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trends

Will Speak For Money (and Occasionally for Love)

by Walter Naeslund on September 29, 2009

The way I see it, public speaking is not about conveying information – books and Google do that much better than I ever can. Instead, I set out to inspire. If I can, on a good day, inspire you out there to take even one action in a powerful direction, things can start to snowball in amazing ways. That’s what inspires me, and that’s the common theme for all my talks – to get you to take action.

I give talks in Sweden and abroad on the topics of digital communications strategy, branding, internet trends, and social media. I also do talks on how building business through communication is just like attracting the opposite sex (or the same sex for that matter, depending on your preference), but that’s a whole other story that I’ll tell you more about when we meet.

Some of the talks have been at schools, companies, and organizations of different sizes, including Stockholm School of Economics, SAS, Berghs School of Communication, Hyper Island, and others; while bigger conferences have included Esomar WM3, Bring Dialogue Conference, and SEMPL in Slovenia.

Contact me for bookings and enquiries, or give me a call at +46-708-560 365.

What the World Will Look Like in 25 Years

by Walter Naeslund on September 1, 2009

When I went to ad-school I felt that the school was in many respects molding people into replicas of what ad-people were supposed to be. Now I feel that this is perhaps about to change. The other day I got interview questions from Hyper Island regarding digital trends, and today I got another question from Berghs School of Communication regarding “what the world will look like in 25 years“. And despite the fact that a question like that is hopeless in terms of giving the correct answer, I can try to provide some humble thoughts on the subject.

First, the world will be what we make it. That may sound like an empty phrase, but it’s really quite the opposite. It is a way of living, of working, of acting, and of thinking. If you live by this belief, make decisions and take action, this will not be an empty phrase, but the best estimate of the future that we can produce.

But aside from this answer, I will try to give you an answer to your question that is a little more pragmatic. Looking at what communications will look like in 25 years we can try on two scenarios.

In scenario 1 we make the internet asymmetrical. We let legislation rule what can and cannot be sent across the internet. Material which is not permitted (like “pirated” information for example) will move underground and will be sent using stealth technology. Much of the information flow of the internet will be encrypted jibberish, undecipherable for any sense-making technology wanting to make use of it and invisible to human senses that could otherwise have been used for collaborative sense-making and coordinated collective intelligence.

The goals of those wanting to control certain information based on their nostalgia of the times when they had a lucrative monopoly on distribution will not be reached because of ever improving speed and convenience of stealth technology. Instead, the huge resources that will be put into creating these technologies (love of music for instance is a powerful incentive) will be of great benefit to those who have truly evil intentions but smaller resources, notably terrorists and criminals. Since the only way of stopping “piracy” will be to do so at the infrastructure level (service providers can be real and effective gatekeepers!) this is where we’ll eventually end up, banning encrypted traffic altogether. And presto! The internet as we know it is destroyed.

Also in this asymmetrical scenario, we will start charging for the use of bandwidth. Me, being a strong believer in free markets and competition, opposing this kind of asymmetrical access to the internet based on resources may sound incongruent, but it really isn’t. Much in the same way roads and equality to the law are the basis for efficient competition (imagine the transaction costs of paying different prices for different levels of use of different roads), I think that access to the internet should be considered public infrastructure that will benefit competition, production, innovation, and market efficiency. But in the asymmetrical scenario, this will not be true anymore, and instead old business models and old distribution monopolies can be recreated by content companies using their funds to squat certain infrastructure lines and only provide access to their content through these. This may perhaps sound fair, but what will happen is that the abundance paradigm of the internet, the free flow of information, the “to each according to his ability” (the reverse of the famously Marxist slogan), and the rise of man through collective intelligence will stop.

I’m an optimist. I don’t think that this will happen.

In scenario 2 we retain the symmetry of the internet. We treat it like infrastructure in place to make markets and information flow efficient. Like a great system of streets and water pipes. In this scenario innovation will flourish because we can all do what we have always done, build on each others innovations, but we can do it with unprecedented efficiency. We can try and fail to a very low cost, we can learn from the mistakes of others, which boosts human efficiency enormously. This increase in efficiency, just like earlier technology leaps such as industrial farming, will create vast amounts of cognitive surplus that we can use for further innovation and production. Note that even resources that seem to be wasted on chatting with friends and Twittering create value in the form of information coordination and add to the collective intelligence. We can learn how people talk, we can cluster information, we can find new synergies and draw new conclusions.

Gossip will become hugely more efficient in this transparent world of efficient communication. This will lead to vengeance and gratitude being distributed with much more precision in answer to bad or good behavior and will make us all behave better and cheat less.

