding before are now commodities that you can pick up and just connect to something else through an open API. Smart people can thus create quite cool innovations by just putting pieces together. An internet-innovator friend of mine said that he’s very reluctant to try anything that he can’t build a first prototype of within an hour. He’s one of the most interesting and successful innovators of the new web in Sweden.

Real Time & Concurrent Editing
Technically, real time and concurrent editing will be important. I don’t know exactly which implementations of this will be the killer apps yet, but true real time collaboration is efficient and will become very popular. Not least by means of Google Wave. But we may well see other applications than these. For example live use of scripts for different purposes. There are a gazillion imaginable uses for such live scripts, but to get an idea, imagine a script being uploaded and run on a users iPhone returning different data depending on conditions such as position, battery status, orientation, in call status, who else is around, etc…

Real time and social search is very interesting and is an area where Google is lagging hopelessly behind. Here, Facebook and Twitter rule.

Mobile
And of course, mobile will be important, but there will be less difference between mobile and non-mobile. What is non-mobile today anyway? The iPhone is not a mobile phone with computer capabilities, it’s a computer that you can make calls on. And it has very comprehensive sensory systems like camera, video, positioning, integrated internet connection, gyro, accelerometer, compass, etc… Laptops have most of these too, but are lacking a few things like positioning and true mobile internet. The next generation of MacBooks will have a SIM-card slot and positioning. Mark my words.

Short answer: Real time. Mash ups. HTML5. Mobile.

2. What is the next big thing? (The new Facebook/Twitter for example)
The next big thing is Google Wave and all the amazing applications that will be built on top of it. Twitter will probably tip over and become mainstream in Sweden, but I’m not sure of it. Facebook with their aquisition of Friendfeed and their new search functionality is becoming very powerful as well.

3. Which trends do you see in digital media?
See question 1.

4. What qualifications will the media industry require?
Great rebels. Great thinkers. Great designers. Great writers. Great system designers/programmers. Great digital networkers. Great storytellers. Amazingly great leaders who can make all these other people love to work together. People who are not afraid to fail. People who can make the current Swedish labor legislation go away. Howard Roark.

5. What is the biggest challenge for the future in the media industry?
There are a lot of people today with power, who’s power relies on a monopoly of information and information distribution. These people will fight hard to stop anything that will remove their power. It’s very natural. They will eventually loose, but they will destroy a lot of value as they fight in increasing desperation. The music industry is the obvious example of this. It will be a perfect rerun of what happened when free-to-air radio was introduced.

Another challenge is our labor laws. Many agencies today have to fire people, but the law forces them to fire the newcomers, and the newcomers, on average, know more about digital communication. Also, for the same reason, they won’t be able to recruit the people their clients demand. This will create a downward death spiral. In nature, those who are able to change in accordance with the changes in nature survive. We are no different.

For me and for Honesty, this is good news of course, since we will be able to recruit the right people from the start.

Björn Rietz New CEO – A Promising New Beginning For The AAS.

by Walter Naeslund on February 18, 2009

Björn Rietz is the new CEO for the Advertising Association of Sweden. I guess I should comment on that.

“The World is Changing” is perhaps one of the most worn out phrases in trend analysis. And it’s always true. But now, the rate of change for our context as marketing professionals act is extreme. Not surprisingly, since in the history of human interaction, there has been no disturbance of the same magnitude as the introduction of the internet. And even though the internet has been around for a while, it has now gone mainstream and truly interactive. Bending the truth is an obsolete strategy, while honesty reigns. The rules have changed. Most agencies haven’t. Yet. Therefore the choice for a new CEO for the AAS is crucial this time.

Björn retains respect from the men of power (yes they’re mostly men) in the industry. He is, to cut things short, a true ad man. But it seems to me that he also enters his new job with a humble attitude towards the changing reality. This is very promising. For instance, I hope he will take a really close look at Guldägget, which is on a dangerous path with strange categories and ludicrious rules. Among other things these rules state that you can’t report results of your campaign, but it has to have been published. This means clients are at risk for being lured into funding art projects.

Björn does talk about advertising being art, which is a shaky proposition. He refers here to how “the same part of the brain is used to produce poems an outdoor headline”, which is true, but doesn’t mean that advertising is art. I wrote my masters thesis on innovation management and involved myself heavily in how the parallell processing right side brain is about synthezis and innovation, of art, creative strategy, products and many other things. I hope this is what Björn meant. Art doesn’t require ROI.

That said I have high hopes for Björn! As a test, I will link to his blog here to see if he keeps track of his incoming links. If you are, Björn, I would also like to encourage you to mix your blog up with shorter posts and get a Twitter account. I can be your first friend at @walternaeslund.

