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.

Money is important to us. Control over our life situation is too. But then, how can we possibly accept Internet banks as they are today. How can we possibly think that it’s okay to, say, not be able to get a visual overview analysis of our expenses and incomes? How can we possibly put up with the long and complicated OCR-numbers or basic search functionality? And how is it possible that we have such user hostile login procedures?

I can’t present all my ideas for my perfect Internet banking experience in just one post, but I can show you three examples of what Internet banking would look like if I had my say, and also what I think it will look like in just a couple of years. Here we go!

Facebook Secure Connect

Logging in to your Internet bank today is more or less of a hassle depending on your particular bank, but it’s nevertheless a hassle. Banks have been lagging behind the times here, focusing on security, but not on usability. The market forces will inevitably push us closer to an optimal trade off between security and usability. We see people leaving their bank today, simply because the login security solution is too complex (using USB-hardware for example).

To creatively solve this problem outside identification providers will step in. On of those will be Facebook. Our online identity is contained in our Facebook accounts, our Google Profiles, Twitter accounts and other services that we haven’t even learned the names of yet. We have come to trust them for logging in to other services now, and since more advanced transactions are taking place using this login by the minute (buying major chunks of advertising for example), a need for more secure identification procedures will arise. A second version of Facebook Connect called Facebook Secure Connect will be launched using secure authorization technology and will eventually be adopted by the banks. One bank will lead this evolution and the others will be both inspired and forced to follow.

Facebook will lead the way in this development, but Google will be quick to follow. To compete with Facebook, Google will go on a marketing rampage for secure OpenID and couple with Google Budget Analytics:

Google Budget Analytics

The amount of control you have over your budget and cash flow today at your ordinary Internet bank is really a joke. You get a list of your transactions and not much else. Besides that, it’s also really messy to go back and check out your history. My own bank has recently made it possible to export to Excel XLS-format, but give me a break – XLS? In 2010?

Instead, when you log in to your bank using secure OpenID all transactions will automatically be indexed, fully searchable and categorized. You will be able to analyze your economy at all levels from the very basic (cigarettes, food, rent) to the very advanced with cluster analysis, seasonal trends, forecasts and goal tracking.

In step two, Google will also launch Google Budget Analytics For Business where you can do your books and account distributions more or less automatically. This will kick ass for small businesses.

Facebook’s reply to this will be to enable sharing services where you can share selected transactions and events in your feed, much like what Blippy does today. Come to think of it, Facebook will probably buy Blippy.

Open Banking API

Finally, banks will realize that they are best at doing what banks do, and will hand over interface design and function to the experts. Banks will release secure API-sets to allow third party specialized internet bank companies to connect to their systems. This will in turn open up the market for hardcore competition. Google will be way ahead already and will release Google Bank which will be an big expansion of Google Budget Analytics. Here, they will also have tight integration with Google Spreadsheets, and will also allow for seamless integration with Google Chat, Google Voice and Gmail for interacting with your bank’s customer service.

And what about Apple – the self proclaimed customer experience rulers of the universe? They won’t remain on the sidelines for long.

Man, I wish I had the cash to go into this one myself. Call me if you know any investors who would like to change the world with me on this one.

Update: Interesting link about the poor quality of internet banking (in Swedish).

I love technology, and can’t help myself when it comes to trying out new services and dissecting new gear into the tiniest spec-sheet detail.  Most of the time I do  this only out of love for technology. Trying out a super unstable alpha or beta of a new service or app is for example usually a huge hassle, with frequent crashes and misery. Google Wave was one such example. When I first laid my hands on one of the Wave sandbox accounts back in July of this year, the thing was just a mess. It crashed all the time and was rather useless. Still, I loved playin with it, just for the sake of the amazing ambition and engineering behind it.

Recently, I started running Wave on my iPhone and natively on OSX (well, not really natively, it’s Gears-powered) via Waveboard. It’s crude, but is sort of works. Running Wave on the iPhone may not be super useful yet, but absolutely necessary if they want it to replace email of course. Or replace any means of communication for that matter. Mobile is not mobile anymore, it’s just a compromise between interface and size in a computer.

But here comes the surprise: A couple of weeks ago, I got my hands on an early alpha version of Google’s browser Chrome for OSX. I expected a horrible unstable shell of a browser, but perhaps some interesting indications of what Chrome will offer us when the first real versions are released. I fired up Chrome and started playing with it. This thing was fast. It was running really smoothly. It was stable. After a while I started using it more and more for all kinds of things, even though it apparently sucks privacy-wise, and Google advices against using it as a browser yet. Despite these flaws and others, such as buggy printing, I can’t help myself. The user experience compared to all other OSX-browsers I’ve tried it just so much snappier. I use it all the time. Can’t wait for a sharp version of this thing.

