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The Google Man at Marketing Week London

Walter Naeslund — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 22:39:41 +0000

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!

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Walter Naeslund Speaking at Marketing Week Live in London

Walter Naeslund — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 14:45:40 +0000

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!

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Brush Your Teeth And Design for The Google Man

Walter Naeslund — Mon, 31 May 2010 13:07:38 +0000

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.

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Clownvertising, Terrorism, and Candy Cane Briefs

Walter Naeslund — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 13:28:38 +0000

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.]Similar Posts:

Got Some Google Wave Invites to Give Away

Walter Naeslund — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:47:47 +0000

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!
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Wave for iPhone and Chrome for OSX Awakens My Engineering Heart

Walter Naeslund — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:43:06 +0000

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.
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First look at Google Chrome for OSX

Walter Naeslund — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:58:27 +0000

I‘ve been trying out an early developers version of Chrome for OSX for a couple of days, and I must say it’s very impressive. In terms of sheer speed and user experience it’s the best browser I’ve tried on the Mac. If only I get some of my favorite add-ons (TreeStyleTabs and ScribeFire specifically), this will be my browser of choice once they’ve fixed some of the privacy issues not yet implemented.

Also, there are some more humoristic bugs, such as this one:

“Your browser is not currently supported?”

Well – I have to give it to them, it’s very considerate to take care of the competitors before dealing with themselves.

Anyway, this looks very promising! Please wrap this product up and send me a copy. It rocks.
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Installing WP Thesis on Host Gator. Don’t Let Them Fool You!

Walter Naeslund — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 09:49:24 +0000

Those stubborn bastards! It took me hours in the live chat with several different support people, a bunch of emails, and even flashing a bit of the famous Walter rage to get the USA-based web hosting service Host Gator to listen. But finally they did. Here’s the story:

I was working on a WordPress Thesis site that was going to be hosted in two versions (Swedish and English) in two different countries (Sweden and the US) and couldn’t get one of the scripts (TimThumb.php) built in to Thesis to function properly on the American server. The Swedish version, which is hosted on Binero worked just fine. After digging through some documentation and forums, I deduced that the error must be that the mod_security settings on Host Gator were set to tight.

I wrote about this to the people at Host Gator and simply asked them to whitelist these rules for the domain in question. They said that they would love to do that, but not if they hadn’t seen the error triggered in their logs. In other words – they refused. I got a bunch of answers from them, here is one:

(5:36:34 AM) Nathan Mo: I’m sorry but I’m unable to confirm this issue for you. We do not provide support for third party scripts.

After a few hours of fruitless nagging I got a bit pissed and wrote this:

With one install (at Binero.se in this case, but it works equally well at other hosts) we get the desired results. At Hostgator we do not. To me, having spent 8 years in an institute of technology, this is an equation with one (1) unknown. Just because we can’t see the unknown (that’s why we call it an unknown) doesn’t mean we cant deduce it from said equation. I can’t help you with your methods of debugging, but I CAN help you with deduction.

(Ok. I really “only” spent 4,5 years at LiTH, but exaggerated for effect).

Finally I get this answer:

I whilsted your domain for those three mod_security rules. That should not make any change because I can see from the logs that the domain has never triggered those rules.

So… finally I got them to do what I asked them to do from the beginning. Did it work? Drumroll…

…BOOM. Everything fallls into place and works perfectly. Only with about a day down the drain because of the stubbornness of Host Gator support staff. In the end, courage to try things will prevail.

(Ps. If reading this as a tutorial, don’t forget to set cache permission to 775).Similar Posts:

6 Ways To Improve The Jung von Matt Agency Site SEO-Wise

Walter Naeslund — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:35:49 +0000

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

No H1′s or H2′s. Only H3′s here and there.
Non-optimal URL-structure.
Missing desriptions on many pages.
Titel on the following pages shouldn’t be “Work”: http://www.jungvonmatt.se/work/?id=69
There is a sitemap, but the case-pages are missing: http://www.jungvonmatt.se/sitemap.xml
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.
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Which Presentation Software/Service Rocks, and Why?

Walter Naeslund — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 07:21:03 +0000

Just found a “new” bus going door to door from my Sofo apartment to my Noho office. Perfect! Especially considering this mornings blizzard. (Ok. I’m exaggerating). Today is presentation day, and game days are my favorite days. Especially when you know that the keynote presentation on your MBP humbly kicks ass! Today is one of those days.

But, getting there was not without hurdles, and for this is why I would like to pass out a question here that you may have the answer to:

I love Google apps, but I have a hard time making presentations there look good. Slideshare feels like a bit of a hassle, though it might just be me being lazy. I end up back with Keynote all the time, and I hate how we always end up in versioning trouble.

Now, I know you, my dear readers, are the creme de la creme of thinkers and speakers, and would love to hear your opinion – which presentations software/service rocks and why?Similar Posts: