by Walter Naeslund on February 15, 2010
After a hard night out on the town me and my beautiful (albeit occasionally hot tempered) girlfriend Katja 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 think that it is good to show stuff like this to marketing managers every now and again. Blogs are real. Blogger celebrities are real celebrities. When I was a kid, television was the hub around which celebrity and conversation spun. Blogs are the television of our time.I also got some interviews with some of these aliens, which I’ll edit and post later.
Stay tuned!
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by Walter Naeslund on February 12, 2010
“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!
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by Walter Naeslund on December 17, 2009
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.]
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by Walter Naeslund on December 10, 2009
This isn’t brand new by any standards, but it reminds me (and perhaps you) that sometimes, bad ass is just… bad ass.
The Subaru also seems to carry a bit more fun & punch than those german Volkmobiles, wouldn’t you say?
Thanks to Juha for sharing.
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by Walter Naeslund on November 9, 2009
I have a few extra invites here to give away to you wonderful readers of Walternaeslund.com. Drop me a couple of lines in a comment and let me know if you want one. Actually, I’ll probably give priority to pingbacks. Link Love 4 ever baby!
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by Walter Naeslund on November 5, 2009
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.
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by Walter Naeslund on October 16, 2009
It’s late Friday. Can’t imagine a better video for an ad man to start out his weekend with than this one:
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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.
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