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!

One of the most dangerous politicians in the United States – that’s what CNET calls Obama’s Vice President Joe Biden. What they are talking about is Biden’s relentless attacks on internet liberty, and the threat that he thereby poses to the evolution of technology. Now that the dust has settled and we have sobered up after celebrating the Obama victory, the Biden threat has become very real. Among other things, he has backed proposals like outlawing region free DVD-players, forcing internet providers to hunt “pirates”, legalizing the entertainment industry’s use of spyware and trojans, and, not least, having the state finance the film industry’s court costs when sueing file sharing teenagers(!).

I would love to say that this gives us Swedes a competitive advantage as a nation, but the problem is that internet innovation is collaborative and spans the entire world. If one nation pours gravel in the machinery, everybody suffers. Especially if that nation is the world’s leading internet nation.

On the positive side, these repressive policies always lead to rebellion and creativity. Philip Zimmermann’s wildly successful PGP-encryption was for example created to protect private communication from a law proposed by none other that Joe Biden himself. PGP is known to have helped dissidents in oppressed nations communicate freely, but also to have put terrorist communication in stealth mode. Funny what a little oppression can lead to. My guess is that we’ll now go into innovation mode again and figure out some really sophisticated stealth file sharing technology. But really, I’d much rather see that we humans would innovate to make the world a better place than to fight oppression. It feels more constructive somehow. Innovation to avoid legislation has a treadmill ring to it.

Most of my time reading is spent on blogs. I still love picking up a magazine every now and then, and when I do my favorites are Fast Company, Monocle, and Guns & Ammo (just kidding about the last one).

I rarely read the print versions of our local Swedish marketing press, but today I picked up a couple-of-weeks-old copy of Dagens Media (which I guess translates into “Media Daily” even though it’s weekly, go figure). One article caught my eye on this sunny Sunday evening. It’s a discussion between Andreas Dahlqvist, Exercutive Creative Director at DDB Stockholm, Karin Ernerot, Creative Director at Tewonder (which I have actually never heard of, though their tagline is the very modern “We’re a Digital Agency. Building Brands for The Next Generation.”), Camilla Tienso, Marketing Director at Svensk Fastighetsförmedling, and Fredrik Thors, Marketing Director at Renault Sweden. It’s a four page spread, and I thought it might be interesting to dig into it and see what the state of the union is.

After plowing through a confused discussion where effectiveness and creativity were put in opposite corners (This ALWAYS makes me burst out in laughter. It’s not an art contest guys.) I found this strange quirk:

Karin Ernerot makes the case that Tewonder works in a different arena than DDB, since Tewonder works in the digital domain, and thus on a global arena. This to me shows a lack of understanding of the state of the digital domain. “Digital” is the only way of doing truly local efforts, since you can pinpoint down to the level of individual/time/location/context/state of mind/prior history/etc. Try that with a local newspaper, outdoor or event if you can! I’m not saying that the local newpaper is useless, but claiming that Tewonder would be working in a different arena than DDB is ludicrous, especially when considering that Tribal DDB may very well be the new center of gravity for DDB. Also, I wouldn’t say that digital is a separate media channel at all. There are media channels in the digital domain, but there are also dinner table conversations there, lover’s rendezvous’, water cooler gossip, and a thousand other interfaces. Local or global? That is more a matter of topic than of channel. And to be fair, geography is one parameter governing which topics interest us.

Andreas says a lot of the right things in the article, but really not much that is surprising, new or controversial. It’s a bit like listening to the obligatory mainstream marketing blogs of Sweden feeded back to you from the pages of this 4-page article. From what he’s saying however, I do think that there is a sharp mind behind the fluff, and I would love to see some of his original thoughts. A Google search for “Andreas Dahlqvist DDB blog” came up with zilch however. All I learned was that he has been very active in different juries. Perhaps a bit more blogging and a bit less jurying would unleash this untapped potential. I think this is a general problem of the Swedish marketing industry. Let’s be frank for a moment and call it by its real name: navel–gazing.

