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.

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!

As Spotify launched their iPhone app, the crowd cheered. The talented SEO-expert (and comedian) Simon Sundén publishes the follwing graph of Spotify Premium sales that went viral amongst us nerds. Half us us thought is was true, and who knows, it may be.

But even if this graphic joke isn’t true, it illustrates something quiet scary. Something scary that starts with an “M”.

Let me tell you a story to explain:

Chapter 1 – The Music Industry

Think for a minute about how the music industry works. This is an industry that has built it’s entire business model around their monopoly on information distribution. Largely, the monopoly has been built on the control over distribution of plastic circles. In recent years, as silver became the new black in the plastic circles industry, the information started to find other ways of distributing itself over the internet, and the monopoly of distribution started to break down.

Desperately, the record industry tried everything to stop these new an superior modes of information distribution by trying to sabotage them with destructive and inefficient “inventions” like DRM. When that didn’t work (because Darwinistic innovation always gravitates towards the efficient), they cried foul, and tried to persuade their friends “in Washington” to legislate and punish anyone who had the audacity to use these new and efficient modes of distribution instead of using theirs.

Why so desperate, you may ask? Well – this was all they knew. It was not them, but the musicians who created the music. What they, the record industry, had to offer was marketing and distribution. And when their monopolized mode of distribution was suddenly outdated, and marketing was suddenly taken over by the music itself, it’s own viral distribution, communities like MySpace, and crowdsourced services like LastFM, the music industry was suddenly cut out of the loop, unable to provide value. And like the dinosaurs before them, their fate looked sealed.

Chapter 2 – The Innovators

But the file sharing systems, though hugely more efficient than the plastic circles, was not perfect. Billions of redundant copies of the information had to be kept on harddrives where you wanted to access the music, sharing the music meant sending over entire files, and meta-information was incongruent. Instead, thought a group of innovative individuals, one would like to take the route of the semantic web and have ONLY ONE instance of every file, with congruent meta data, stored in ONE place so that we could share it by only sending links pointing to the specific files. Then each of us could have access to all information and create a hugely efficient market for sifting out the very best. A more efficient model to be sure, and as we know, Darwinistic innovation always gravitates towards the efficient. The group of geniuses created and productified this new and superior mode of distribution. And they named it – Spotify.

Chapter 3 – The Cartel

And here, the music industry saw it’s chance. In one of the weekly meetings of The Cartel, the organisation they had set up together “to act for the common welfare of artists everywhere”, one executive stood up and said – “we can’t stop every single individual on the internet, but we can stop one company! We can threaten to destroy their new value, and claim part of it as ransom! We can regain our distribution monopoly by using their own value against them! But we have to act quickly! If more inventive companies emerge and compete, like Chilirec for instance, we will loose this last chance for survival of our kind. Sure, Chilirec will try to sue us, in fact, they already did, but that’s no match for our lawyers. We have our own people in the courts”.

One young assistant’s assistant, who had observed them in silence from the end of the table, mumbled quietly “but what value will we contribute? How will we make things more efficient? Will this not stifle competition and put an end to innovation?”? BE QUIET! Roared an executive at the end of the table. THEY NEED US! THEY WILL SUBMIT OR BE DESTROYED!

Said and done. The Cartel cheered and applauded. “If we all agree to let Spotify use our music, and let Chilirec use none, we can cut any deal we want. They have no chance to do this without us. We can use their new invention to return to the times of the distribution monopoly! We can be rich! Maybe we can even keep all new releases within Spotify and NEVER NEVER NEVER release the files to anyone else! Trying to hack Spotify and batch down these files will be easy enough to stop! We couldn’t control the data on the plastic circles, but we CAN control the data on the Spotify servers! We can even demand to own part of Spotify“! The room went silent as his words resonated through the spines of The Cartel directors like a chilling wind. Own the only source of music… on the planet.

Epilogue

When Apple realized what hit them it was too late. A year earlier, soon after The Cartel’s spirited meeting, Apple had given away their last line of defense and allowed the Spotify client on their iPhone. As the power of the iTunes store faded away, Apple tried in a last attempt to launch their version of Spotify, called iTunes Unlimited. The service was impeccably polished, integrated into their brand new Wild Cat operating system, and could play songs while texting on the iPhone, something that the Spotify client couldn’t. But what was the use of all this if they had no music. Or at least, just enough music not to be able to compete with Spotify. The number of Spotify exclusive songs and artists soared and left the rest of the industry in rubble. A lot of people said that “we should have seen this coming when Spotify restricted the iPhone app to paying premium users”. But now it was to late. The war was over. They won.