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).

Just found a “new” bus going door to door from my Sofo apartment to my Noho office. Perfect! Especially considering this mornings blizzard. (Ok. I’m exaggerating). Today is presentation day, and game days are my favorite days. Especially when you know that the keynote presentation on your MBP humbly kicks ass! Today is one of those days.

But, getting there was not without hurdles, and for this is why I would like to pass out a question here that you may have the answer to:

I love Google apps, but I have a hard time making presentations there look good. Slideshare feels like a bit of a hassle, though it might just be me being lazy. I end up back with Keynote all the time, and I hate how we always end up in versioning trouble.

Now, I know you, my dear readers, are the creme de la creme of thinkers and speakers, and would love to hear your opinion – which presentations software/service rocks and why?

We may have some exciting news in store for you for tomorrow, so today is a non-writing-all-working day. Instead I’ll show you my favorite clip from my favorite sport, which was posted on my favorite web service by one of my favorite tweeps.

Enjoy.

I had a dream last night. In my dreams there are often all kinds of strange inventions and artifacts that don’t exist in real life. Most of the time, these are really weird and just plain dumb. But every once in a while something truly useful pops up. Last night was one of those times.

In my dream somebody called me on my phone, and when I looked at the phone there was not only the name of the person calling, but also the subject of the proposed call. Caller ID with a subject line. Just like with email. Wouldn’t that be really useful? If you’re anything like me, you often answer a call, even when busy, just to “see if it’s anything important”. With this functionality, that would not be necessary. You could also see on your missed calls what they where about. I think that would be absolutely awesome!

Wouldn’t it also be fairly easy to implement? At least in a service like Skype?

If you’re in a position to do so, please steal this idea and implement it. Consider it a Creative Commons license.

If you’re not, help me spread this idea so that we can get it implemented. I just want to see it happen. If you’re on Twitter, link back to this post and use #CallerSubject.

[EDIT: There seems to be some similar patent out there already. I guess that's why it isn't implemented. What can we conclude from that? And what should we call it? #ideasquatting maybe?]

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.

Yesterday, BBH Labs wrote an interesting post commenting on some of my thoughts on internet transparency and gossip. The post itself, as well as the comments, are well worth a read. Since it’s one of my favorite topics, I naturally wanted in on the discussion myself, but as I started writing a comment on their blog, I realized it would probably be a bit long for a comment, and instead decided to make it a follow up post here.

Q: Is there any evidence of better behavior and less cheating?

A: I think we can see plenty of evidence to support the fact that the breakdown of brand privacy forces brands to behave better. User comments and ratings are in fact the backbone of much of e-commerce, and are really a form of digital gossip. Companies behaving badly are exposed all over the place. Companies behaving well are to some extent rewarded, even though gossip gravitates towards the negative for natural reasons (it’s often more expensive in nature to make the wrong decision than valuable to make the right one). On the individual level, Googling is a standard part of hiring these days, and cheating husbands and wives are exposed all over the internet every day. Just to mention a couple of examples.

Before language evolved, cheaters were easy to spot in small tribes, but not in larger societies. When language evolved, efficiency of gossip increased and we could now crack down on cheaters and reward contributers in bigger groups. Now, with the social web, gossip is made even more efficient, thus making it possible to spot cheaters and reward contributers in very large groups, spread out all over the globe. It’s the same basic psychology and the same economics behind it, but more efficient means of communication enable us to increase scale. The economics of gossip are very much the same as internet economics, or information economics in general: Providing gossip is virtually free, while receiving it can be very valuable. This creates growth. As a fun excercise, you can try applying these economics to the “piracy”-debate.

“Q”: On one hand it all sounds a little Utopian (and some might argue, less fun). On the other, it does sound rather attractive.

A: It may sound utopian, but it’s really not. I’m not talking about perfect transparency with zero transaction and coordination costs (which would be utopian and impossible). Instead, I’m talking about an increase in efficiency, which leads to a more precise control system that is harder to cheat. Harder, but not impossible.

And I really don’t think that it’s a question of attractive or less fun, but rather of us increasing our ability to coordinate as a species. An increase in ability to coordinate enables us to coordinate more quickly, thus becoming more adaptive to changes in our environment. Those who adapt the quickest to change will be the most fit for their environment, and the fittest will survive. If we let this continue without destroying the efficiency with legislation, this is where we will gravitate towards by Darwinistic law. It’s somewhat like asking if life became less fun or more attractive when language was introduced. I can’t answer that, and I don’t know if it’s a relevant question. I do think that it made us more civilized, and I think that the web will have the same effect.

