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 got an email this morning from Jung Von Matt Stockholm asking me to check out their new “optimized” site in the wake of the Lowe Brindfors debacle a couple of weeks back. I really don’t intend to take on the role of advertising agency website critic, but since they asked, and since I like the guys at JvM, why not give it a go.

The site is another in the long line of WordPress installations showing up lately in the advertising world, like Farfar and Great Works for instance. And really – why do anything else? WP has become a kick ass back end. This one is also a very pretty WP-installation design-wise. I’m not absolutely sure about the usability flow for this particular design, but that could be just me.

The reason (i figure) that I got the email however is to check it out SEO-wise. Now – first off, I want to be clear that I am by no means an SEO expert. I am interested, and I do have a solid technical background, but let’s be humble and bring in the real Michael Jordan’s of SEO, because I do pride myself in understanding how to bring in the right people. After consulting one of my favorite SEO-experts Simon Sundén, these are some of the quick pointers one would like to fix, even though this site is playing in a completely different league than the all-Flash agency sites we have discussed here earlier. The following are just examples that popped up after five minutes of analysis and discussion during lunch, but feel free to continue in the comments or hire us for a complete audit.

Just-Fix-It-List for JvM

1. No H1′s or H2′s. Only H3′s here and there.
2. Non-optimal URL-structure.
3. Missing desriptions on many pages.
4. Titel on the following pages shouldn’t be “Work”: http://www.jungvonmatt.se/work/?id=69
5. There is a sitemap, but the case-pages are missing: http://www.jungvonmatt.se/sitemap.xml
6. Lots of old pages 404′d and not redirected: http://www.google.se/search?hl=sv&q=site%3Ajvm.se (Example: http://www.jvm.se/projects/unicef)

That said, it’s still a good effort! Congratulations on your WP-site!

By the way – for those of you who think I hate Flash per se, here is one site which uses Flash very well, and where it is motivated to use Flash (it’s a design hotel). Simon also wrote a great post about this today.

Suddenly my Twitscoop-window started screaming at me with two huge keywords: “Finland” and “Broadband”. What the… I thought and started investigating. Turns out Finland, as the first country in the world, has made broadband access each citizens right by law, and suddenly, BOOM, Finland is on the map as the most progressive country in the world. It’s actually part of my 25 year prediction for the future:

…we retain the symmetry of the internet. We treat it like infrastructure in place to make markets and information flow efficient. Like a great system of streets and water pipes.

Meanwhile in other countries, legislation is passed allowing suspension from the internet as a good and fair punishment for passing along “propriatary” information. Make a projection from these two scenarios to see where they’ll end up in terms of innovation and growth, and also compare them to the 25-year prediction post above. In Sweden we just passed the FRA-law, which also leads us in the wrong direction, even if I personally don’t think it’s remotely as dagerous as the IPRED and IPRED2 laws.

Anyway, hats of for Finland, who have now proven themselves as forerunners in the online world! Congratulations!

When I went to ad-school I felt that the school was in many respects molding people into replicas of what ad-people were supposed to be. Now I feel that this is perhaps about to change. The other day I got interview questions from Hyper Island regarding digital trends, and today I got another question from Berghs School of Communication regarding “what the world will look like in 25 years“. And despite the fact that a question like that is hopeless in terms of giving the correct answer, I can try to provide some humble thoughts on the subject.

First, the world will be what we make it. That may sound like an empty phrase, but it’s really quite the opposite. It is a way of living, of working, of acting, and of thinking. If you live by this belief, make decisions and take action, this will not be an empty phrase, but the best estimate of the future that we can produce.

But aside from this answer, I will try to give you an answer to your question that is a little more pragmatic. Looking at what communications will look like in 25 years we can try on two scenarios.

In scenario 1 we make the internet asymmetrical. We let legislation rule what can and cannot be sent across the internet. Material which is not permitted (like “pirated” information for example) will move underground and will be sent using stealth technology. Much of the information flow of the internet will be encrypted jibberish, undecipherable for any sense-making technology wanting to make use of it and invisible to human senses that could otherwise have been used for collaborative sense-making and coordinated collective intelligence.

The goals of those wanting to control certain information based on their nostalgia of the times when they had a lucrative monopoly on distribution will not be reached because of ever improving speed and convenience of stealth technology. Instead, the huge resources that will be put into creating these technologies (love of music for instance is a powerful incentive) will be of great benefit to those who have truly evil intentions but smaller resources, notably terrorists and criminals. Since the only way of stopping “piracy” will be to do so at the infrastructure level (service providers can be real and effective gatekeepers!) this is where we’ll eventually end up, banning encrypted traffic altogether. And presto! The internet as we know it is destroyed.

