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.

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.

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!

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!

The human body. Such a marvel of engineering. We can do amazing stuff with this machine, things that are many times EXTREMELY difficult to mimic with any machine. If you only consider using the body as a physical tool we are amazing when it comes to detailed movement and interaction, walking upright och playing basketball. And that would probably be classified as the easy stuff.

But the body also has it’s limitations. Seemingly simple tasks like cutting a metal wire fall outside our capabilities. Or DID, I should say, because we have now evolved to a stage where we can easily cut metal wires, even if this part of the evolution happened outside our bodies. But if you look at technology this way, a Leatherman Wave or any other piece of technology is most definitely part of human evolution, and therefore part of the modern man (or woman). Just like a modern programming language, nature has just abstracted evolution to let late stage of evolution the Leatherman Wave build upon an earlier stage – the human intellect.

In our everyday life we rarely reflect over separation between technology and man. If somebody told you to build a freeway, you would instinctively build it for man the way man is today. Including late stage evolution such as motorbikes. You wouldn’t build a freeway to be used on foot at speeds around 20km/h would you?

Still we do this all the time when it comes to creating communication and designing web sites. We do it for what man was 20 years ago. Not the way man is today. 20 years ago, web search engines did not exist in the life of ordinary people. Google did not exist. SEO was unheard of.

Just like with the body, the human mind is extraordinary when it does what it does best – in the case of the mind, this is stuff like interpretation, emotion and flexibility. But it is extraordinarily bad when it comes to massive memory storage and running algorithms. And since the web filled the memory void (with MASSIVE MASSIVE memory storage), we desperately need powerful algorithm processing to sort and search through all this massive information. The master of the search algorithm at the moment is Google. And just like in the case of the motorcycle or the Leatherman Wave, Google is part of man (or woman). It’s not a separate entity of it’s own with it’s own purpose or origin. It’s made by man for man, not in symbiosis, but in integration. Google is part of humanity.

It’s time for us to do what we do when designing freeways, to start designing for man the way man is today. Not the way man was 20 years ago. The world is no longer a smörgåsbord where we have preselected information layed out in a beautiful art directed magazine spreads, but a world with vast seas of interrelated data, impossible to navigate for a lone human mind. In this world, powerful algorithm processor extensions of our mind are absolutely necessary for us to be able to navigate. Human beings are flexible, and quickly pick up on these extensions of course. We use Google without thinking twice about it. It’s time for us communicators to do the same when communicating with these people.

Designing for man the way man is today should be, has to be, and will be as natural as brushing your teeth. With a toothbrush that is.

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.

Wow. My friend and mentor Magnus (@trendymagnus) just spoke at TED. I’m sorry, but this is as cool as it gets for any speaker. Read his backstage account on his blog. VERY cool.

Looking forward to hearing the debrief on our Wednesday lunch Magnus.

“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.

Great news!

We have now finished our first round of expansion at Honesty and now have four of the six partners here full time! Fantastic!

Honesty will be divided into three units, each responsible for their own area of expertise. The three areas are Management & Strategy, Digital Business Development, and Creative Studio.

Two of the new partners, Martin Marklund and Petrus Kukulski, take on the roles of creative directors, and will head the Creative Studio. Martin and Petrus are two of the most experienced creatives in Sweden with a truckload of awards and plenty of amazing characters to their credit. We’re very proud to have them with us.

The Management & Strategy unit will be headed by me (Managing Director) and another of the new partners, Emil Clase (Client Director) who is also extremely experienced in handling client relations. Emil is also a completely amazing person to have on board, and also great lunch company if you’re in the mood for discussing your business with us.

For the Digital Business Development unit, we have two new partners which will be disclosed in two phases. The first one, our new expert on traffic generation using search and social media, will join us on Monday 9/11. Stay tuned for more info on him. The second one, our new edge in digital business strategy and conversion, will join us later this fall.

If you know Swedish, you can learn more about all the news on our Honesty site. We’ll have an English language one up shortly. You can also read about us today in Dagens Industri (4/11).

Now that we’ve launched stage one, I promise to become a better blogger again.
See you soon!