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.

Every gold rush has it’s opportunists. The gold rush of viral marketing is no exception. Before we leave the gold rush phase and move into a more mature market, agencies will keep running around waving YouTube views in the faces of marketing managers to show off how creative they are. But are they really?

There are two problems with measuring success in terms of YouTube views:

1. YouTube view count not a good KPI on it’s own. Measuring success that way temps us to turn to malpractices like clownvertising rather than aiming for healthy business goals for our clients.
2. Focusing on this number encourages cheating.

Cheating can be done in different ways, but probably the most common way is to buy views from sites such as these. Tempting if you only measure your success in views, is it not? Damaging for our industry? Certainly.

So how can you spot a cheater? Well – first you have to check out the view graph. To do this you click on the little button to the right of the view count in the YouTube window.

Second, you take a look at this graph. Here’s what a GENUINE viral graph looks like:

The graph grows organically without strange bumps caused by the mysterious parameter “viral/other”.

An agency or individual that has cheated to spice up their view count will have a different behavior. Here’s a typical example of what cheating could look like:

Especially note the major bump in the beginning. If you dig deeper into this video for yourself, you’ll see that the bump is caused by “viral/other” – a sure fire sign of bought views.

Some agencies have realized this and removed the graphs altogether to cover their tracks. Doing this however is an active choice. The graphs are by default visible. If you take a look at some of your favorite virals and see that their graphs have been removed, this is a sign that something very fishy is going on. Why would you make the active choice of removing this graph if you have nothing to hide?

So why am I showing you this? Well – I am tired of sitting in meetings where people want us to give them YouTube views. We are not in the business of clownvertising, but in the business of creating business value for our clients. This is done by being structured and creative in setting up an awesome KPI-set (i.e. quality embeds and other REAL interactions) and using that to dynamically control our activities. At the end of the day, my job is to boost our clients business. Otherwise I could as well work as… well… a clown I guess.

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.

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

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.

I‘ve done quite a bit of thinking about how the social web will make the world a better place. I’ve written about it, and also lectured about the social web, good, and evil.

So when a talk by Evgeny Morozov popped on TED on the topic of how the net aids dictatorships, I was naturally interested. Was somebody going to put up a good argument against my theories?

The answer is yes. And no. Evgeny argues beautifully for the ideas, but simultaneously shows how the dictatorships actually start using the web to reach out and communicate, much like I think companies should. They are proactive, the contribute, they engage, and they are present. They DON’T try to cencor stuff, because they have realized that participation is more effective. And I tell you – if dictatorships do this successfully, companies should too!

Then, of course, these dictatorships abuse their power to flood the system with government biased comments and spam, and commit evil acts, but I’m not as sure as Evgeny is about how effective this is. Compare it for example to this example from the very well designed guidelines at Intel for how to effectively use the social web:

Be transparent. Your honesty—or dishonesty—will be quickly noticed in the social media environment. If you are blogging about your work at Intel, use your real name, identify that you work for Intel, and be clear about your role. If you have a vested interest in something you are discussing, be the first to point it out.

This is not a guideline that the dictatorships exactly follow. On the other hand, perhaps other commenters don’t dare use their real name either for fear of physical abuse, so this way It may actually work for government agents to blend into the anonymous crowd. Again – we see an example of how anonymity leads to evil and abuse.

Incidently, the campaign led by The Cartel to hunt down file sharers also leads to anonymization of the web, making laws like HADOPI and IPRED all the more troublesome – and also promoters of more serious evil.

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.