The witness seminar is now available

Posted on | november 22, 2011 | No Comments

The transcript from the witness seminar entitled ”The internet, the IT boom and the advertising industry in the second half of the 1990s” is finally available for downloading from this URL.

The text is in Swedish, with an abstract in English and an introductory text in Swedish which presents the project and the witness seminar as a qualitative method.

If you want a printed copy, please give us your address and we will send you one.

The Danish Advertising Association looks at ”the Swedish cookbook of success”

Posted on | oktober 15, 2011 | No Comments

There has been a hiatus on this site for a while, since Oskar and Gustav are on paternity leave – this  outstanding feature of the Swedish welfare state.  However, Ann-Sofie has not been  idle in the meantime. On 1 September she gave a talk at a seminar organized by the Danish Advertising Association. In his introduction to the seminar, Kim Boisen of the Danish Advertising Association pointed to Sweden ”beating” Denmark 32-2 in terms of Cannes lions won. The purpose of the seminar was to point to success factors in Swedish digital advertising to contemplate for the Danes . A number of our interviewees were among the other speakers – Swedish digital advertising is a small world. The seminar was commentated on in the Danish marketing journal Huset Markedsføring.

Guldägget 2011

Posted on | april 14, 2011 | No Comments

Tonight Guldägget, the main award show for Swedish communication agencies, celebrates its 50th anniversary at Stockholm Waterfront. Accompanying Guldägget, the Swedish Association of Communication Agencies organize two days of seminars. Ann-Sofie represented the project with a lecture yesterday afternoon on our findings so far.

Right now we’re in the middle of an intense period of article writing. Oskar has written a paper juxtaposing the role of network- and market-oriented strategies as routes to success in digital advertising. The paper will be presented at a session on the history of advertising at the biennial meeting of Swedish historians in Gothenburg on 7 May. Gustav is working on a piece on creativity in advertising, targeting advertising researchers. Whereas the mainstream of advertising research tends to take creativity as something given and reified which can be categorized and measured, we use our study to illuminate how creativity is deeply contextual and especially how award shows – like Guldägget, but especially the international ones – are at the centre of a set of rules for what constitutes creativity and governs inclusion and exclusion in the creative field.  Ann-Sofie is working on a paper on the multiple and divergent motives of digital advertising entrepreneurs, in contrast with the focus on financial rewards in the mainstream of entrepreneurship research.

The digital wonder at ADA and in GP

Posted on | april 14, 2011 | No Comments

Here comes a belated report from our presentation at Business Region Gothenburg’s Association for Design and Advertising, ADA on 1 March. Some 100 creatives listened rather attentively – especially given the high level of noise at Bliss Resto – to our 45 minutes of preliminary findings and comments by Gustav Martner (CP+BE) and Jimmy Herdberg (Kokokaka).

Inspired by this event, Gothenburg’s main daily, Göteborgsposten, devoted most of the front page as well as an entire page in the Economy & Politics section to the digital wonder, featuring one interview with Kokokaka founder Jimmy Herdberg and one with me (Gustav). Somewhat ironically for an article on the importance of digital media, it was only available in the print version of the newspaper. In my Swedish-language blog I speculated that this might be a revenge for Jimmy’s claim that print newspapers are obsolete. Fortunately an English, shorter version is available from Göteborg daily.

We’re of course delighted at the interest in our project. However, there is sometimes a discrepancy between our perceptions of what we do and the medial representation of the project. The title of the ADA seminar was ”Why are we so good” and GPs take was in the vein of a Gothenburg success story – whereas what we do to a large extent aims at deconstructing and reinterpreting the digital wonder and avoiding oversimplified interpretations in terms of success. This is an inevitable tension in the sense that our research project in itself is a marker that Swedish digital advertising is important and worth spending some SEK 2 million studying. We do believe that, but we also believe that such a research project benefits from not taking the straightest route.

