How the hell can you end up in a seduction lecture, an emergency landing, a fire truck and an ambulance plane, all on the way to a client presentation? And can you still pull off the presentation? It sounds incredible, but this is that story:

A few months ago one of our biggest clients asked us to come down to Gothenburg to present our latest communications concept for them. The presentation was for the top marketing executives from all international markets, so needless to say this was a key presentation for us.

As fate had it, this meeting ended up being scheduled only two hours after the end of a speaking engagement on “Basic Seduction Theory for Marketers” in Stockholm that I had accepted an invitation to several months earlier. If you know anything about Swedish geography, you know that getting from Berns in Stockholm to the Gothenburg harbor is not something you do in two hours unless you’re EXTREMELY lucky with your flight times. We weren’t that lucky.

So I canceled the speaking gig, right? No. Canceling speaking gigs is not something I take lightly, and rescheduling the client presentation was not an option. What to do?

I started calling around to see if I could get hold of anybody with a helicopter or a plane who could fly us down to Gothenburg (always the optimist). We actually did get hold of one friend with a plane, but it turned out that he didn’t have a “cloud license”, something that I had never heard of in my life before, but which apparently meant that he couldn’t fly if there were clouds in the sky. Hoping for clear skies seemed a bit brave since we do live in Sweden after all. I’m not that optimistic.

I am however stubborn. Ridiculously stubborn at times. This was one of those times.
– Let’s book a business jet, I said to Emil (Honesty’s account director) who looked at me in disbelief.

Business jets are not exactly cheap, but after some calling around I managed to find a plane that was slightly cheaper than the others. I booked it. I guess I should have known better. Keep reading.

The talk in Stockholm went great. After I finished I rushed out to a car waiting outside with the motor running. We had to have our own car since taxis like to keep speed limits (stubborn bastards) and we really didn’t have time for trivialities like that (If you’re a policeman reading this, I’m only joking. Promise.). As we zoomed towards Bromma Airport I tried to clear my head to prepare for the next presentation.

You get what you pay for, and I suppose I should have realized what kind of plane to expect, but what came rolling out of the hangar was this tiny piece of junk propeller plane. The pilot wore jeans and a windbreaker. But there was no turning back now. We rushed aboard the four seat plane, put on our headsets and buckled up.

As the plane took off we felt immediately that something wasn’t right. The plane bounced around in the sky and sounded like an out of tune sewing machine. We held on to our iPhones for king and country. The pilot bravely pushed on for five minutes that felt like an hour before his voice came on in our noisy headsets:

– As you can hear there is something wrong with our engine and we have to turn back to the airport.
At this point Emil was starting to become really nervous about not making it to our super important meeting and asked politely (Emil can only ask politely):
– Ehrm, Mr Pilot, We’re in a bit of a hurry and…
The pilot cuts Emil short.
– That’s the least of our problems right now! We need to get this plane back on the ground!

This situation was definitely not improving.

We came down towards Bromma Airport for a proper emergency landing followed by a parade of ambulances, fire fighters and airport security cars. When the plane came to a stop, some kind of emergency procedure started with debriefings and reports. Emil and I were so worked up about not missing our meeting by now (we had after all just risked our lives to get there) that we somehow managed to convince the plane rental people that we needed to go on the fastest plane available to Gothenburg like… right now.

To this day I still can’t figure out exactly how this happened, but minutes later, after a short ride in a fire truck, we were taxing out to the runway aboard an ambulance jet (I shit you not) and took off for Gothenburg to the roar of jet engines.

Rocketing across the sky in what must have been close to 1000 km/h we tried to finish up the presentation keynote.

The interior of the ambulance plane consisted of three seats and a stretcher, plus two ad guys with MacBooks. It’s no exaggeration to call this a strange scene.