Also in this asymmetrical scenario, we will start charging for the use of bandwidth. Me, being a strong believer in free markets and competition, opposing this kind of asymmetrical access to the internet based on resources may sound incongruent, but it really isn’t. Much in the same way roads and  equality to the law are the basis for efficient competition (imagine the transaction costs of paying different prices for different levels of use of different roads), I think that access to the internet should be considered public infrastructure that will benefit competition, production, innovation, and market efficiency. But in the asymmetrical scenario, this will not be true anymore, and instead old business models and old distribution monopolies can be recreated by content companies using their funds to squat certain infrastructure lines and only provide access to their content through these. This may perhaps sound fair, but what will happen is that the abundance paradigm of the internet, the free flow of information, the “to each according to his ability” (the reverse of the famously Marxist slogan), and the rise of man through collective intelligence will stop.

I’m an optimist. I don’t think that this will happen.

In scenario 2 we retain the symmetry of the internet. We treat it like infrastructure in place to make markets and information flow efficient. Like a great system of streets and water pipes. In this scenario innovation will flourish because we can all do what we have always done, build on each others innovations, but we can do it with unprecedented efficiency. We can try and fail to a very low cost, we can learn from the mistakes of others, which boosts human efficiency enormously. This increase in efficiency, just like earlier technology leaps such as industrial farming, will create vast amounts of cognitive surplus that we can use for further innovation and production. Note that even resources that seem to be wasted on chatting with friends and Twittering create value in the form of information coordination and add to the collective intelligence. We can learn how people talk, we can cluster information, we can find new synergies and draw new conclusions.

Gossip will become hugely more efficient in this transparent world of efficient communication. This will lead to vengeance and gratitude being distributed with much more precision in answer to bad or good behavior and will make us all behave better and cheat less.

Digitally replicable products will not be products, they will be marketing for products where there is still tension between supply and demand. Musicians will try to get their music redistributed as quickly and widely as possible in order to fill venues and cut deals with brands, authors will do the same with their audiobooks to get speaking opportunities and sell hardcovers, filmmakers will use their films as vehicles for brand building and profit off of their brand, while also providing vehicles for other brands. Ludicrous legislation regarding this will be laughed at in 25 years. So will the crude methods of product placement of our age. The cinema experience cannot be pirated and we will see huge product development in terms of widening this experience. Their temporary monopoly on the film itself has made them lazy in this respect.

There will not be a difference between our digital identity and our physical one. All interaction with us will be permission based, and we will grant permission to those that we like and receive value from. Interuption marketing will be long since dead. The notion of publicly reachable phone numbers and email adresses will be laughed at as cute relics of the past. Our identity will be our identity and we will call people, not numbers, by whatever means is most efficient at the time, voice, video, text, images. By default our precense in the digital and analogue world will be publicly available. The benefits of this will outweigh the drawbacks. At times we will switch this off, just like we close the door when we want to sleep.

The semantic web will be obvious, and we’ll look back at how the internet was and smile at how we had so many copies of everything and how inefficient everything was. Of course each object will only be available in one absolute, so that any update will only have to be done once. Of course each of these will contain data representations fit for each semantic understanding of that particular data. We will be able to search, deploy scripts to ask questions and make calculations, and switch between real time representations and the historic dimension. This will all be very intuitive.

Since you are asking me to describe what the world will look like in 25 years, it is a bit ambitious to think that one blog post will answer it all, but these are some ideas of how things will be. If that’s what we decide to make them into. Because still, I think that my first answer is the best one – the world will be what we make it.

Last week I announced that I will be speaking at the Bring Dialogue Conference this summer, a speaking opportunity that I’m very excited about.

Today I’m proud to announce that I will also be making the opening keynote adress at the Esomar WM3 Conference to be held Sweden this year. At the Clarion Sign Hotel in Stockholm on May 5 to be exact.

I would like to thank the programme committee for choosing me, and also Mr. Anders Haraldsson, CEO at Norstat, Sweden and Tony Jarvis, Former EVP Global Research at Clear Channel Outdoor, USA for recommending me.

ESOMAR is the world organisation for enabling better research into markets, consumers and societies. With 5000 members in 100 countries, ESOMAR’s aim is to promote the value of market and opinion research and help effective decision-making.