Anyway, it was interesting to dip ones toes into this discussion, though I also think that the time spent reading these 4 pages would have been better spent plowing through some #socialmedia. But hey – it’s easter sunday after all. Can’t be working all the time.

I’ve given some thought to Spotify over the past few days, and here are some of my thoughts.

Perhaps I’m wrong and Spotify has gone social after all. But not in the spheres where I move and socialize. And I have tried to spark some collaboration and social behavior without success. These thoughts build upon the assumption that Spotify HASN’T gone social. Yet.

Spotify should theoretically have everything needed to go social. They have all the prerequisites – great content, rudimentary sharing and very high usability. But:

Spotify has been communicated in a general way. “Everybody loves music” is… well… a bit bland. Sure we do love music, but iTunes could say the same thing, or Gibson, or whatever. The use of the word “Everybody” is also unfortunate. It’s not about you, it’s about “Everybody”. It doesn’t give me any hint of what the service is all about. Luckily it’s a very intuitive use interface. For a music PLAYER that is, not for a musical social tool. There is nothing intuitive about going social using Spotify. It’s as if Twitter would have said “Everybody loves writing”. I would say that the killer app having a centralized server is not to have a huge music collection. Most people don’t know how to find the right music anyway. Spotify is theoretically a long-tail idea, but I doubt that it has sparked long-tail behavior for this very reason. No. The killer app of having a centralized server is that it has made music truly shareable. No sending of megabytes of songs required. No use of bad sound quality YouTube-clips required. Just share the link and go. Spotify is not about listening to music, it’s about communicating music. And this is the one major point where I think Spotify has gone wrong (as I have also said many times in the past).

The most common description I get of Spotify is “it’s like iTunes, but with everything on it”. And that’s the intuitive impression you get of the service at first. And that’s where people stop. Right-clicking to retrieve a link and posting it on your blog isn’t the first thing people think of upon opening Spotify. It’s not obvious enough. Perhaps a share button should be placed by everything that can be shared. I’m thinking something along the lines of a pop-up like the iBeginshare-plugin for WordPress (that you can see at the bottom of this post. But prettier of course. This one is darn ugly, though useful).

And why do I think that this would make a difference? Well – it’s just to much of a hassle to right-click, copy a link, and paste it somewhere. Call me lazy, but this is how we all are on the internet. I would rarely share blogposts if it wasn’t for the one-click share action in Google Reader. But this just makes it super easy and streamlined.

So, my first advice to Spotify would be this:
A share-button with a customizable pop-up which is by default equipped with Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, MySpace, and, most importantly in the long term, a “post to Feed”-option where “feed” can be any number of feeds that you may choose to create. These feeds can then be subscribed to by anybody. Easy piecy. And it would trigger creativity.

This would be a good start. Now tell me where to send the invoice.

I know that these are not new clips or anything, but they prove an interesting point. With “LEGO for adults”, a product that was originally intended for children expands its audience into a new category.

It fascinates us to see what some incredibly creative people have put together using LEGO, and it makes us want to try. It also strengthens the notion that LEGO induces creativity. So regardless if you are a tech-geek wanting to try and build these things, a parent who wants to help grow your children’s creativity, or (like us) just in love with ingenious toys, you are going to buy more LEGO. These ideas and films extend the target audience for LEGO while strengthening the brand for the core audience.

If this was a campaign of mine, there would be bragging.

And Estelle, please make room in our budget for a couple of thousand LEGO-bricks. We have a gun to build.

I recently read about a study from 1999 where the Israeli research team had studied 200 highly regarded advertisments – ads that were all finalists and winners in top advertising competitions. When analyzing these ads, they realized that most of them (89%) could be categorized into one of 6 different categories or templates (example: “Extreme Consequenses”). THAT is interesting in itself, but it gets worse.

Next they brought in three different groups of novices and gave them each three briefs; for a shampoo, for a diet-food item, and for a sneaker. Now these three groups recieved three different training.

The first group recieved no training at all, but started generating ads immediately, the second group got two hours of standard creativity training (free-association brainstorming and such techniques), and the third group got a two hour brief on the six categories mentioned above.