When we walked into the meeting we were a mere fifteen minutes late. We walked in, trying to breath normally, apologized for being fifteen minutes late and fired off our presentation. It was one of those moments from an American high school movie when everything is in slow motion and the fat kid scores the winning goal in the football finals. *Musical score fading up*

On my way out from the meeting I looked up and met Emil’s eyes. I could tell that he was thinking the same thing I did, “I don’t know what the hell just happened, but somehow we pulled this off”.

We had made it! The concept presentation was a great success and today we are rolling out that concept in Sweden and internationally. When the evaluation came back from the speaking gig at Berns, it was all top marks there as well. Somehow we had managed to execute what seemed like an impossible plan.

So what’s the moral of this story? Well – I guess I can summarize it in this single sentence: “Impossible is a mindset”. There is always a way to get things done if you put a bit of extra effort into it, and I think that sticking to this conviction is an important ingredient in succeeding with anything. And besides, getting some adrenaline through your veins every once in a while keeps you young and peachy.

But don’t take my word for it. Go out and try it for yourself. Pick out an impossible project and just go for it. You’ll be surprised how far a little bit of stubbornness can take you, let alone a lot.

If you break something, you fix it. If only United Airlines would have had this moral policy when they broke Dave Carroll’s Taylor guitar, they wouldn’t have suffered. But they did. Oh, they did.

Because creative people aren’t like ordinary people. They don’t fight back with legal action that huge and rich organizations can defend themselves against. Instead, they fight back with emotional triggers, often using the deadliest of them all – humor.

In Dave Carroll’s case, the attack took the form of a song called United Breaks Guitar’s, and a corresponding video on YouTube. The video has already been seen by millions of viewers, and has gained plenty of coverage in different mainstream media and on blogs.

When coaching brands about social media, I always talk about “Google Equity”, an equity that is not built overnight, but takes time, effort, and most of all, the inspiration of others. The United Airlines brand, like so many others, has done this poorly, and thus can’t put up much of a fight when something like this happens. Last time somebody completely lost grip on Google was when US Airways Flight 1549 crashed in Hudson River. And now, the United Airlines Breaks Guitars is in the top search results for “United Airlines”.

My top advice for United Airlines and other brands is to put real focus on building Google Equity. Offence is the best defence.

But regardless, since Dave Carroll has promised another two songs and videos on the subject of his broken guitar, I really would think twice before pissing off a creative again.

I encourage everyone to cut out and frame today’s editorial in DN. It’s one of the strangest editorials I have read in a newspaper of a democratic country, and it will probably be worth money some day. Since it was an editorial, I actually considered cancelling my subscription. But then I read this article, which is more balanced and actually shows quite clearly a couple of interesting points.

Henrik Pontén’s quote is, for example, really entertaining. Especially when he claims that this verdict will lead to “reasonable content” on the web.

We can see in this article how this is a war between conservatives and innovators. Researchers are sceptical to these controlling behaviors, while corporations making money off of the old system want to retain the status quo. I guess one can’t blaim them. Humans are inherently afraid of change.

More interestingly, Viasat’s CEO Hans Skarplöth, whom I have discussed here earlier, is in this article as well, calling the false sense of security derived from this verdict and the IPRED-law “naive”. Brand-wise we can now start to see one of the big winners, and I think that Viasat’s moral courage will be in the marketing textbooks and lectures of the future. As will the ruined brand name Metallica.

This is the second part of my idea sketch on privacy and integrity. The first part can be found here. There is also an interesting comment on that post by Michael Dahlén where he talks about information symmetry, a theme that I’ll adress later in this post.

In this second part I will show you two talks, the first of which happens to be one of my favorite talks ever, by the phenomenal writer and psychologist Jonathan Haidt. The second talk is a rather graphic and frightening one by Philip Zimbardo, and I will only present the link here and not embed it since there are some very graphic images in the presentation.

Anyway, I wrote in the first part about how we psychologically maintain moral behavior in a self-regulating way, by rewarding and punishing each other in more or less subtle ways to maintain moral equilibrium. It’s an extremely impressive distributed control system, much like the self balancing control system of a market economy, but much more refined and granular.

