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!

Man that was tough. I’ve been lucky to have been scheduled in the first slot of the day at most talks I’ve done so far, but today I got the very last slot. And it was crazy hot in Olympia’s Pillar Hall in London where my Marketing Week talk was scheduled. Some talks are easier than others, and this was definitely not one of the easy ones.

Anyway, the theme of the day was to take advantage of the evolutionary gap. Right now, that gap is very present in marketing when it comes to search marketing and advanced metrics. You can still win advertising awards without neither relevance in terms of actually selling product (Clownvertising) or even the most basic search marketing considerations. We’ve seen examples of both over the past year.

This does of course present an opportunity for those who stay ahead and work with the tools that are actually out there; and this opportunity is represented by precisely the evolutionary gap between what is currently being applauded by the majority and what is possible to imagine when you grab your backpack and your walking stick and actually set out to explore the boundaries. One can’t help but wonder if awards given out by a majority vote are even a compliment in times of rapid change.

Anyway, despite the tough venue and the courageous overheated heroes in the audience, visiting London was fun. And despite being pretty darn tired, I’m looking forward to seeing you Londoners again soon!

Cheers!

Super happy to announce that I will be speaking at Marketing Week Live at Grand Hall Olympia in London next week June 29. Amazing gig that I’m really looking forward to. For some reason I’ve never had a chance to speak in England. I hope we have the same sense of humor.

The topic of the day will be the same one that I wrote about here a little while back: “Brush Your Teeth and Design for The Google Man”. I guess they liked the title. But on a more serious note I really think that a mindset where we’re lookin at online as part of our ordinary evolution, like fingers, teeth or motorcycles, is key to success in times of change. Not just in our business. This mindset makes us quick. It makes us smart. It makes us efficient. Really looking forward to the discussions after the talk. That’s where I learn. There are always tons of smart people at this type of event.

So if you’re in London on the 29th, I hope you can swing by and say hi! Looking forward to seeing you!

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.

Embrace Experience. Breath Innovation. Produce Intimately.

Sure the world has changed. But I think it’s time to realize that we haven’t changed much. A couple of years ago I was one of the people running around screaming that the world was coming to an end, that the traditional advertising agency model was over and that the world would never be the same again. In a way, we need people running around like that to initiate discussions and spark debate, but I also think we have to look outside our window and see what the real world looks like, because – let’s face it – the biggest and greatest agencies are also doing things right. I believe in taking EVERY piece of knowledge I can from these agencies and adding on everything new I can possibly find from the frontier and then pour it all in the blender. Will it blend? I think it will!

Production Intimacy

Just because an agency doesn’t understand search marketing dynamics it doesn’t mean that it can’t create massive results using television, print, and outdoor. Just because an agency has in-house production resources doesn’t mean it will loose it’s strategic capabilities. Quite the contrary. Personally, I believe in keeping production intimate for two reasons: First, emotion is in the finger tips, and emotion is such an amazingly important part of strategy that outsourcing it lowers communications quality significantly. Second, let’s face it, it’s hard to get the very best creatives on a freelance basis. At least that’s my experience. Feel free to challenge this.

At Honesty we try to have the same people on the production set (and in SEO- & conversion tuning labs for that matter) as we have at the initial strategy workshop. This plays into our philosophy of “Clarity & Emotion” where we try to simplify everything to super clear but emotionally punchy topical packets that inspire people to pass along the brand story. We really can’t outsource that.

Finger Tip Feel Requires Finger Tips (Not Robot Arms)

Occasionally, we outsource specific things like design, illustration or sound design. We’ve recently worked with a very established artist from Sweden for illustrations and a superstar designer from New York for identity, and they’ve both delivered qualities that we could never (and should never) have in-house. But that’s completely different from outsourcing all production and delivery. We can outsource roasting the beans, but we can’t outsource the barista so to speak. Finger tip emotional execution requires finger tips – not robot arms.

From Radical Idealism to Pragmatic Innovative

My journey has gone from radical idealism to pragmatic innovative. For me to be happy, I don’t want to settle with only having super progressive ideas. I want to make them happen. And to do that, I have to look outside my window and grasp the reality my client lives in. I want to create kick ass communication that we know will work in all media channels, while also building Google equity and evolving the brand through design and customer service. I want to take clients by the hand on a journey to greatness; I don’t want to do is insist on trying to teleport them to la-la-land. It doesn’t work, and no marketing manager worth its salt will let you do that anyway.

The Recipe for Success Then? This Is What I Think:

1. Information Clarity
2. Butterflies in stomach
3. Tight team of highly skilled individuals
4. Few strategy slides (tight strategy = consultants assuming responsibility for making choices)
5. Production intimacy

Funky Business Models vs. Great Minds

In the end, our business is all about results, and I think we can all see that advertising agencies are not as dead as some entrepreneurial people thought a couple of years ago (though I appreciate the ambition). There are a lot of great minds at those “soon to be dead” agencies, and a new and funky business model will never beat brilliant people when it comes to consulting businesses. Why? The consulting business is all about – you guessed it – the consultants.

Man, it feels like I’m flying back and forth to Gothenburg like a ping pong ball. It’s really a nice city though, so I can’t complain. Now I’m back down here again, and I’m stealing a few minutes from my beauty sleep to hang out with you, dear reader, before heading off to bed. And today, I thought I should share with you a new efficiency trick that I’ve fallen in love with. Ready? Here we go:

Sail When There is Wind

There are really two periods of the day when I write: in the morning, or late at night. I rarely find inspiration in the afternoon. What I realized though, is that my whole life is built a little bit like that. There are parts of the day when I’m really really pumped to take on whatever comes my way, and there are parts when I’m pretty darn slow. And I have a feeling that you, dear reader, may perhaps share this experience?

