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.

Super happy to announce that I will be speaking at Marketing Week Live at Grand Hall Olympia in London next week June 29. Amazing gig that I’m really looking forward to. For some reason I’ve never had a chance to speak in England. I hope we have the same sense of humor.

The topic of the day will be the same one that I wrote about here a little while back: “Brush Your Teeth and Design for The Google Man”. I guess they liked the title. But on a more serious note I really think that a mindset where we’re lookin at online as part of our ordinary evolution, like fingers, teeth or motorcycles, is key to success in times of change. Not just in our business. This mindset makes us quick. It makes us smart. It makes us efficient. Really looking forward to the discussions after the talk. That’s where I learn. There are always tons of smart people at this type of event.

So if you’re in London on the 29th, I hope you can swing by and say hi! Looking forward to seeing you!

Kicking back for a well deserved five minutes in the red sofa at the office, a thought came to mind: Why do we store such huge amounts of food in distributed warehouses all across the city? I’m talking here about the grocery stores. I can understand that we need the small corner stores for when we need something right away, but for the bigger grocery shopping streaks, this seams to be inefficient. Perhaps contrary to what intuition tells us, shopping for groceries on the web should really make this middle buffer of city-distributed mini-warehouses unnecessary, giving us cheaper and fresher goods right?

If we order food online, the main distribution centrals can order everything on demand, and nothing will have to get old while being stored locally. It should also be environmentally smart, since discarded food comes at a huge environmental cost.

Just a thought from the red sofa.

Now back to tomorrow’s pitch presentation and coffee with some of Honesty’s new partners. Exciting times!

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: ]

Contrasts are what make life interesting. Yesterday I woke up here:

…from the sound of sheep walking around outside my tent. Today I woke up and threw myself into a cab to Arlanda to fly off to Oslo and Strömstad for the Bring Dialogue Conference ’09.

When I got here I realized I’d be staying here:

…at the luxury spa resort in Strömstad. Slightly different from camping – haha! It’s actually even nicer than what the picture shows.

But conferences are all about the people. The people at Social Web Camp were the elite of social media – almost like Sweden’s own R&D-department of digital communication. Here we have a similiar number of people from the business elite (at least from what I can tell so far). Probably as smart, as passionate, and as creative, but in slightly different fields. Also, we have some amazing speakers like Kjell A. Nordström, Micael Dahlén, Magnus Lindqvist, and Jan Bylund. Only to name a few. (Note that all but one are striking the same knuckles-in-chin-pose).

And then I haven’t even begun talking about the shellfish buffet that is planned on Koster for tommorow night.

Those of you who attended my session at the Social Web Camp got to see a preview of the talk I’m doing here. Stay tuned for Slideshare presentation that will be posted shortly. I’ll be discussing the evolution of gossip, good, and evil, draw parallels to social media, and also present thoughts on strategy for approaching this new breakdown of brand privacy.

See you soon!

Dear Chris,

You left me a comment on my “Cut, Copy, Steal, But Never Lie”-post about how it is “NEVER okay to steal”. I believe you are missing my point, and since I believe it’s quite an important one I will dedicate this whole post to an answer to your comment.

The point is that this copy/mash-up/stolen goods/call it what you want/, works so well BECAUSE it is draws upon an existing campaign and because we leave a clear reference to it – much like linking to the original post when remashing it. Just like with the blog post, both parties benefit from keeping the discussion alive. The campaign CD Fredrik Lundgren put it best: “tap into the existing conversation”. Amen.

What ISN’T neither smart nor “okay” (if that matters) as you put it is to steal and pretending it’s your own. You are then missing out on the power of sailing on an existing idea while also behaving like a prick. And if you look at this post, you might want to consider what ad agencies have been up to for the past couple of decades.

And by the way, thank you for commenting!

In about an hour we will know the verdict in the Pirate Bay-trials. Let’s hope that people are being smart about this. Because a guilty verdict would not be good for anyone. Especially not for art and artists.

A guilty verdict would do little to boost sales. I believe we’ll see the opposite result. Darknets and stealth services (like Pirate Bay’s own would evolve quickly. Innovation incentives in the legal realm would be smaller. We would do little but slowing down inevitable change. From a wider perspective, it is just not intelligent.

If they are found not guilty however, it will be considered a future oriented statement. One that would benefit artists, culture, our country, and eventually the world. The music industry will have to come up with something better and more useful than Pirate Bay, and to be honest, they already have. Though Spotify would perhaps need some healthy competition. Spotify is just one small step, but it is a step in the right direction. This type of evolution is where we are going. A guilty verdict would just make us look dumb. Especially in the history books.

From the angle of the artist, nobody has put it better than Paulo Coelho:
“I didn’t start writing to get rich, I started writing to get read”.

We are now starting to see the effects of the Swedish IPRED-law, which states that copyright holders can go after individuals downloading protected content. Apparently, Swedish internet traffic has now dropped by nearly half. And since when is that a good thing? I thought traffic was valuable?