In Haidt’s talk, five moral foundations are listed as ones that we have with us from birth. These five are:
1. Harm/care
2. Fairness/reciprocity
3. Ingroup/loyalty
4. Authority/respect
5. Purity/sanctity

If any one of these foundations are challenged, we react quickly to restore equilibrium. At least until we shift the equilibrium by fundamentally changing the rules of the system. There are several ways of changing the rules of the system, but I will focus only on one of these here. The one I will focus on it the introduction of anonymity.

If we remove personal responsibility from the system by introducing anonymity, studies have shown that several of these moral foundations seem to fail. Some of these studies are presented briefly in the talks below. Personally I’m most intrigued by the first two of these foundations. It seems that people can turn evil and cause harm when power is introduced in combination with the removal of personal responsibility. Consider uniforms in war for example, or hoods worn by executioners through all time. And people in many systems seem to loose sense of reciprocity by cheating when individual contributions are unclear. We also seem less prone to do good under such circumstances.

So is this view highly cynical? Well, perhaps not. Perhaps it’s just how civilized group behavior evolved. How else would something like this be governed? The peer to peer equilibrium control system is perhaps the only viable path for evolution to take (Darwin would say that the present state is proof of that. I would too).

This view would explain why religion was a really good idea for keeping up moral behavior. Because even when nobody was watching, god was. But the notion of god created a huge information asymmetry which was quite scary, and often abused throughout history.

But as the internet removes anonymity in a (more) symmetrical way, it is much more difficult to abuse this information. I don’t mean to be bombastic, but I can truly see us moving into a new era of higher moral standards and a better world – simply because we increase communication efficiency and information symmetry. And I would like to encourage you to consider this the next time you read a negative article about the breakdown of privacy.

It also puts a new spin on Google’s “Do No Evil”-tagline, doesn’t it?

Now watch these two amazing talks and consider what I just said:

Talk number 1 by Jonathan Haidt:

Click here for talk number 2 by Philip Zimbardo.

Some things in life are just taken for granted and are rarely questioned. Privacy is one of those things. It’s implicitly agreed upon by everybody that privacy is a good thing, and that maintaining personal integrity is one of the major challenges of web 2.0. I would like to question this.

Let’s go back to the early stages of the development of our species for a minute. The development of collaborative behavior is one of the major advancements in the history of humanity, without which we couldn’t have achieved anything but satisfying our most basic needs. And in order to collaborate, we need some form of rules and norms, at least when the advantages of collaboration are balanced unevenly between individuals over time. We’ve created institutions for maintaining these rules, but more importantly, we have a distributed control system where morals and norms are enforced by our peers. In fact, the punishments and rewards administred by our peers are so important to us that they could be viewed as an important part of the genome of the collective intelligence that makes up our culture and our civilization.

So, while this distributed control system is beneficial for the community as a whole, it also puts pressure on the individual. And individuals don’t like pressure. At least not instinctevly and in the short term.

Enter social media.

What social media did is that it opened up the flood gates of peer control. Suddenly we could follow each other much closer than before, seeing photos, updates, status reports and blog posts. We could administer peer punishments and rewards much more effectively than ever before and across previsously unthinkable boundaries.

This poses questions:

(1) Will the breakdown of privacy raise moral, improve individual behavior and ultimately make the world a better place?

(2) Why are people so reluctant to compromise their privacy?

I believe that the answer to (1) is likely to be yes. It makes sense rationally, and there are also psychological experiments performed that support this thesis.

The answer to (2) is more complex and is a combination of laziness and fear. A more publicly available life puts pressure on you to raise your moral standards and generally behave better. Lazy people are not attracted by this proposition. There is also a notion that public knowledge of your activities puts you at risk of being exposed to crime of different sorts, from stalking to burglaries (when your Twitter feed gives away that your home is empty for example). To some degree this could be a valid fear.

