The human body. Such a marvel of engineering. We can do amazing stuff with this machine, things that are many times EXTREMELY difficult to mimic with any machine. If you only consider using the body as a physical tool we are amazing when it comes to detailed movement and interaction, walking upright och playing basketball. And that would probably be classified as the easy stuff.

But the body also has it’s limitations. Seemingly simple tasks like cutting a metal wire fall outside our capabilities. Or DID, I should say, because we have now evolved to a stage where we can easily cut metal wires, even if this part of the evolution happened outside our bodies. But if you look at technology this way, a Leatherman Wave or any other piece of technology is most definitely part of human evolution, and therefore part of the modern man (or woman). Just like a modern programming language, nature has just abstracted evolution to let late stage of evolution the Leatherman Wave build upon an earlier stage – the human intellect.

In our everyday life we rarely reflect over separation between technology and man. If somebody told you to build a freeway, you would instinctively build it for man the way man is today. Including late stage evolution such as motorbikes. You wouldn’t build a freeway to be used on foot at speeds around 20km/h would you?

Still we do this all the time when it comes to creating communication and designing web sites. We do it for what man was 20 years ago. Not the way man is today. 20 years ago, web search engines did not exist in the life of ordinary people. Google did not exist. SEO was unheard of.

Just like with the body, the human mind is extraordinary when it does what it does best – in the case of the mind, this is stuff like interpretation, emotion and flexibility. But it is extraordinarily bad when it comes to massive memory storage and running algorithms. And since the web filled the memory void (with MASSIVE MASSIVE memory storage), we desperately need powerful algorithm processing to sort and search through all this massive information. The master of the search algorithm at the moment is Google. And just like in the case of the motorcycle or the Leatherman Wave, Google is part of man (or woman). It’s not a separate entity of it’s own with it’s own purpose or origin. It’s made by man for man, not in symbiosis, but in integration. Google is part of humanity.

It’s time for us to do what we do when designing freeways, to start designing for man the way man is today. Not the way man was 20 years ago. The world is no longer a smörgåsbord where we have preselected information layed out in a beautiful art directed magazine spreads, but a world with vast seas of interrelated data, impossible to navigate for a lone human mind. In this world, powerful algorithm processor extensions of our mind are absolutely necessary for us to be able to navigate. Human beings are flexible, and quickly pick up on these extensions of course. We use Google without thinking twice about it. It’s time for us communicators to do the same when communicating with these people.

Designing for man the way man is today should be, has to be, and will be as natural as brushing your teeth. With a toothbrush that is.

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.]

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.

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!

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.

It’s late Friday. Can’t imagine a better video for an ad man to start out his weekend with than this one:

It’s just one of those days. Twingly launches it’s Twingly Channels, Google launches Wave, and (admittedly somewhat smaller) Stockholm School of Economics’ MCXL launches their new website. From what I can tell from the site, the latter is in test-phase right now, so I’ll post the link later.

We were actually planning to launch some stuff today too, but it feels like the attention economy i running a bit low on the supply side right now, so we may postpone for a week. We’ll see.

Anyway, if interested in the progress of Honesty, please join the @HonestySTHLM news feed on Twitter. We’ll always post news there first.

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.