Digitally replicable products will not be products, they will be marketing for products where there is still tension between supply and demand. Musicians will try to get their music redistributed as quickly and widely as possible in order to fill venues and cut deals with brands, authors will do the same with their audiobooks to get speaking opportunities and sell hardcovers, filmmakers will use their films as vehicles for brand building and profit off of their brand, while also providing vehicles for other brands. Ludicrous legislation regarding this will be laughed at in 25 years. So will the crude methods of product placement of our age. The cinema experience cannot be pirated and we will see huge product development in terms of widening this experience. Their temporary monopoly on the film itself has made them lazy in this respect.

There will not be a difference between our digital identity and our physical one. All interaction with us will be permission based, and we will grant permission to those that we like and receive value from. Interuption marketing will be long since dead. The notion of publicly reachable phone numbers and email adresses will be laughed at as cute relics of the past. Our identity will be our identity and we will call people, not numbers, by whatever means is most efficient at the time, voice, video, text, images. By default our precense in the digital and analogue world will be publicly available. The benefits of this will outweigh the drawbacks. At times we will switch this off, just like we close the door when we want to sleep.

The semantic web will be obvious, and we’ll look back at how the internet was and smile at how we had so many copies of everything and how inefficient everything was. Of course each object will only be available in one absolute, so that any update will only have to be done once. Of course each of these will contain data representations fit for each semantic understanding of that particular data. We will be able to search, deploy scripts to ask questions and make calculations, and switch between real time representations and the historic dimension. This will all be very intuitive.

Since you are asking me to describe what the world will look like in 25 years, it is a bit ambitious to think that one blog post will answer it all, but these are some ideas of how things will be. If that’s what we decide to make them into. Because still, I think that my first answer is the best one – the world will be what we make it.

5 Questions and 9 Answers About The Future of The Internet – My Hyper Island Interview

by Walter Naeslund on August 27, 2009

A couple of days ago I was contacted by students at Hyper Island for an interview about the future of digital communication. Here are their questions and my answers:

1. What do you think will happen in the future regarding digital media? For example real time applications, Flash, Adobe Scene 7, Motion Graphics, Mashups?

Innovation Will Gravitate Towards the Efficient
It is always difficult to say anything about the future. Even the inventors themselves can rarely tell how their inventions will be used. Remember for example that Twitter was created as a way to let people know via SMS where the party was. Their invention then took on a life of its own in the hands of the users. On the other hand, this kind of “Darwinistic” innovation is a key feature of the digital technologies. Especially when it comes to innovation in the realm of open source and open APIs.

What we can say is that innovations will gravitate towards increased efficiency in different fields. And this realization is useful. Whenever you come up with an innovation or a campaign, ask yourself: will this make things more efficient? If the answer is yes, the innovation will stand a chance of succeeding, if not, it may at best become a short lived hype. In particular, innovations making collaboration and coordination more efficient are interesting when it comes to the internet since they promote themselves.

Good Bye Flash, Micro Sites & Poor Indexing
Real time applications will be important because they’ll make things more efficient. “Awesomely cool” but utterly useless Flash-based micro sites have always been a bluff and will increasingly be called as such by clients with a deeper understanding of the internet. Such sites make nothing efficient. Perhaps some people will disagree with me here and start arguing that I’m way too rational and that people buy with their emotions, but my bet is that these critics don’t understand the social web. What is often inefficient about these Flash-porn sites is that they are SOCIALLY inefficient. There is no way for me to efficiently share and discuss the content with my friends.

Recently we have started seeing “share”-buttons thrown into the mix, but these usually don’t tap into the actual behavior of people, and are just there because “social-media-is-the-new-hip-thing-and-therefore-we-need-share-on-Facebook-button“. Again, ask the question – will this make things more efficient in some dimension? They are also often inefficient in that they’re not indexed properly by search engines. The question then is, what are they good for? For inspiration? As some sort of interactive film? Very recently (like, right now) I saw one such campaign where they were actually showing commercials for the campaign on television! Making advertising for advertising must be the ultimate proof of failure and inefficiency.

Flash in general will get fierce competition as we will want sites to be more application-like, fast, optimized and useful. HTML5 will be a primary technology and may well put Flash and Silverlight in the shade.

Mashups & Commoditization
Mashups will continue to be super important because the idea of mashups resonates with the basic idea of innovation: take the best of what’s around and make it better. Since the costs of interacting with other open API innovations are so low, the total value of all parties in a mash up interaction will increase. We all benefit from mashups. If somebody has made the best map, like Google Maps for instance, there is not much point in using energy making a copy of that, but rather put our energy into innovating a new service and use their map. They win, and we win. More than anything, users win.