I believe that you can never be quite certain when you make predictions about the future, but in this case I think that the case is quite clear, and that we can now see the evidence emerging.

But first off, I want to be very clear that I am on the side of artists and other creators of value. I have strong opinions about this subject, but they are all about realism. Not about anarchism.

What the IPRED-law is doing is to protect an outdated business model for music, motion pictures, and other content. It’s implementation will remove incentives for product- and business model development like for example Spotify.

What’s worse, however, is that it directs valuable resources to evil forces, such as terrorists and criminals. Why? Well, a lot of people care about music and film. Much more people, in fact, than are criminals and terrorists. And thus there is a broad base for recruiting creatives to help keep music, film and other content free. If we go after file sharing individuals using the IPRED-law, there will be strong incentives to develop stealth file sharing software, and a large and powerful community engaging in it. We will quickly see increasingly sofisticated software of this type appearing and being deployed. With file sharing, we’ll be back to where we started, but criminals and terrorists will have brand new fast stealth tools which they would never have had the resources to develop themselves. And even if this if perhaps an exagerrated fear (there is after all already great stealth services out there, as well as bad guys using them), it clearly shows that this law will be completely useless very soon because of people learning to use these stealth services.

And what about open wireless networks? Will they all disappear now? That will not make brands trying to utilize IPRED very popular, and will actually damage the country’s progress towards connectedness. Read on.

Because another angle is the branding angle. And here it becomes very interesting when opening todays newspaper DN (unfortunately not linkable yet). In one article you can read about how people are boycotting the film- and music industries. Here are some examples of quotes from the public cited in the article:

“I’m completely going to boycott the music- and film industry now. Earlier, I’ve spent an average of 1000kr (ca $100) per month on cinema, DVDs, concerts and CDs. That will now end. All this will be cancelled”.

Or this one from a middle age person:

“I’ve never file shared in my life, but now I have to if only to show them that they can’t scare us. Let’s fight to protect our last rights. I have just downloaded file sharing software and figured out how it works. This will be fun”.

Or this interesting one:

“Let’s demand a seal for artists entirely without association with the major labels”. Now wouldn’t that be interesting.

Like I wrote the other day, we can already see smart companies, like Viasat for example, taking advantage of this, publicly promising NEVER to have anything to do with the IPRED-law, and thereby end up in the same future oriented category as for example Spotify.

If I were a copyright holder today I would think once, twice, and three times before even thinking about using this law. It may very well cost you your brand.

This is the first, and perhaps the last time we’ll do an outfit of the day post on here, but today is a special day.

Because today, symbolically enough on the day of the Golden Egg Awards, my agency Honesty is moving into new offices. And not just any old shack, but the legendary 6th floor of Kungsgatan 48, formerly famous for agencies like Forsman & Bodenfors and Manne&Co. They had an impact on the communications industry, and I humbly hope to have a shot at the same feat.

Now that we have F&B’s old offices, maybe we should buy their old aquarium website as well… hmmm… should we say $300?

Also, the new Honesty offices are overlooking Konserthuset, the venue of the Golden Egg Awards tonight. So if you go out for a smoke, don’t be surprised if you see us burning the midnight oil. There is much work to be done. You find us here:

And what about the outfit of the day? Well – since we’re moving, I’m wearing functional work clothes. The world’s premier fleece hoodie from Houdini because it’s super comfy, and a T-shirt I got from Cunning Communications in New York a few years back, because I haven’t had time to do laundry (not that I didn’t appreciate the gift though, thanks guys).

Just in case, I also wear the world’s most comfy socks from Smart Wool. And let me tell you – there is nothing quite like it.

Boom. Ready for anything.

OMG. Reading this mornings newspaper, I get the same vibe as when I hear about bullying in schoolyards, or when I listen to Philip Zimbardo talking about evil at TED.com – “if we attack in a group, we all get away with it”.

Earbooks, Storyside, Piratförlaget, Bonnier Audio, and Norstedts have decided to take advantage of the new and highly controversial (79% of young men are against, and half of the general population) IPRED-law to attack, in formation, ordinary people downloading audio books from file sharing sites. This is NOT smart.

Sure, one of them could attack an individual and say that this is what they believe in and have some sort of pseudo-discussion about rights of artists. They could make it part of their identity and stand by it. I don’t believe in it, but at least it would feel honest and perhaps even a little courageous. But when hiding behind each others backs, effecively saying that they’re a little bit ashamed, it’s absolutely devestating for their brands.

On top of it all, Bonnier has a brand new R&D-department working to take Bonnier into the future. Suddenly this sounds less than convincing. If putting the numbers on the board of what kind of money they MIGHT make off of this (will it even be a +sign in front of that number?) against the cost of the damage they’re doing to their brand, and multiply that number over the medium or long term, this will seem like the worst decision in a long time. It’s very unfortunate.

Compare this to what Viasat are doing, leveraging this law to show off their brand as progressive and intelligent.