So I finally got my first day off from work in what feels like a lifetime. It also feels like a blink of an eye. So amazingly much has happened this year, and at the same time, I have never had a year pass this quickly on me before.

I’m sitting here at one of my favorite cafés on Skånegatan in Stockholm trying to write some sort of re-cap of one of the craziest years of my life.  (Read part 1 here). Here it goes:

How 2009 Was Like a Bad Action Movie and Almost Brought Me To Bankruptcy

The difference between 2009 and 2010 was almost ridiculous. 2009 was probably the toughest year of my life. It started with a throat surgery and an extremely uncertain startup existence where I borrowed the 100 000 SEK necessary to legally start up Honesty AB and went on to setup Honesty’s first office at a cost of over 20 000 SEK per month. You can imagine what that did to my private economy.

I rented Honesty’s first computer with my apartment as collateral because I couldn’t afford to buy one. I ran out of money completely twice and had to leave the first office and move back home to my apartment to which my very dedicated project manager intern Emelie Evenstedt had to come to work every day despite the fact that it didn’t even have a kitchen at the time. I even had a real estate agent come to my apartment to tell me how much it was worth so that I would know if I could sell it to bail me out of my loans (It could. Barely). Needless to say, starting up Honesty was pretty bare bones. I guess hardcore is a better word actually.

Towards the end of the year the Honesty story had taken me from getting close to personal bankruptcy to having meetings with presidential election committees in Manila and weapons traders in dark hotel restaurants (yes, all this sounds completely incredible but is true. I should probably mention too for the record that these people were closely related to democratic governments and VERY far from thugs that you see in movies).

These particular meetings completely shattered my prejudice about weapons traders. At least the ones I met were very warm, caring, friendly and smart people with whom I had late night philosophy discussions and developed friendships. I decided not to work with them in any way professionally since I don’t want to work with tobacco or weapons for personal ethical reasons, but there was always total understanding about this and never any pressure. It’s strange how something like this expands your view of the world. There are so many worlds out there that we don’t have a clue about but that are inhabited by people like you and me with very similar minds, dreams and emotions.

How 2009 Generated No Cash But a Ton of Value

In the face of all challenges, Honesty survived. Last year at the end of 2009 we had the christmas party for Honesty at Carmen, a local (very) low price range restaurant where the beer is half the price from well… everywhere else and where the atmosphere very much reflects just that. Did we go there because that was all Honesty could afford? Not really. In fact, Honesty couldn’t afford even this at the time. Everybody had to pay for their own plankstek and 29kr stor stark.

That is where 2010 started. But even though the treasure chest may have been empty, a ton of other value had been created. We had managed to put the Honesty brand on the map (even if sometimes in a provocative way). We had managed to bring together an amazing dream team of people who all came in to start work in October (for this reason we use this date as the official launch date of Honesty), effectively putting an end to one of the loneliest periods of my life. We had managed to get invited to pitches. And we had managed to set up a new office in an old garage.

2010 Started in Style!

The new year 2010 started in style with me and Martin putting up our brand new sign on the door with our first logo. It was a pretty emotional moment which gave at least a symbolic sense of stability. We realized when preparing the window that we hadn’t invested in cleaning products for the office yet, and you can actually see the bottle of Absolute Vodka that we stole from the neighbor and that we used to clean the window in the bottom left corner of the picture below.

Besides style, the year also started in Cava (one step up from cheap Carmen beer) with the Stena Metall account landing at Honesty. I must say that I’m am incredibly happy and grateful to the open minded and courageous marketing department at Stena Metall for having faith in us despite our lack of other major clients at the time. We have since delivered creative that we really believe in for Stena Metall, working towards charging the brand with emotional values and have picked up a couple of awards along the way. And while awards are fun, I’m most proud of the results we have seen in the metrics. This works. The Stena team will always be part of the Honesty heart and story as something of a modern Medici family who saw potential and invested in Honesty before anybody else. So Ninni, Katrin, Carina, Peter and all the other awesome west-coasters, I want you to know that you have played an important part in the history of this agency!