At least until the rebels on the far moon of MySpace started their indie music rebellion. But that is a whole other story.

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.

One of the most dangerous politicians in the United States – that’s what CNET calls Obama’s Vice President Joe Biden. What they are talking about is Biden’s relentless attacks on internet liberty, and the threat that he thereby poses to the evolution of technology. Now that the dust has settled and we have sobered up after celebrating the Obama victory, the Biden threat has become very real. Among other things, he has backed proposals like outlawing region free DVD-players, forcing internet providers to hunt “pirates”, legalizing the entertainment industry’s use of spyware and trojans, and, not least, having the state finance the film industry’s court costs when sueing file sharing teenagers(!).

I would love to say that this gives us Swedes a competitive advantage as a nation, but the problem is that internet innovation is collaborative and spans the entire world. If one nation pours gravel in the machinery, everybody suffers. Especially if that nation is the world’s leading internet nation.

On the positive side, these repressive policies always lead to rebellion and creativity. Philip Zimmermann’s wildly successful PGP-encryption was for example created to protect private communication from a law proposed by none other that Joe Biden himself. PGP is known to have helped dissidents in oppressed nations communicate freely, but also to have put terrorist communication in stealth mode. Funny what a little oppression can lead to. My guess is that we’ll now go into innovation mode again and figure out some really sophisticated stealth file sharing technology. But really, I’d much rather see that we humans would innovate to make the world a better place than to fight oppression. It feels more constructive somehow. Innovation to avoid legislation has a treadmill ring to it.

After digging through everything I have been able to get my hands on about Google Wave, I’m in awe. This to me changes the game completely. I am not even going to begin trying to explain what Wave is (others have done so already), but trust me, it’s extremely cool. And ambitious. I love it. In fact, I’m loosing sleep over it. Already, I have ten or so innovations in mind for this technology. Mijau.

Pour a good cup of coffee and take your time to really watch this video. It’s an hour and twenty minutes long, but it’s history in the making.

In about an hour we will know the verdict in the Pirate Bay-trials. Let’s hope that people are being smart about this. Because a guilty verdict would not be good for anyone. Especially not for art and artists.

A guilty verdict would do little to boost sales. I believe we’ll see the opposite result. Darknets and stealth services (like Pirate Bay’s own would evolve quickly. Innovation incentives in the legal realm would be smaller. We would do little but slowing down inevitable change. From a wider perspective, it is just not intelligent.

If they are found not guilty however, it will be considered a future oriented statement. One that would benefit artists, culture, our country, and eventually the world. The music industry will have to come up with something better and more useful than Pirate Bay, and to be honest, they already have. Though Spotify would perhaps need some healthy competition. Spotify is just one small step, but it is a step in the right direction. This type of evolution is where we are going. A guilty verdict would just make us look dumb. Especially in the history books.

From the angle of the artist, nobody has put it better than Paulo Coelho:
“I didn’t start writing to get rich, I started writing to get read”.

People sometimes ask me what I mean when I talk about Honesty’s communication model. And in response, well, let me tell you a story:

Last night I briefly attended one of these cool VIP-ish happenings where you get a goodie bag upon leaving. Though not entirely aimed at me (mostly women’s beauty products in there), one of the products caught my eye. It was a “Chai Latte Soul & Body Wash” from Philip B.

Now, how different can these products really be? I mean, sure, it’s probably great and all, and it probably smells lovely of chai latte, but if we want scented cleaning products, there are probably much cheaper alternatives, right? Instead we want to buy in on the luxury dream. And that will trigger us to buy, which is good of course. But today I want to talk about what triggers us to communicate and talk to our friends, blog readers and Twitter followers about something. And this lovely product has such triggers.

First, the name. Besides the Chai Latte scent association the “Soul & Body Wash” product description is just lovely. That alone is blogger friendly and cute. But the real magic emerged when turning the bottle. The directions on the back read: “…lather it up and let soak in for 2 or 3 minutes or until you see GOD! Rinse well.”

That kind of detail is JUST what people love to talk about. It may seem insignificant, but these things matter. Unless you want to try buying your way in using brute force and distribution. Who’s going to talk about the new Wella shampoo just because they have an expensive full page spread in an expensive magazine with an expensive sensual model shot by an expensive photographer with an expensive camera. You may get people to buy if you have enough cash to spend, but you won’t get people to talk.