The ads where screened and sifted by an experienced creative director and put to standard testing.

And the results? The second group performed slightly better than the first, but they were still considered “annoying” and “uncreative” by the test groups. The third group however was an entirely different story. These ads were rated as 50% more creative and produced a 55% more positive attitude towards the products advertised.

And this, my friends, is after a two hour study of these six templates. Berghs SoC advertising school for example will take you two years, and their tagline reads “2 cm From Reality” (or was that just for the kick off-week?).

Maybe you should consider going to the “2 Hours From Reality” copy cat school of communication instead? It’s much cheaper.

Organization of creativity and innovation is one of my favorite topics. I haven’t written about it much here, but I actually wrote my masters thesis on the subject for my M.Sc. in Media Technology back in 2003.

More advanced organizational principles and technological aids for innovation are rare in the media industry, at least in Sweden. It’s not easy to get these things to work, so I really can’t blame anybody, but still I believe there should be more attempts made. If successfully inlemented it could be massively profitable.

Today I found out that Aftonbladet are actually instituting an innovation officer to work on these things, with the ambition to activate the most innovation capacity from the entire organization. Her name is Agnes Sävenstedt, and interestingly enough, she also has an M.Sc. in Media Technology. I guess we just like innovation.

Anyway, it’s an interesting move from Aftonbladet, who I think are big enough to make something like this work.

Read more about it here.

When cleaning up my appartment I found an issue of Wired that I bought at some point but never read. Anyway, in it I found conclusive evidence for the benefits of my powernap habit:

Since stress moves focus to our amygdala (lizzard brain) and shuts down other parts of the brain where analysis, creativity and other juicy goodies are happening, you stressing is bad news for your boss who will get less out of you. And in the article the two top ways suggested for reducing stress is Yoga and powernapping.

There you go. All the reasoning you need to get away with putting up a do not disturb sign in front of your face and crash on the floor mid office.

“If I would have listened to the marketplace, I would have built a faster and cheaper horse.”

Not such a bad mind – that Henry Ford character. The Henry Ford quote also tells us a bit about planning. It tells us that planning is a creative process – a process where you don’t just ask, but you actually listen. And when you’ve listened, you don’t just make a fast and cheap horse. Instead, you interpret, you dream, and you innovate. You make a T-Ford. That’s what planning is.

The other day I met with an ad-agency in New York. It wasn’t just any ol’ agency, but a small agency with some of the worlds best creatives working there. It’s probably one of the companies in the world with the most creative genius per capita. They didn’t have much of a planning department, and I sensed a healthy skepticism to planners. It’s not surprising. They come from a culture where planning is separate from the creative process, where you’ll often end up with something that… looks like most advertising today. And if you are a very intuitive strategic creative, that must be madly frustrating.

Maybe planning is an obsolete term. Maybe we should introduce the agency model I suggested in an earlier post:

1. Administration (project- and relationship management)

2. Research (listening)

3. Communication Strategy (concept development)

4. Technical direction (technological innovation/evaluation/design)

5. Excecution (design, copy, directing, performing)

(Note that this is NOT a linear proces, but an iterative one).

I don’t believe that creativity is a random and unmanageable process. I think you can create a manageable process, institute measurable goals for creative production and then achieve them. And then you will achieve results. You’ll be rich. You’ll be famous.

Z-Card. They now have my attention. Just today I’ve received direct marketing by regular mail, I’ve seen their ad in Resumé, I’ve gotten an e-mail from them and something else that I don’t even remember. Omni-presence works. They have my attention, but not so much my interest. They sort of have my involvement in this blog post (which spreads the word), but not my desire, and definitely not my post purchase alignment.

But again, omni-presence works to some extent. Now just imagine what they could have done if all that frequency would have meant something, if they would have inspired me, if I would have actually come up with a couple of ideas on how to use Z-Card. It would have been pretty easy to get me there by using actual creativity when creating communication for all that space. But the communication in their ads is just not interesting. Their website is flat out awful.

On the upside they have shown great understanding for the focused use of media. And they do boost my conficence by setting an example on how not to use that media.