Q: For other societal constructs, such as a nation/regime, hard to say. The world had pretty honest information on the Iran situation, but that didn’t make the regime behave more honestly. On the other hand if
victims in genocidal warfare in Africa had means of disseminating real time information would the world be more inclined to intervene and act more honestly by upholding basic human rights?

A: There are a few different questions involved here, and I won’t go into the specific situation for each country, but on the structural level you can say this: There is a huge shift in power going on all over the world. The monopolies of information distribution previously (and sometimes currently) held by institutions by economic neccesity, are falling apart. And this makes those depending on such monopolies less powerful. For these institutions, the social web poses a threat, and the only way to stop the threat is to stop entire services, and indeed this is what we are seeing in some of these regimes.

Unfortunately for them, this is also very costly in terms of not tapping into the growth engine of gossip and digital gossip that we spoke about earlier, and will leave them with the choice of handing over power by unblocking internet services or loosing out in the competition with free countries. Ultimately, I think and hope that fighting internet freedom is a loosing battle.

If they only knew what a great idea they really had! Forsman & Bodenfors just came up with a new site for Svenska Kyrkan (The Church of Sweden) where you can submit your prayer to the site. The prayer is then keyworded on the site so that you can find other prayers on the same topic.

What makes this idea so great is that it suddenly makes The Church of Sweden relevant for a vast number of current topics like swine flu or economic crisis. Just like the church is relevant across a broad spectrum of topics in real life, it becomes equally relevant online. It also produces thousands of pages with relevant cross links. Brilliant.

Unfortunately this is also where the brilliance ends and it becomes apparent that Forsman & Bodenfors haven’t understood what a great idea they really had. Why is that? Well – much of the power of this idea, say a potential 20-50% of visits to the site, comes from the fact that the church becomes a relevant hit on Google for so many different topics. Or would have become just that, if they would have been at all visible to Google. And they aren’t, simply because F&B don’t know Google. Forsman & Bodenfors have chosen Flash as their technology for this campaign, which in it’s standard form isn’t indexable by Google. And they haven’t done any of the standard workarounds to make it so. To Google, this looks like thousands of identical and uninteresting pages with different names. Google looks at it, scratches it’s head, and throws all of them in the garbage without indexing anything. Let alone indexing on a wide variety of topics.

You can see above what the site looks like. You can see the selected prayer in the middle with keywords in different colors and the share buttons. Pretty, but utterly useless from a Google perspective. Because if you take a look at how Google sees http://svenskakyrkan.se/be, this is what Google sees:

Google sees three pages instead of the potential thousands. One containing the main page containing the Flash file, the Flash file itself described with this beautiful text: “txt Header instructions txt1 txt2 txt3 txt4 Header instructions txt Header instructions txt txt Lorem ipsum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, …”, and the fail page “the prayer doesn’t exist”.

In plain English this is a complete failure, and an awesome display of the problem most agencies are facing – they are smart, but they live in the past.

Besides the Google perspective, there is also the perspective of user behavior. Users want intuitive interaction. It is not intuitive to use an embed-code to embed text. For video, there is a purpose for the embed code, but for text? No. People naturally want to be able to copy and paste the text directly, preferably with links and colors and everything. That way we also get relevant links all over the web linking back to the Church of Sweden site on relevant topics. THAT would have been brilliant.

Conclusion – This is really an excellent idea, but the excellence is there by mistake, and is not taken advantage of at all simply because of lacking knowledge of basic SEO. It’s really sad. Especially since it would have been so easy to solve by using DHTML or even underlying indexable content.

One thing puzzled me though. How could something like this receive thousands of entries? Truly a mystery. At least until I switched on the television in my hotel room and saw television commercials for the internet campaign! Advertising for… advertising! What on earth?! To get traffic to the site you try to buy this traffic with television dollars?! A site like this one should get at least 20-50% of its traffic via search, which would have been free, self regenerating, and incredibly easy to achieve.

Suggestion – (Hi friends at F&B, I know you’re reading this and you know I love you, but I HAD to write this, since it’s such a great example to learn from. Please accept my free advice here as a return favor).

What if you would have used existing and established services such as Facebook status updates and Twitter posts (#whatever) to complement your web interface as a way to input prayers?  And an email adress (spam filtered of course) and an SMS-service (free of course)[edit: they have SMS-input]? What if your output of the prayers would have been much more flexible, mashable, widgetized and projected at the churches of Stockholm? Or whatever. Make it bigger. Give it presence.

But more than anything – learn SEO. Optimize that thing! Optimize it! Because really, what you came up with, apparently without realizing it, was a really good idea! You have great brains! But by implementing it the way you did, you created a bomb without a fuse.
For some reason, this image comes to mind.

Yeah, we're down with social media.

[Edit: Article about the site in Swedish: ]