I want to get people to talk. Because then you will get leverage on your marketing cash. And you will build equity in search engines by getting a lot of links and lot of buzz. How much equity do you get out of a magazine spread? Ultimately, we will have a much larger pool of people buying AND talking. And then you have a positive spiral and can get ready for the next product development.

This is what I talk about when i talk about communicative product development. It may well be a bigger innovation like a foldable car, but it may just as well be a small detail, like tonality in the directions on the back of the bottle.

Like they say – the devil is in the details.

Björn Rietz is the new CEO for the Advertising Association of Sweden. I guess I should comment on that.

“The World is Changing” is perhaps one of the most worn out phrases in trend analysis. And it’s always true. But now, the rate of change for our context as marketing professionals act is extreme. Not surprisingly, since in the history of human interaction, there has been no disturbance of the same magnitude as the introduction of the internet. And even though the internet has been around for a while, it has now gone mainstream and truly interactive. Bending the truth is an obsolete strategy, while honesty reigns. The rules have changed. Most agencies haven’t. Yet. Therefore the choice for a new CEO for the AAS is crucial this time.

Björn retains respect from the men of power (yes they’re mostly men) in the industry. He is, to cut things short, a true ad man. But it seems to me that he also enters his new job with a humble attitude towards the changing reality. This is very promising. For instance, I hope he will take a really close look at Guldägget, which is on a dangerous path with strange categories and ludicrious rules. Among other things these rules state that you can’t report results of your campaign, but it has to have been published. This means clients are at risk for being lured into funding art projects.

Björn does talk about advertising being art, which is a shaky proposition. He refers here to how “the same part of the brain is used to produce poems an outdoor headline”, which is true, but doesn’t mean that advertising is art. I wrote my masters thesis on innovation management and involved myself heavily in how the parallell processing right side brain is about synthezis and innovation, of art, creative strategy, products and many other things. I hope this is what Björn meant. Art doesn’t require ROI.

That said I have high hopes for Björn! As a test, I will link to his blog here to see if he keeps track of his incoming links. If you are, Björn, I would also like to encourage you to mix your blog up with shorter posts and get a Twitter account. I can be your first friend at @walternaeslund.

A little over a year ago I wrote about the Forsman&Bodenfors site that never seemed to air. And now, finally, it has.

The lesson that I talked about back then was that polishing and polishing on your product, and not getting it out there is fatal in times of rapid change. I also quoted Guy Kawasaki:

“Don’t worry, be crappy. An innovator doesn’t worry about shipping an innovative product with elements of crappiness if it’s truly innovative. The first permutation of a innovation is seldom perfect–Macintosh, for example, didn’t have software (thanks to me), a hard disk (it wouldn’t matter with no software anyway), slots, and color. If a company waits–for example, the engineers convince management to add more features–until everything is perfect, it will never ship, and the market will pass it by.“

And these are times of rapid change. What on earth can they have been working on all this time? The idea they had two years ago can hardly be the same one that went online this week, or?

Well, maybe it is. Because it feels a bit… well… old. But first, let me start with the positive stuff:

+

On the plus side the initial interface has a very slick search interface. It’s looks much like the TED-visualization, but more stylized and with live search. For a portfolio site, this is a nice solution. Production-wise there is not much to add. If this is the idea you are going for, it is very well executed. Images are well chosen and art direction is cool. Also, the portfolio is very easy on the eyes. Excellent images and videos.

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The site feels a bit old. Not surprisingly of course, since it’s been in production for an amazingly long time.(It has to be some kind of record). Though i like the search interface, unfortunately when you click on anything you end up in what looks like a  flash template from the early noughties. And of course, I do have to ask, where is the agency? Where is all the social functionality? Does anyone at F&B even have a Twitter account? I can’t tell since the only means of contact available is email. Email guys? And what’s up with not having shareable content on the site? Add that, and I’ll add another star to your grade.

Conclusion

This is not an agency site, but a portfolio. I have no way of getting to know the agency behind it. Are they smart? Do they know what’s going on in the world? I don’t know. But it is a nice portfolio site to navigate. Not having shareable content is amazingly strange, and you get the feeling that F&B thinks that live search is the hottest thing since sliced bread. Social media seems to have passed them by. (Though I know at least one person at the agency has a Twitter account, and some of them probably have Facebook accounts). I do think that the site is very pretty though and I do like the search interface.

Waltergrade

Grade today: WW

Grade if they add shareability: WWW