Welcome to The Ultimate Walter Naeslund!

by Walter Naeslund on December 1, 2008

So this is what it finally came down to. Walternaeslund.com. I guess I can’t go further than the ultimate personalization.

The Very Best of Walter Naeslund will be a very generous showcase of my work. I will never talk about clients here, but you will get a lot of research and strategy here for free. Can’t afford a strategist? Come on down!

For a long time walternaeslund.blogspot.com has been my work blog, while walterlicious.se has been my private one featuring parties, pictures, and craziness. I figured it was a good idea to keep the two separate. And it was. Just not for the reasons I thought. The web is an open arena. There is not point hiding anything. You’re either out there or you’re not. So if you’re interested in what I look like after a couple of drinks (and can read Swedish), walterlicious.se is for you.

Walternaeslund.com will replace walternaeslund.blogspot.com. And all the old archives from there are on here as well. So change your bookmarks.

Good to have you over. Ciao!

Give Hope for The Childhood Cancer Foundation Launched

by Walter Naeslund on November 19, 2008

Yesterday, my last campaign before leaving Identity Works was launched. The Give Hope-campaign for the Childhood Cancer Foundation (Barncancerfonden) was a collaboration between us and the Superstrikers digital agency. I was in charge of concept development and strategy together with the brilliant design strategist Jonas Rutegård and Superstrikers – a match made in heaven to be sure.

In short, the campaign is about giving while giving. We created Give Hope gift boxes so that each time you give to a friend, you also give to the Childhood Cancer Foundation, you show your support for the cause to your friend, and you encourage him or her to do the same when giving to somebody else. A pay it forward strategy if you will.

For the digital solution we worked with badges for your site, Facebook-profile, blog, or any other digital home you or your company may have. From that badge, your friends or clients can pick up their own badge, and this entire web of support can be tracked from givehope.se so that you can see what other participation that your participation has spawned.

We’ll see how it grows. Pick up your own badge here on the right.

Other blogs about Give Hope:
Cap&Design

Management by Fuzzy Edges

by Walter Naeslund on November 5, 2008

Imagine that you are an advertising agency and that you’re approached by a client with a brief. Now imagine that you’re advertising agency is made up of a certain set of people with certain skills, and that these people cost you a certain amount of money regardless of what they produce. Now imagine what you’ll end up producing.

If you have any urge to survive, you’ll produce concepts and ideas that will make use of your production resources. It’s quite obvious really. The only problem is that these solutions might not be the best ones for your client just because they happen to suit your production capabilities. And that, is a problem for your client.

At our agency the philosophy for boosting our clients bottom line is to create conversation. And we mean conversation in its broadest sence including any type of information transaction. We describe ourselves as a social media agency because social media is the most effective infrastructure for conversation that the world has ever seen, and it is a natural strategic focus for us.

But this also means that our solution might be a new business model, a new e-trade solution, films, prints, rumors, stories, characters, events, or anything else that will create the right type of information exchange, and eventually inject energy into our clients bottom line. And in saying so, we are also saying that we can not staff up on specialized personal for certain tasks. We need to have strategic minds with great interest in psychology and business, and we then need an extraordinary network ranging from illustrators in Estonia to programmers in India. We need to have a fast moving network of open minded partners in Sweden for exchanging services and a thriving freelance community around us. More or less closely linked to us on a continous scale.

We also believe that audiences have to be involved in the production of communications, which I guess is true by definition when we’re talking about conversation in any form. One of many philosophers that we draw inspiration from for our thinking is Harvard professor Yochai Benkler. You can see one of his most inspiring talks here:

We call this way of doing business management by Fuzzy Edges, and we see this as the only way to go for our type of agency. It also means that we need an open and highly scalable web of communications tools around us to tie together this loose network making up the Fuzzy Edges of Verymuchlogo.

We only use gmail-adresses for this reason and other social media services like Flickr, YouTube or Facebook in a cloud formation, rather than a static website. We never work with local document files, but with links to central entities on Google’s servers or other centralized housing services where appropriate.

For this reason, Verymuchlogo can set up shop anywhere very quickly and use more or less any machine with an internet connection with basically identical workspaces as anywhere else. This Fuzzy Edges management method is us, walking the talk of what we want to do for you. Welcome aboard.

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“The School Web is Not Primarily a Matter of Communication…”

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Björn Rietz New CEO – A Promising New Beginning For The AAS.

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Give Hope for The Childhood Cancer Foundation Launched

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