Getting invited to any respectable conference is an honor, but this particular one got my juices flowing a little extra. The way I see it, measurements and research is one of the most important keys for the future of our industry. And I’m not saying this primarily because we need help evaluating our efforts and measure ROI, even though this is indeed very important (there was a heated debate here, here, here, and here about this in Sweden recently). I’m saying it because we need new eyes and ears to guide our communication efforts proactively.

Those of you who have seen my talks have heard me describe several communications strategies and tactics, one of which is what I refer to as “sailing”. I use this term to describe how to harness existing viral “winds” to propell your own topics. This method is just one example where there is no way of succeeding without excellent and very fast metrics. Generally I think that the use of proactive measurements is not given enough focus. This is just one example. There are several.

I am very much looking forward to this talk, which will be entitled “Truth, Transparency, and The Death of Privacy”, and I also warmly recommend registrering for the conference here.

There is a bit of discussion going on right now about what is relevant to measure in advertising. Some are claiming that only ROI is relevant, while others defend measuring intermittently and on different parameters like recall and recognition. So, who is right?

Well – I would love to agree with the “only ROI is relevant”-side. Because in the end, ROI is obviously all that matters. But they are also missing the point of measuring in the first place. Or rather, they regard measurements as something you do to evaluate how things went after the dust settled. It’s kind of like saying that happiness is the only relevant parameter of measuring success in life. While that might be true when you are knocking on heaven’s door, other measurements are tools to intermittently guide efforts to the ultimate goal of good ROI.

Back in my engineering days, we would have talked about feedback loops, and modeled them something like this:

In the “only ROI matters” model, there are no feedback loops for real time adjustments, because no intermittent parameters are being measured.

Consider an airplane. In an airplane, the ultimate goal can be to arrive at JFK, but we still need to intermittently measure ground speed, bearing, and altitude to intermittently adjust our response to different errors and disturbances, and ultimately end up safely at JFK. And really, this is EVEN MORE important today when campaigns are live and in real time. You need to measure ALL THE TIME to adjust and end up at the JFK of ROI.

So while I don’t agree with the writers claiming that ROI is the only relevant parameter, I do agree that our present parameters are not very realistic. We need better parameters, better methods, and better models. We also need live responses in this world where brands are created in real time collaboration between company and consumer. We need to stop thinking campaign, and start thinking real time participation. We need to create brand management FLOW.

The “Flow Man” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (perhaps the world’s hardest name to pronounce) can teach us a lot about this. Consider his model applied to our world of branding and, if you have the time, check out his TED-talk. Who knows, you just might get inspired.

Like I said, seminars are getting better. The R/GA one about Nike+ and three other Nike projects was interesting. Though perhaps a bit shallow (hey, they only had 45 minutes), their projects are impressive.

For the sheer scale of it, The Human Race-project is also interesting, gathering 1 million people to run on one single day.

The Nike ID-project was nicely executed, but it really didn’t get my juices flowing. I’ve seen it before.

Most interesting to me was their new Ballers Network project, which can most accurately be described as NIke+ for basketball. Cool.

Today was a day of production. Not the kind where you run around on set shouting in a megaphone, or passionately discussing camera angles and styling. No. This day was about sitting down, with my dying Powerbook (yes, not Mac Book) in my lap, writing. And writing. And writing.

I’ve written basically two things. One first draft of a brand platform and one brief of management of creatives. (Yes, I know I’m a creative myself. Life’s tough sometimes).

Anyway. Now I’m completely square eyed but happy and is slowly trying to get enough energy flowing to drag my behind out to dinner with some colleagues and something involving Wyclef Jean. I have no idea what.

Talk to you soon!

I did also appreciate Seth Godin’s original “Idea Virus”-era, but that was back in the early noughties. What has since been known as viral marketing is what we should all be doing. Only, the word viral, apart from being totally abused and misused, doesn’t make sense semantically. What we are doing is social marketing. It’s about trust. About using your trusted sources to sift out interesting stuff from the overflowing sea of information. It is not about uncontrollable viral outbreaks at all.

What’s even worse is the up-front use of the word viral. I’ve seen it in briefs and even agency names. One prime example is this horrible one:
The “Never Hide”-campaign by Ray Ban. They’ve made some really great content such as this film:

But now go to neverhide.com and see what happens. Go on. When you make it through the “choose language”-part, select films. Then look around the page for that horrible little word. It’s there. THEY are calling their films “viral” which is like saying: “You love this film enough to send it to all of your friends. We are not asking, we’re telling“. When you finally get to the films you can’t even share them, much less embed them anywhere. Great going guys. Couldn’t be viral even if you showed proof of Elvis being alive. Why didn’t you just embed the YouTube-clips?