How Johan Carlsson Led Me To a Hero of Mine

Another important person in this story, at least for me, has been Johan Carlsson. This is a guy who literally walked into our garage office and smacked a brief on the table. “Solve this in 4 hours” was his pitch to us. Johan, besides being a client, has been an important support and inspiration for me personally as we have similar crazy entrepreneurial minds. We also have very different backgrounds so we complement eachother creatively really well. He’s the kind of guy who simply calls up people like designer star Stefan Sagmeister just because he liked what he saw him talk about on TED.com and books a meeting. Me and Johan actually went to New York together to have Stefan as a designer on the team. I’ve always admired Stefan as a designer and person, so needless to say, this was a big moment for me (though, as you can see in the picture, I was jetlagged to death).

In these workshops we created the new brand PFO which is one of the cooler brands I’ve been involved in creating. The product itself is an amazing GPS positioned assault alarm bracelet which looks like a fashion bracelet until triggered. When triggered, a SWAT-like team from G4S finds you and saves you within minutes. All this, which sounds very much like extremely high end celebrity security actually exists today, is patented, and comes at a low price that sounds completely impossible when you first hear it. Not any mind could make something like this happen. And PFO? What’s that? It’s just an acronym which looks cool… until you trigger the alarm. Then it changes into PLEASE FUCK OFF. It’s a wording equivalent of the product.

How Honesty Turned Into a Real Agency

Around February we had started gaining momentum in production and sent off our first invoices. As some cash started to come in we could start investing in very basic stuff like a server (no, we didn’t even have that before), a printer and studio materials. It’s almost hard to believe today that we didn’t even have these things back then.

Honesty’s fiscal year is broken on the last of june which means the first fiscal year of Honesty is actually a year and a half between February 1 2009 and June 30 2010. This also means that we closed our first fiscal year 6 months ago. The first year ended with a turn-over of about 4 000 000 SEK with 2 480 000 SEK in profit. At this point none of the partners had received a single salary, hence the large profit margin. For me personally, this meant almost a year without income and I had survived on my new speaking career that was spawned out of necetity and sheer survival instinct. Looking at this financial result gave me a ton of hope. Indeed, this would be a tiny step for a normal agency but it was a giant leap for Honesty.

The Halebop Story

Besides making sure to really deliver results to our main client Stena Metall, we literally worked our bums of for another key project in the Honesty story – the pitch for mobile network youth brand Halebop. I have made a promise to myself to never count the actual number of hours we put into that pitch, but it was A LOT of hours!

We also put in a lot of people on the case and the garage office was becoming very very very crowded as you can see in this picture.

We decided to move and ended up in a much bigger place slightly closer to the city.

In May of 2010 – Halebop stepped into our new office with huge smiles on their faces and two magnum bottles of Champagne. We had won!

Halebop was a major turning point for Honesty, and today, there is a lot of love between the two of us. We are similar in culture in a way since we’re both underdog challengers, and perhaps that is part of why we can push the envelope quite far in what we do for them. We have created advertising that’s so far from convention we seem to have shocked the market into a renewed interest in the brand. The interaction around the Halebop communication is fantastic as you can see in the linked post and all across the web if you try for example a YouTube search for the brand name. And it’s just as much thanks to the marketing department at Halebop who had the vision to see where all these crazy sketches that we showed early on could land with the audience. Annika, Karolina, Åsa, Rune, and all the others bad ass marketing minds in the magical bat cave on Ringvägen – I applaude you for your courage and vision! You are the ones who made the metrics we have both seen possible.

We have also won several smaller accounts over the year and one major new account recently that I will tell you about soon. We are also involved in a few pitches. And of course we are looking at some new hires to manage the new accounts. We are not rushing new pitches at the moment though, because I believe that priority number one always has to be to take care of our current clients. Our regulars. They made us happen. They’re family.

How Setting Impossible Goals Creates Impossible Results

Next week we’ll be half way through Honesty’s second fiscal year and we did set a bold goal for this second year. We said that we were going to grow at least 500% and I did get a lot of mocking comments about that in Dagens Media when I said it in an interview. I have no hard feelings about that. I would perhaps have thought the same, but we are now half way through the fiscal year already and are starting to see something crazy on the horizon.

We actually seem likely to not only reach that goal of 500% growth, but surpass it. We are ahead of the curve and are now looking at close to 600% on a linear prediction. And as a lover of bold goals, I’ll hereby revise my goal up to 800% just for fun so my critics can have something new to mock me about. It really doesn’t matter. 250% would have made me just as happy. Looking back at where I was a year and a half ago – broke, without an office and with my home up as collateral – I think that I will now head off to enjoy my first day of vacation in a long time and perhaps treat myself to an extra large hot chocolate.