But if the answer to (1) is yes, then we owe it to ourselves to make sure the problems of (2) are solved. It is not a matter of protecting our privacy, but of protecting our right to be safe in public.

If you are like me and are interested in how people work, keep reading.

In one of the books I’ve read this week (by Jonathan Haidt) there is a discussion about the law of reciprocity. This law (as I presume you all know) states that we humans find it very difficult not to return a favor we have recieved. There is a lot of research done on this by Richard Caldini that I won’t go into here, but it’s awesome. His book “Influence” is by the way required reading for anyone claiming to be a communicator.

Haidt links this law of reciprocity to evolution. It has been a very succesful bit of evolution; basically a law of collaboration, to a degree which separates us from most animals.

Collaboration requires language, which we have developed, and we have also developed gossip as a means of encouraging good collaborative morale (the importance of gossip is therefore gravely underestimated). But what’s interesting is that it seems that this feature is what has required us to develop such enormous brainpower, and thus enormous brains, and thus enormous heads. It turns out that the size of a mamals brain is proportionate to the size of the group it must keep track of, and the average human peer group is somewhere around 150 people.

In fact, we have such big heads now that we humans can barely give birth to our young. And when we do, the toddlers are just half baked (to keep head size down), unable to move properly, and have to be carried around for two years or so.

This incredible evolutionary sacrifice as a trade off for social skills puts new perspective on the importance of social networking and gossip doesn’t it?

Now there has been a revolution! We have invented Facebook and other similar social aids to help us keep track of an even larger number of people.

Weighing the evolutionary sacrifice of headsize against the invention of Facebook can therefore only lead to one conclusion. Facebook will eventually shrink our heads.

What’s better than a free lunch? Well, sometimes, the lunch that you pay for is better. Here is why:

Lionell Robbins’ definition of economics from 1935: “Economics is a science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses” doesn’t accurately describe the field of economics as noted in the late nineties by the “new economy”-supporters as well as the more modern Long Tailers. It’s the scarcity paradigm that doesn’t hold true in the digital age, where the marginal cost for information approaches zero. You know this already. The same holds true for ideas, or does it?

Not really. It’s true that the cost of distributing ideas approaches zero, but the value of that idea can both increase and decrease depending on the distribution. In the advertising sense, spreading an idea makes it more valuable (like We Try Harder or Just Do It), but spreading the ownership of the idea makes value decrease (like Jeep or Rollerblades unless you stay associated to being “The Original and Best”). You’ll see the same thing when you look at super high value web services like Facebook, You Tube or Flickr. They don’t give away the shares in the companies do they?

I intend to apply this structure to my own business of Walter Naeslund and here is how:

Here at Walter Naeslund we come up with a lot of ideas for different brands, but a lot of times there are reasons why we don’t have any luck approaching that brand with our idea. The brand owner may have a retainer deal with another agency eating up their budget, or they can be unable or unwilling to pay for our services for some other reason.

So we don’t approach them with our idea, and the idea goes to waste. But for spontaneous ideas, the marginal cost of putting the idea out there is zero. Therefore the idea or strategy or innovation or concept will be published here on walternaeslund.blogspot.com. Anyone who is able or willing to pay for a particular concept will see it promptly removed from this blog, though the idea may have been exposed to competitors or media already. For some that may be fine. Otherwise you can make a retainer deal or a running bill deal with us beforehand, and then no idea within that deal will be published. What you pay for then is your very own focused ownership of the idea (higher value) and we will then work on making it spread (higher value again) with your ownership retained.

Ideas put on the blog can of course be taken without payment, but the idea will have a publishing date and a moral ownership that is ours. Using it will put you behind moral bars and we will have a “ideas stolen”-ticker on the blog with special events where we celebrate you. (At least we’ll get a fun party out of our work, right?)

Fun huh?
The worlds first Open Source advertising agency. It’s an experiment. We call it WNOA: Walter Naeslund Open Agency.