When I started asking around what people thought of these phases of the day, I realized that we’re all built a little bit like that, and that I (and perhaps you?) should start planning my day around it. It all started out as something of a joke, but I soon realized that there was amazing power in this way of structuring my life.

Euforia Day Planning 101 – This is How It Works

I wake up at 6.30-ish and head out for a morning run. I then have until about noon to get the most demanding tasks of the day, mostly creative work, done. This is when I have my V8 running at top RPM. I also try to make check my task lists and add tasks to them (Google Tasks kick ass).

After lunch I get noticeably slower and try do get routine stuff done and check off all the easy stuff from my lists. At around 3 in the afternoon I’m more or less ready to pass out, and therefore I do! A fifteen minute powernap here gets me back to sync and up to speed for a pretty effective couple of hours before leaving the office at around 6. After dinner I do most of my reading and occasionally write stuff – like now.

This may all sound pretty obvious and straightforward, but the trick is to say no to attractive but non-demanding stuff that wants to enter my 8-12 sweet spot. And there is A LOT OF STUFF that wants to claim that sweet spot! Saying no here can be quite tricky, but it’s really where the power comes from.

And that’s it. A short and dead simple piece of advice, but one that actually works. Simple things often do.

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).

I‘ve always been interested in economics, because economics is a great way to model, measure and understand human behavior. In a TED-talk I watched over a bowl of indian curry (I got stuck alone in the office over lunch), Loretta Napoleoni explains the economics of terrorism and how it relates to the economics of the rest of us. One thing that caught my interest was what she refers to as rogue economics, where politics looses control of the economy, and the economy becomes a rogue force. Rogue economics “always lurks in the background” as she puts it, and “comes back in times of change…such as globalization”. This is not surprising. Politics is a system, and systems always take time to adjust to disturbances. In the meantime, the disturbance affects those affected by the system.

This talk made me think – could this be exactly what is happening in our industry right now? That the system that controlled and demanded relevance and results from marketing spend looses control when the world of communications changes rapidly? Could it be that clownvertising is the rogue economics of the advertising industry?

I sat down with a couple of our industry’s most respected names the other day at Le Rouge and discussed this topic. What they said resonated with my hypothesis. They, like me, also saw campaigns like “The Fun Theory” as irrelevant clownvertising where the client is blinded by the blizzard of change, where the strategists are seduced by the “how can we make it viral”-love potion, and where the creatives watch in astonishment as they receive the most delicious candy cane of a brief they’ve ever seen (“just make it fun, ok?”). I haven’t been in the industry as long, but according to my discussion company at Le Rouge, the blizzard of change that came along with the introduction of television advertising spurred similar epidemics of clownvertising in television. “The Fun Theory” is by no means the only famous clownvertising example. To me, the Cadbury’s gorilla falls into the same category, even though “pointless but fun” is perhaps more relevant to a chocolate bar than a $20 000 vehicle. A smaller but more recent example is “The Wall of Sound” for Brothers.

But anyway, back to the question of rogue economics. Because what we DO know about rogue economics is that the system stabilizes over time. This means that pretty soon, it will no longer be accepted to just “go viral” with irrelevant humor, and that a much more difficult task will be put on the plate of advertising agencies. In this new stabilized system, you will have to be attractive (in the literal sense of the word), sticky (in the Gladwell sense of the word), re-shareable, and effective in terms of what you want to achieve (which at the very least requires relevance). This is not easy. It will place enormous demands on the shoulders of advertising creatives and it will – and this is what I love about this change – place less crap in the lap of the consumer. It’s time to step up the game.

[Edit: Consequently misspelled rogue. Sorry about that. Le Rouge probably threw me off. Thanks Matthieu for noticing.]

I have a few extra invites here to give away to you wonderful readers of Walternaeslund.com. Drop me a couple of lines in a comment and let me know if you want one. Actually, I’ll probably give priority to pingbacks. Link Love 4 ever baby!

I love technology, and can’t help myself when it comes to trying out new services and dissecting new gear into the tiniest spec-sheet detail.  Most of the time I do  this only out of love for technology. Trying out a super unstable alpha or beta of a new service or app is for example usually a huge hassle, with frequent crashes and misery. Google Wave was one such example. When I first laid my hands on one of the Wave sandbox accounts back in July of this year, the thing was just a mess. It crashed all the time and was rather useless. Still, I loved playin with it, just for the sake of the amazing ambition and engineering behind it.

Recently, I started running Wave on my iPhone and natively on OSX (well, not really natively, it’s Gears-powered) via Waveboard. It’s crude, but is sort of works. Running Wave on the iPhone may not be super useful yet, but absolutely necessary if they want it to replace email of course. Or replace any means of communication for that matter. Mobile is not mobile anymore, it’s just a compromise between interface and size in a computer.

But here comes the surprise: A couple of weeks ago, I got my hands on an early alpha version of Google’s browser Chrome for OSX. I expected a horrible unstable shell of a browser, but perhaps some interesting indications of what Chrome will offer us when the first real versions are released. I fired up Chrome and started playing with it. This thing was fast. It was running really smoothly. It was stable. After a while I started using it more and more for all kinds of things, even though it apparently sucks privacy-wise, and Google advices against using it as a browser yet. Despite these flaws and others, such as buggy printing, I can’t help myself. The user experience compared to all other OSX-browsers I’ve tried it just so much snappier. I use it all the time. Can’t wait for a sharp version of this thing.