Drop me an email or something if you want to meet up with me during the Christmas holidays. I’ll probably stay in town and  always enjoy meeting new people.

Merry Christmas and a ton of love to all of you who have been a part of this! You know who you are. I love you all!

__

Ps. Update: Thanks for all the amazing support, emails, SMSs and comments on this post (and during these two years of course)! It really warms my heart. One of the most common questions has been what we chose to replace Carmen for Christmas dinner. The answer? Dinner party at our office actually. It has become quite a comfy place these days. And the food? Catered from Bistro Voltaire of course.

It’s time to round up the year in more ways than one. Our advertising agency Honesty’s first fiscal year just ended a month ago, and I’ve been treating myself to some well deserved vacation on a sailboat in the Stockholm archipelago. And for those of you who have never been here, it’s quite a place:

It has been a strange but amazing year. Definitely tough. Probably the toughest year of my life. In February 2009 I had just left McCann (been fired is probably a more accurate description actually, I was a bit of a pain). I was on the street with no job, no financial stability to speak of and, in the typical ironic style of the game of life, no voice since I had throat surgery planned for the day after I left McCann. I couldn’t even call anybody to tell them about my predicament. Probably just as well as I was pretty high on painkillers as you can see below. Nevertheless it was what one could call bad timing.

At this point all options were open. I guess I could have joined another agency, I could have left the business altogether for something else, or… I could start something of my own. But as I was laying there in the hospital bed, I made a decision. I knew the concept we had at Verymuchlogo (the agency I left) was basically right, though somewhat crude, but the project was slightly off center in the staffing since we were missing an important piece of the Ocean’s 11 team and we were lacking the right production philosophy. Now was the time to make it all perfect from the start. But it was not going to be an easy ride.

In February 2009, still with pain in my throat and strong painkillers to fight it, I filed all the papers to start the advertising agency Honesty. To this day, I still have the original sign on the door of my apartment.

Shortly thereafter I moved into Honesty’s first office located in Forsman & Bodenfors’ old office on Hötorget in Stockholm.

Here I was hanging out with amazing people like Louise Hamilton and Daniel Jouseff, ping-ponging ideas and meeting tons of people.

Great meetings were held with everything from creatives and strategists to potential financiers and clients. The office was an expensive place for only one person to pay for, but looking back, it turned out that it actually paid for itself many times over.

And it was an important time, albeit painful – being on my own like that was a quite scary experience since I had nobody but myself to rely on for basic stuff like food and rent. It was important because it forced me out on the ledge. If I would have taken the safe route, Honesty would have been dead and gone a long time ago. Instead, I spent time digging through our industry and surrounding industries, like SEO, social media consulting and business consulting, to figure out what was being done right and wrong in our industry, or put into business terms – where the inefficiencies were that could be exploited. I saw (and see) the music industry as related and wrote a lot about that too back then. Check out the walternaeslund.com blog posts from February here.

Besides doing some smaller consulting gigs to stay afloat, my persistent bloggin was starting to pay off with more readers coming in every day and public speaking gigs starting to pop up, both in Sweden and abroad. I fell in love with the stage and it’s still a great marriage!

I also helped out as a consultant where I could. One of these gigs that I’m really happy and proud to have been a part of was the “Sweden’s Most Swedish Job”-campaign that Syrup planned for during the spring and executed in the summer. It was an awesome campaign, not least PR-wise, where we sent around a guy all over Sweden to rediscover the country and stay at STF’s (the client’s) hostels.

It was also an opportunity for me to work with the fantastic Henrik Frenne who is, by the way, a one-man-agency in himself. (Grab him if you can afford him).

My lifestyle at this point was anything but luxurious. All my money went to my expensive office and pitch projects and living expenses. There was one exception however: Our oyster Thursdays. Here me and my friends met up for oysters and discussed life. These Thursdays did chip away on my lean budget, but still I really think they helped keep me sane.

Around this time we started to throwing the epic Daniel & Walter-parties at the Stockholm club Collage. At least we thought they were epic. We always had a great dinner at the club before firing up the turntables and partying until 2-ish. Also a great way to keep my spirits and creativity up (we had a new theme every week).

Summer came. In many ways this was a huge frustration. The ad business slowed down and went into vacation state. All I wanted to do was work, but things around me were slow. Looking back I can see that this was actually really good. I fixed up my apartment and read up on a lot of stuff that I didn’t have time for before, like evolutionary psychology and the psychology of attraction, themes that are now at the core of my lecturing and overall strategy.

