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.

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.

Lesson number one. Never release a “viral” close to the inauguration speech, if it’s not a spoof of it. Pretty much everything spreading fast right now is Obama in one form or another.

That said, I think that one of the fastest growing non-Obama-virals right now is quite interesting conceptually. They’ve actually created a rudimentary interactive game on YouTube on the old Street Fighter theme. Check it out here:

Being an old tech guy, I find this incredibly cool:

Interactive Video Object Manipulation from Dan Goldman on Vimeo.

The Swedish advertising award Guldägget just announced new digital categories. The categories are:

1. Interactive Category A:
Sites
Includes campaign sites and corporate sites.

2. Interactive Category B:
Advertising
Includes banners, mobile marketing and SEO.

3. Interactive Category C:
Other digital media
Includes widgets, applications, digital events, interactive tools and social media.

This segmentation into technologies could have been a good idea for production companies, but for communications agencies? I don’t know.

In a media landscape where the consumer chooses it’s channels and switches between them seamlessly and very quickly, any communications strategy residing in ONE channel is questionable. And thus, deviding up awards in this way is too. Any communications strategy that does not take into account channel orchestration is simply incomplete.

I would love to see the awards segmentation matrix turned 90 degrees. Channel orchestration and choice needs to be present for any strategy to be considered complete, and segmentation could instead be by business type or target audience for example.

Then perhaps there could be another awards show for production companies and their technical achievements, just like Roy is for film production companies.

A creative at one of Sweden’s biggest agencies insists that web production is heading the same way as film production. That advertising agencies will get treatments from several different web production companies and get to choose which agency will get to produce.

I’m not so sure. First of all, in the sort term, demand for top notch web production is way higher than supply. The good web production companies won’t NEED to leave speculative treatments. They can just choose a different project.

Secondly, web production companies seem to have a different agenda. Rather than accepting their role way down in the value chain, they seem to want to claim the idea- and concept development phase from the traditional advertising agencies (Farfar being one prime example). No wonder, since most big Swedish agencies don’t understand web yet, and thus will come up with print concepts or television concepts distributed via the Internet. Furthermore we need to ask ourselves what we mean when we say “web agency”. If we mean the programming, that is best made in India, Estonia or China in a couple of years. If we mean content, like film, images or sounds, we have brilliant companies with extensive experience producing that already (and sure, they may keep making treatments).

No, there won’t be treatments where “web agencies” (a dying word) will do the advertising agencies work for them. Why would they. Advertising agencies need to understand pull-, interactive, and digital social behavior. They need to understand how programming services are bought, and they need to start delivering modern communication. That’s how you stay in the game. Not by paying your way out.