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!

After quite a few comments and a two interviews, I would like to clarify here on the blog that this is by no means an attack on Forsman & Bodenfors or Lowe Brindfors. They are just providing us with very clear and good examples to learn from. This is a problem for a big chunk of the industry. In all fairness, we could keep going around on a safari of the Swedish ad agency sites and see a lot more of this.

Here, for example, is a screenshot of one such agency, taken today. This agency (one of the biggies) is seriously charging clients big bucks for modern communication advice.

(I will buy whoever finds this site and posts a link in the comments a glass of excellent Champagne at Brunnsgatan 1 at 18:15 tomorrow Thursday).

Now, let’s cut this bullshit out and get serious again about reclaiming a position as a leading nation in digital communications.

Cheers.

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.

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…”.

If they only knew what a great idea they really had! Forsman & Bodenfors just came up with a new site for Svenska Kyrkan (The Church of Sweden) where you can submit your prayer to the site. The prayer is then keyworded on the site so that you can find other prayers on the same topic.

What makes this idea so great is that it suddenly makes The Church of Sweden relevant for a vast number of current topics like swine flu or economic crisis. Just like the church is relevant across a broad spectrum of topics in real life, it becomes equally relevant online. It also produces thousands of pages with relevant cross links. Brilliant.

Unfortunately this is also where the brilliance ends and it becomes apparent that Forsman & Bodenfors haven’t understood what a great idea they really had. Why is that? Well – much of the power of this idea, say a potential 20-50% of visits to the site, comes from the fact that the church becomes a relevant hit on Google for so many different topics. Or would have become just that, if they would have been at all visible to Google. And they aren’t, simply because F&B don’t know Google. Forsman & Bodenfors have chosen Flash as their technology for this campaign, which in it’s standard form isn’t indexable by Google. And they haven’t done any of the standard workarounds to make it so. To Google, this looks like thousands of identical and uninteresting pages with different names. Google looks at it, scratches it’s head, and throws all of them in the garbage without indexing anything. Let alone indexing on a wide variety of topics.

You can see above what the site looks like. You can see the selected prayer in the middle with keywords in different colors and the share buttons. Pretty, but utterly useless from a Google perspective. Because if you take a look at how Google sees http://svenskakyrkan.se/be, this is what Google sees:

Google sees three pages instead of the potential thousands. One containing the main page containing the Flash file, the Flash file itself described with this beautiful text: “txt Header instructions txt1 txt2 txt3 txt4 Header instructions txt Header instructions txt txt Lorem ipsum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, …”, and the fail page “the prayer doesn’t exist”.

In plain English this is a complete failure, and an awesome display of the problem most agencies are facing – they are smart, but they live in the past.

Besides the Google perspective, there is also the perspective of user behavior. Users want intuitive interaction. It is not intuitive to use an embed-code to embed text. For video, there is a purpose for the embed code, but for text? No. People naturally want to be able to copy and paste the text directly, preferably with links and colors and everything. That way we also get relevant links all over the web linking back to the Church of Sweden site on relevant topics. THAT would have been brilliant.

Conclusion – This is really an excellent idea, but the excellence is there by mistake, and is not taken advantage of at all simply because of lacking knowledge of basic SEO. It’s really sad. Especially since it would have been so easy to solve by using DHTML or even underlying indexable content.

One thing puzzled me though. How could something like this receive thousands of entries? Truly a mystery. At least until I switched on the television in my hotel room and saw television commercials for the internet campaign! Advertising for… advertising! What on earth?! To get traffic to the site you try to buy this traffic with television dollars?! A site like this one should get at least 20-50% of its traffic via search, which would have been free, self regenerating, and incredibly easy to achieve.

Suggestion – (Hi friends at F&B, I know you’re reading this and you know I love you, but I HAD to write this, since it’s such a great example to learn from. Please accept my free advice here as a return favor).

What if you would have used existing and established services such as Facebook status updates and Twitter posts (#whatever) to complement your web interface as a way to input prayers?  And an email adress (spam filtered of course) and an SMS-service (free of course)[edit: they have SMS-input]? What if your output of the prayers would have been much more flexible, mashable, widgetized and projected at the churches of Stockholm? Or whatever. Make it bigger. Give it presence.

But more than anything – learn SEO. Optimize that thing! Optimize it! Because really, what you came up with, apparently without realizing it, was a really good idea! You have great brains! But by implementing it the way you did, you created a bomb without a fuse.
For some reason, this image comes to mind.

Yeah, we're down with social media.

[Edit: Article about the site in Swedish: ]

This is the first, and perhaps the last time we’ll do an outfit of the day post on here, but today is a special day.

Because today, symbolically enough on the day of the Golden Egg Awards, my agency Honesty is moving into new offices. And not just any old shack, but the legendary 6th floor of Kungsgatan 48, formerly famous for agencies like Forsman & Bodenfors and Manne&Co. They had an impact on the communications industry, and I humbly hope to have a shot at the same feat.

Now that we have F&B’s old offices, maybe we should buy their old aquarium website as well… hmmm… should we say $300?

Also, the new Honesty offices are overlooking Konserthuset, the venue of the Golden Egg Awards tonight. So if you go out for a smoke, don’t be surprised if you see us burning the midnight oil. There is much work to be done. You find us here:

And what about the outfit of the day? Well – since we’re moving, I’m wearing functional work clothes. The world’s premier fleece hoodie from Houdini because it’s super comfy, and a T-shirt I got from Cunning Communications in New York a few years back, because I haven’t had time to do laundry (not that I didn’t appreciate the gift though, thanks guys).

Just in case, I also wear the world’s most comfy socks from Smart Wool. And let me tell you – there is nothing quite like it.

Boom. Ready for anything.