In September I wrote a blog post that exploded like a bomb. The post was about Forsman & Bodenfors’ campaign for The Church of Sweden and was intended as a clear and good example to show what happens when you design for man as man was fifteen years ago, in the pre-Google era, rather than designing for man as man is today, including the augmentation of the mind that search engines provide. Over the course of that week, my blog traffic doubled, tripled and quadroupled before hitting the Swedish advertising press in the form of an article in Resumé. At most I had six times my ordinary traffic on the blog going to that particular article. A week later I wrote about Lowe Brindfors’ new site, just to show that it is really not a Forsman & Bodenfors problem but an industry problem. Agencies need to get on the bus and design for man as man is today! During those two weeks, we had tons of traffic to the agency site as well, with all the big agencies topping our visitor charts. That week several of the biggest agencies where out searching for SEO-experts to hire. Ironically, we ended up on the top list of SEO-consultancies only some weeks later. The question I always get asked is whether the posts were a PR-trick or not, and my answer is: not really. I just told things as they were. Including screen shots. Sometimes a simple truth carries a long way.

Later that fall all the remaining 5 partners in the planned Ocean’s 11 team had signed on to the project, had gotten on board and received their shares. By October we were up and running. The old place was now way small and we moved into Honesty office #2 in Hornstull.

We were pitching small stuff and bigger stuff and were on a winning streak. To date we have withdrawn from two pitches and won the rest. Such an amazing payoff for all this hard work.

One of the ones we withdrew from was for, wait for it, the presidential campaign in the Philippines. That’s one you don’t do every day. This amazing ride was a great adventure including a week long very intense trip to Manila.

Instead we got to work on a dream project with one of my favorite designers Stefan Sagmeister and went over to New York to meet up and do workshops.

I’ve been a fan of his work on stuff for everything from superstars like Lou Reed and The Rolling Stones to small fun projects for a long time and also felt much appreciation for his philosophy and view on life. You can check him out speaking at TED.com here:

As a bonus, I also discovered and fell in love with Ace Hotel in New York. Fantastic place and a place I keep coming back to.

Things were starting to pick up speed now at Honesty. We added two employees to the staff, one art director and one account manager, and some freelancers and just pushed on full speed ahead. Before long we had outgrown Honesty office #2 as well.

By now we had won the accounts for Halebop and Stena Metall along with a bunch of other smaller accounts, and moved into our present space near Mariatorget: Honesty office #3.

This was a perfect stop for us where we could regroup and search for a perfect space without being too crammed. We have a couple of ideas for where our next space Honesty office #4 should be but haven’t quite decided yet.

Our first fiscal year, which was actually a year and a half, was closed on the last of June. Most of our real business has taken place from February, and that was an important lesson: it takes some time to start an advertising agency from scratch without financing. But when I got those books in my lap I was real proud, of myself, of my partners, and of everybody else who have made this happen. It’s just f*#!n cool that we could make it happen.

Before summer started I bought a piano. I was worth it. That’s where I sit down when I come home from work to clear my head before writing to you. It’s been an amazing year and an amazing ride. If you ever get the chance to do something like this, then do it! And if you don’t get a chance like that, make one.

When I got fired I called my mentor Magnus to tell him the news (well… I couldn’t talk remember, so i mumbled and whispered). I remember very clearly his reaction: “Walter – that’s GREAT news! It’s probably the best thing that has happened to you since puberty!”.

I guess he was right.

Have a great day!

Unlike me (note to self), Honesty’s two creative directors (and partners) are humble guys. They rarely speak to the press and prefer to close the door to their room, pour a cup of coffee, put their feet up on the table, and just churn out ideas like mad. That’s just how they are. But in today’s Resumé (“The Swedish Ad Age” to make some kind of reference for you foreign readers), they gave one of their rare interviews. It’s hard not to love these guys, and sometimes I wish I was a bit more like them.

The interview is only (as of yet) available in the print edition of Resumé.

Really proud of you Martin & Petrus. Keep on doing what you do! ♥

One of the major benefits of my line of work is that I get to work with a lot of amazing people from all over the world. They are consultants, designers, copywriters, strategists, marketing managers, logistics experts, event people, translators, web developers and all kinds of other specialists. Here are three of the more impressive people I’ve had the benefits of working with so far:

Magnus Lindkvist – Trendspotter, Strategist & Professional Speaker (Sweden)

Trendspotter, brand strategist and speaker of the year in Sweden 2009 Magnus Lindkvist is a one of a kind personality. He’s big, loud, intense and always carries either a big smile or a concerned analytical look that mostly resembles a human supercomputer. Magnus can see the matrix.

