Last week we started rolling out the new concept for the Swedish youth mobile brand Halebop. The reactions that came back to us were as expected – mixed. It’s a love hate thing and very few inbetweens. And here’s a hint: Love-Hate-tension creates discussion.

And what does it look like in concrete terms? Well – we created hundreds of sketches and threw away most of them. We actually produced tons of semi finished material that we also threw away. The things we kept had a spontaneous, improvised look and feel that we loved, and we established a way of working that kept generating fresh ideas that felt like they came straight from the street. And in reality, I guess they did actually come straight from the street.

I want to save some surprises for later, so I’ll end this post here. Right now we have things like print, outdoor, television and store materials out for the launch of Halebop’s new looks. You can check out som of the films below!

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.

After a hard night out on the town me and my friend went out for a cozy Valentine’s day walk on Södermalm. We started out with pizza (hey, we were out until 6 in the morning last night, give us a break), and went on to pick up a couple of semlor (if you ever go to Sweden, make sure you grab a semla!).

But as we walk past the bakery, we see this huge commotion on the other side of the street. There are policemen, police cordons, a police car and an army of aliens. Yes aliens! Wearing strange but awesomely put together outfits with bows in the hair, bright colors, and extremely advanced fingernails and make up. WTF?

As we get closer we realize that they are also quite small – about the size of 9-12 year old humanoids.

We work up our courage to walk into the rowdy crowd and find out what’s going on.

It turns out that the aliens are not aliens at all, but fans of the seventeen year old blogger Foki, who is visiting the jewelry shop Cocoo to meet her readers and sign autographs for Valentine’s day. Awesome!

“I did not have sex with that woman… miss Lewinsky” is not a good strategy. Why? Because it’s untrue. If you think back at the Clinton/Lewinsky-affair, the big issue wasn’t really that Bill was unfaithful, but rather that he kept lying himself into a corner. Tiger Woods did the same thing.

In Sweden we have a politician called Fredrick Federley who is using the exact opposite approach. He’s being brutally honest and says precisely what he thinks about anything.

Here are some examples: He has admitted trying cocaine and pot, opposed the FRA-legislation, is homosexual and dates a person from the Let’s Dance jury, has an alternate drag persona called Ursula, parties hard and is pretty open with this in a variety of images. For example this one:

Imagine being a politician trying to get away with all this while lying! Pretty hard, right? Now however, with the brutally honesty approach he has, it all just blows past. In fact, it actually strengthens his brand. Honesty works.

On top of this, Fredrick Federley is a social media natural. He is very active on twitter and on his blog, and does it incredibly well. I you know Swedish, you should look and learn. Also, check out this amazing performance in a television interview. This is how you do it!

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.]

Suddenly the news drop like a bomb. The big yearly price comparison on groceries organized by the National Penioners’ Association in Sweden was rigged by many of the store chains – and the one chain that usually wins was the worst offender. Suddenly no quirky traditional television commercial will help, because suddenly truth showed up at your door step. The point? Focus on what drives the bottom line, not what drives advertising awards. Oh, and never lie.

With traditional tag-along advertising, we force our way into peoples homes, or rather, we sneek our way in by way of real value. This has provided us with good reach by simply paying our way in, but it also has its disadvantages – we have to behave like the uninvited guests that we are.

I would like you to commit to a thought experiment here, and I hope to get some intelligent thoughts from you on the topic in the comments. Let’s go.

The Thought Experiment

Take a look at this film, which was made as a party invitation for Diesel:

Now imagine that this would not have been made for Diesel, but instead had another logo at the end, say Sears (or Åhléns for you Swedish readers). What would that do to this brand?

Well – running it on television, forcing it into peoples homes, would be disastrous. But what if we don’t run it on television? What if watching it is completely voluntary? Would people then be offended and blame it on Sears (or Åhléns)? I think not, because watching it is completely up to you, and anyone who would be offended probably wouldn’t share it to anybody else either.

People who did thought this was cool however would share it with other people who they thought would appreciate it too, don’t you think? They probably wouldn’t share it with people who they thought would be offended (like their parents for instance), right?

So, leaving it open if this would make Sears (or Åhléns) more down with the kids or not (something similar definitely could), I doubt that it would cause negative PR-effects. Wouldn’t this mean that it would be fairly risk free to try it?

What do you think?

Telia (Sweden’s biggest mobile phone network provider) actually did something similar to this when they launched Jacko, a highly graphic character without pants walking around behaving rather… well… you’d better watch it:

Did this cause PR-disaster for Telia? No. Why? Well – because it was voluntary. I think. But I’m not sure.

What this would mean is that you could try to put out different attitudes to different segments, some very very edgy, and have it work great. It’s rather counter-intuitive considering how we’ve always thought in terms of brand identity congruency, but I think this may be a remnant of our blunt and broad instruments of distribution, and that this way of slicing your communication from rated PG to rated R could actually work really well.

It’s late and I’m a bit tired, so I’m sorry if these thoughts came out in a somewhat messy structure, but I just wanted to get these thoughts out of my head before heading out for my evening walk.

Let me know if you think that this made any sense.

Good night.

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: ]

A few days after the fact I read this article on Realtid.se. The contents of the article are nothing jaw dropping. The comments on the article however, reflect the fact that so much of this discussion is taking place well outside the realm of relevance. People are talking about whether or not artists should be able to be artists, something that would require them to get paid for their work. Fair enough. But it is utterly irrelevant. Art will not dissappear. Neither will the internet. I will not waste energy on this discussion. Like most things, it will evolve Darwinistically.

To be productive we have to discuss value. The business model of charging for copies is obsolete. Some copies, such as physical books, have a certain value and will prevail. CDs are just a hassle. So are digital self hosted files really. So where can we add value? Here are some examples:

1. Hosting. Hosting music and syncing it between players is a hassle for the consumer. Especially if you have to authorize the player (In which case the stolen product is actually superior to the purchased one. Go figure).

2. Shareability. An effect of sharing a central database of music is that sharing music only requires sharing a tiny link. The evolution of sharing services is still somewhere around the stone age.

3. Upping the S/N-Ratio. There is just so much music! Finding the stuff you love could easily be a full time job. In my engineering days we talked about upping the signal to noice ratio. Last FM and Genious has scraped the surface of this field, but here you can create real value. And again, a centralized music database makes this much more effective.

4. Augmented Intelligence. Yes, Jan Guillou, I know you’re upset about your audiobooks and that I’ve been focusing on music. But here is an idea for audiobooks as well: If a centralized service keeps track of what I’ve “read” of what audiobook it can help me mine this data (since audiobooks are also available in text form) and help me draw conclusions that I would perhaps not otherwise have seen. I’ve personally co-developed a service doing knowledge clustering for the television industry. We could just as well do it with this data. Suddenly the person using this service is smarter than the person downloading on Pirate Bay. Again – this is real value. If anyone out there would like to develop this service, give me a call. I’ve made quite a bit of progress here already.

The current discussion about Pirate Bay is a joke. We will laugh at it ten years from now. If that.

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

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

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

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