A lot of what required coding before are now commodities that you can pick up and just connect to something else through an open API. Smart people can thus create quite cool innovations by just putting pieces together. An internet-innovator friend of mine said that he’s very reluctant to try anything that he can’t build a first prototype of within an hour. He’s one of the most interesting and successful innovators of the new web in Sweden.

Real Time & Concurrent Editing
Technically, real time and concurrent editing will be important. I don’t know exactly which implementations of this will be the killer apps yet, but true real time collaboration is efficient and will become very popular. Not least by means of Google Wave. But we may well see other applications than these. For example live use of scripts for different purposes. There are a gazillion imaginable uses for such live scripts, but to get an idea, imagine a script being uploaded and run on a users iPhone returning different data depending on conditions such as position, battery status, orientation, in call status, who else is around, etc…

Real time and social search is very interesting and is an area where Google is lagging hopelessly behind. Here, Facebook and Twitter rule.

Mobile
And of course, mobile will be important, but there will be less difference between mobile and non-mobile. What is non-mobile today anyway? The iPhone is not a mobile phone with computer capabilities, it’s a computer that you can make calls on. And it has very comprehensive sensory systems like camera, video, positioning, integrated internet connection, gyro, accelerometer, compass, etc… Laptops have most of these too, but are lacking a few things like positioning and true mobile internet. The next generation of MacBooks will have a SIM-card slot and positioning. Mark my words.

Short answer: Real time. Mash ups. HTML5. Mobile.

2. What is the next big thing? (The new Facebook/Twitter for example)
The next big thing is Google Wave and all the amazing applications that will be built on top of it. Twitter will probably tip over and become mainstream in Sweden, but I’m not sure of it. Facebook with their aquisition of Friendfeed and their new search functionality is becoming very powerful as well.

3. Which trends do you see in digital media?
See question 1.

4. What qualifications will the media industry require?
Great rebels. Great thinkers. Great designers. Great writers. Great system designers/programmers. Great digital networkers. Great storytellers. Amazingly great leaders who can make all these other people love to work together. People who are not afraid to fail. People who can make the current Swedish labor legislation go away. Howard Roark.

5. What is the biggest challenge for the future in the media industry?
There are a lot of people today with power, who’s power relies on a monopoly of information and information distribution. These people will fight hard to stop anything that will remove their power. It’s very natural. They will eventually loose, but they will destroy a lot of value as they fight in increasing desperation. The music industry is the obvious example of this. It will be a perfect rerun of what happened when free-to-air radio was introduced.

Another challenge is our labor laws. Many agencies today have to fire people, but the law forces them to fire the newcomers, and the newcomers, on average, know more about digital communication. Also, for the same reason, they won’t be able to recruit the people their clients demand. This will create a downward death spiral. In nature, those who are able to change in accordance with the changes in nature survive. We are no different.

For me and for Honesty, this is good news of course, since we will be able to recruit the right people from the start.

Will The Workspace of The Future Be Designed By Nintendo?

by Walter Naeslund on March 9, 2009

I think the Siftables demo at Ted is just incredibly cool. As much as I love computers, I’ve never really come to terms with the user interface. It’s just not physical enough for me. Sure, I’ve tried Wacom tablets and what have you, but it’s just not enough.

The same way we saw Nintendo turn gaming into a physical actitivity, we’ll see computer based work take the same path. It has to move in that direction. People are not designed to move around a little mouse with one hand and type on little keys all day.

Siftables is one step in this direction. I’m not sure yet exactly which jobs would be the right ones for this particular solution, but instantly I can se music sequencers and other music software like Reason or Logic using this (part of the demo touches upon this). Programming drum machines using Siftables could probably be very intuitive.

I’m surprised that not more research is being done in this area. It’s an absolutely huge market. And then we haven’t even started talking about the health benefits of actually being physically active at work.

Will Nintendo design our future workspace? If they do, I’ll be first in line to buy stock.

Ogilvy on Advertising: "When Aeshines spoke, they said, ‘How well he speaks’. But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, ‘Let us march

by Walter Naeslund on March 24, 2008

The other day i wrote about Donny Deutsch’s book Often Wrong, Never in Doubt. Today I started flipping trough the pages written by another of advertising’s greats, David Ogilvy, in 1983. (*Interesting fact: Both Donny and his dad used to work for Ogilvy, and apparently Deutsch Sr. had a beef with David).

