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.]

The mini bus died. All of a sudden we feel the stench of burnt clutch, and minutes later everything just stopped. But more on that later. First a brief report on the highlight of the year so far for me – The Sweden Social Web Camp!

Anyone who has ever read Ayn Rand’s epic novel Atlas Shrugged will understand what I’m talking about. In the novel, the most talented, creative and productive people gather in what they call Galt’s Gulch to get away from the world of politics, envy and empty words. This event was just like that. Everywhere you turned you could talk to intelligent and interesting people with a ton of knowledge in different areas. Rarely have I enjoyed a conference this much! Sleeping in a tent was the final and perfect touch to the weekend.

The entire Saturday was filled with sessions on all kinds of topics related to the social web – most of very high quality. One of my absolute favorites was SEO-expert Simon Sundén’s talk on SEO.

But the most valuable aspects of SSWC was perhaps after all the informal interactions taking place all over the island. I could name several here, but notably Dan Carlberg of Bloglovin who is one of the brightest people I’ve met. I picked up a bunch of great ideas and hopefully contributed with a few. Check out #sswc on Twitter to tap into the conversation.

And what about the van? Well – no trip is complete without failure, right? Ours came when our van broke down on the way back to Stockholm. With a smoking clutch the van died just outside of Norrköping. After hitching a ride with one of Simon’s friends, we got on the train in Nyköping. And that’s where I am right now, writing to you.

Thank’s to all involved for an amazingly successful weekend, and a special thanks to Thomas Wennström who put it all together for us!

I often refer from my private Swedish blog to this one, but rarely do it the other way around. Today, I will make an exception because of extraordinary and dangerous events that have taken place in Swedish politics and courtrooms recently. So if you read Swedish and intend to vote in this Sunday’s elections, please read this.

Times change, and it’s always easy to be smart when looking back. But when you’re back there, things are rarely that obvious. We can laugh at Bill Gates for saying that 640k of RAM is all anyone will ever need (or did he?), but predicting the future is a whole different ball game.

An excellent book on the topic that I would recommend is “Fooled By Randomness”. Read it if you haven’t read it, and I promise you’ll see things differently.

The same is true for our world. Sure, we could envision social media in a way. Personally I played a social game called “Global War” on a self hosted BBS (predecessor of websites) in the 1980′s, and the “reply all” button in any email system was a form of many to many communications (Social Media), but few people could forsee the incredible impact and breadth that many to many-communications would come to have. Or mobile phones for that matter. Or that two youngsters in a garage could launch the world’s biggest television network in just two years from scratch and with no money (YouTube).

And that makes me wonder – what will have happened in another two years? Or five? (I guess going beyond five doesn’t make any sense). This evolutionary jolt is not over yet, and I believe there are more empires to be built on the potential that this enormous technological and behavioral shift has created. In two years, when looking back, this will be obvious. And we’ll all say “I could have done that”.