I worked with Magnus during my time at Identity Works in Stockholm and had some of the best strategy discussions I’ve had to date. Magnus has also been a great mentor for my own career as a speaker.

If you ever get the opportunity to sit down for a coffee with Magnus (could be hard as he does a couple of hundred lectures per year, including TED 2009) you are more likely to learn something about yourself than about the world. That’s how he approaches things. And that is also what makes him interesting. As a trendspotter, he will try to make you see for yourself rather than telling you what the future will be.

If you have the chance, go listen to one of Magnus’ talks and check out his book “Everything We Know is Wrong – a Trendspotter’s Handbook”.

Stefan Sagmeister – Designer (Austria/USA)

If you’re even remotely interested in design, Stefan Sagmeister doesn’t need any further introduction. He’s one of the great graphic designers of our time, and also one of the easiest people to work with that I’ve met. During a very intense two day workshop in New York a few weeks back we got more work done than I have in a long time, and what I realized is that there is a very productive and rare combination in being a great listener and being very clear in voicing your opinions. And being fun to be around. This is what Stefan is, and it’s a winning combination.

Stefan’s work includes stuff for Lou Reed, Rolling Stones, Adobe, Talking Heads and much much more. He’s also a frequent TED speaker with three different appearances to his credit.

Markku Mäntymaa – Producer (Finland)

You may not have heard of Markku. Yet. And he’s the only one of these three people who hasn’t spoken at TED. Yet. I traveled to Manila in the Philippines with Markku for an amazing week of work where we tried to figure out how on earth to pull off one of the most challenging tasks in my career, and he pulled through meeting after meeting like a machine with seemingly endless energy. I guess it figures that it is this guy who pulled off to get permissions for and produce an extreme sports event for Red Bull on… wait for it… Red Square in Moscow! How many producers do you know who could do that? Not many. I promise you. This is a hard working guy. The fact that he’s also a professional drummer with 20 or so years experience just makes him even cooler.

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.]

Since I drew the first napkin sketch of the Honesty agency in February there has been a lot of toil, sweat and tears. Today I can finally say that stage 2 is completed with the recruitment of Jesper Åström as the final piece of the puzzle. Jesper joins as new digital director alongside Simon Sundén and also the last of the six planned partners in the company.

Jesper has an impressive track record and has been working with everything from hardcore gambling traffic generation and conversion at WGP to making designer campaigns take off at H&M, we’re Jesper was responsible for social media and SEO globally. In short, he is like a combination of a special forces soldier and your best friend – a great guy with a lethal skill set.

Now is not the time to kick back and rest, and we’re all basically working around the clock, but there will be some kind of celebration. Perhaps a more luxurious lunch on friday.

It’s just a really happy day for me!

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.

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).

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

1. No H1′s or H2′s. Only H3′s here and there.
2. Non-optimal URL-structure.
3. Missing desriptions on many pages.
4. Titel on the following pages shouldn’t be “Work”: http://www.jungvonmatt.se/work/?id=69
5. There is a sitemap, but the case-pages are missing: http://www.jungvonmatt.se/sitemap.xml
6. 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.

[EDIT: Sorry. My bad. Was a bit quick there. The true result for this post is position 4, not 3. Thank you Simon Sundén for your correct result].

Correct results from Simon Sundén.

Didn’t mean to return to the Lowe Brindfors case, but since I got a few comments in defense of ignoring SEO, saying that Lowe Brindfors don’t need an optimized site “because people will simply search for lowebrindfors” I just wanted to show you a demonstration of why you still need it. Here is a screen shot from Google on exactly that search.

Did I say that WordPress and Thesis are fairly well optimized?

This is the English language search where my site ranks higher because it is in the English language, but it’s working it’s way up in the Swedish results as well and is now on page two. You can imagine what would have happened if my site would have been in Swedish, right?

And if you think that I should have searched for Lowe Brindfors or “Lowe Brindfors” instead in my experiment above, you can click the links to see those screen shots intstead. Basically the same result.

Simply put – poor SEO puts you at the mercy of pain-in-the-ass-people like myself.

Now do you believe me?