Anyway, the two books can really not be compared, but it’s striking how no-nonsense the Ogilvy book is, how warmly he talks about testing campaigns and readable the book is. This is truly the original planner/creative, and I must say I’m impressed.

And while I think that Ogilvy may be old-school and arguably would have difficulties developing an intuition for social media (a general difficulty for those with few friends who are active users of such media) and youth trends, he is a master of the psychology of gut feeling. David also writes:

“I run the risk of being denounced by the idiots who hold that any advertising technique which has been in use for more than two ears is ipso facto obsolete”

And I ask myself; have I been one of those idiots? Well – at least I’ve not been paying enough attention to the underlying thinking of people like Ogilvy or Bernbach. I’ve been the rebelling teenage kid, and I know from experience that it is an unavoidable phase in anything I set out to do. I’ve been a dogmatic futurist and exclusive believer of “new” psychology and new technology, but I (with the assistance of David) am starting to shift my stance. The true winners will be those with an understanding for what’s next, but also a firm grasp on the craftsmanship, the no-nonsense businessmanship, the devilish attention to detail of people like David Ogilvy. Not many people can combine Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (or rather David Ogilvy & Chris Anderson) within themselves, but if I have one mission in this career, making that fusion is it.
Wish me luck.

(Oh, and by the way, when reading I have a habit of marking pages that I find interesting. After flipping through the first ten pages of Ogilvy’s On Advertising, is this a good indication of how good I think this book is?)

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Cozy My Ass

by Walter Naeslund on December 11, 2007

Last Sunday I read in the morning newspaper DN about a “trend”. The writer said we were all going towards a trend of “cocooning” and cozyness, away from the hectic big city life, the dirty martinis and early morning afterparties. Examples of this “coming trend” would be new cozy-brands like Filippa K Ease and such.

I can’t help thinking the article perhaps said more about the writers current life situation than global trends. Because really – cozy is so last season, and urbanity is the new black.

Think about it. Yeah, having a house in suburbia, slobbing around in your dirty sweatpants (they’re called that for a reason), baking bread (really, you’ll never do it in real life, and if you do it’ll turn out stale and grey) and fixing the broken heater is NOT a trend of the masses, but the trend of life. It’s the trend of getting old. Nothing wrong there – I’m looking forward to the beauty of aging, just not at this tender age.

In global trendspotting terms it’s just plain wrong I think. Filippa K Ease is not exactly new. The global trend is rather about social life. Facebook-groups springing to real life get togethers. There has NEVER been so many party opportunities (or is that my life situation?) and clubs are popping up every night of the week. I think people are increasingly craving friends, company and fun. Social is the new black.

Stolt androgyn halvplanner kommer ut ur garderoben

by Walter Naeslund on July 2, 2007

Nina, som är planner på Garbergs, och jag hade ett långt reklamprat häromdagen över en bit thaimat. Jag önskar att fler kreatörer hade såna prat med en planner. Och slöt fred. Kramades och skapade förståelse. Helst skulle jag se att de limmade ihop sina huvuden som Siamesiska tvillingar och jobbade som en person.

En bra planner är både trendspanare och strateg, både fågelskådare och schackspelare. Och peeping tom. En bra kreatör kan sätta ihop företeelser från till synes helt olika områden till någonting intressant. Någonting som går att prata om. Det är en match made in heaven. Evolutionen kommer ha sin gång, och planner/kreatörspar kommer ta över världen. Tro mig. Dinosaurier se upp!

Det var David Schwieler på Remotion som sa det först: Johan, du är hälften planner, hälften kreatör. Jag tänkte inte så mycket på det då. Vad en planner var hade jag, liksom många andra kreatörer då, ingen vidare koll på. Det är nu när jag tänker tillbaka på det, efter att ha fått en lysande föreläsning på ämnet “vad gör en planner” av Nina, som jag inser vilken fin komplimang det var. Jag är en androgyn halvplanner. Vad fint!

Och jo, det är sant. Jag älskar att plöja trendbloggar och snacka spaningar över thaimat. Jag spenderar hellre en kväll med Wired och en latte än med fotbollsmatch och folköl. Och jag gillar det. Jag skulle till och med gå så långt som att säga att det är mitt förbannade ansvar att gilla det om jag skall sitta och fakturera tvåtusen spänn i timmen. Och om det inte är mitt förbannade ansvar så är det istället mitt förbannade ansvar att söka upp en stor tub superlim och en rakad plannerskalle.

Så. Gå nu ut och ragga upp en planner.

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