GUNN Report 2010

Posted on | februari 23, 2011 | No Comments

The interviews are coming along nicely

Posted on | maj 18, 2010 | No Comments

This spring the research group focus on interviewing, and we have added a few more entrepreneurial life stories to our list. Last week Gustav and Ann-Sofie met up with Perfect Fools co-founder Tony Sajdak. Besides providing a fourth angle of what happened at Abel & Baker in the early 2000s (following Martin Cedergren, Ted Persson, and David Sundin), Tony gave us insights into digital advertising from the vantage point of a production company.

Next week we are meeting with, in turn, Matias Palm Jensen (Farfar), Jesper Kouthoofd (Acne), and Axel Bendrik (Deasign). We are not least looking forward to hearing about the rise and fall of Farfar, who set the digital wonder in motion with their 2001 Grand Prix Cyberlion, but were unexpectedly wound up by their owners, Aegis Group, about a month ago.

The Tesch brothers in London

Posted on | mars 31, 2010 | No Comments

On Friday 26 March I (Gustav) set out for London’s Farringdon district for successive interviews with Måns and Johan Tesch, two representatives of what has been labelled the export of the Swedish digital wonder, as several Swedish digital creators have been recruited by major foreign agencies over the last few years. The Tesch brothers founded Tesch & Tesch in 1996, which then became one of the leading web bureaus in Sweden by 1999. Following economic difficulties in the wake of the dotcom crash, the brothers sold their creation to the Lowe network in 2002. The firm, now under the name Lowe Tesch, won gold lions in Cannes in 2004 and 2005 for campaigns for Saab Automobile and 3. When the firm was merged with Lowe Brindfors in 2007, the brothers decided it was time to move on and headed for London, Johan as a creative director at BBH and Måns as digital strategy director first at Lowe worldwide and then at Fallon. They are currently working on setting up their new, yet unnamed, agency in London with the idea of combining the best elements of Swedish and British advertising practices. We can only wish them good luck.

The interview transcript from these and some 20 other interviews constitute the main source material for this research project. At the time of writing I am waiting for the next and fifth interview, with Speedway Digital Army, Abel & Baker and Great Works co-founder David Sundin.

The internet, the IT boom and the advertising industry

Posted on | mars 11, 2010 | No Comments

The witness seminar ”The internet, the IT boom and the advertising industry in the second half of the 1990s” was held on 17 February. The panel – Mattias Hansson, Mattias Söderhielm, Johan Ihrfelt, Hans Sydow, Sven-Olof Bodenfors and Rolf Jansson – represented several of the important actors during the turbulent years of the late 1990s: new media (Z-magazine), government-owned companies (Telia, Posten), internet consultants (Framfab, Spray) and advertizing agencies investing in the new media landscape (Adera, Forsman&Bodenfors). During the seminar the participants were given the opportunity to share their experiences of the dramatic changes of business opportunities created by the emergence of the Internet. Their stories dealt with the interdependence of technological change, entrepreneurial spirits and the feeling of making history. The seminar was recorded and is now being transcribed. The results will be published in a report later this year. If you are interested in a copy, send us an e-mail (gustav.sjoblom[at]chalmers.se) and we will let you know as soon as the report is ready.

Welcome to the witness seminar on Wednesday 17 February

Posted on | februari 12, 2010 | No Comments

On Wednesday, 17 February, we welcome everyone to our witness seminar on ”Internet, the IT-boom and the advertising industry in the second half of the 1990s”. The seminar takes place between 1 PM and 5 PM at Sandlersalen, ABF-huset, Sveavägen 41, Stockholm. The purpose of the witness seminar is not only to give insights to participants and spectators, but also to provide a historical source material which will be used in our research. The seminar is recorded as audio and video files and will hopefully be made publicly available in some form.

What we want to achieve with the seminar is to recall the uncertainty that followed the breakthrough of the internet, as the boundaries between media, advertising, telecommunications, and information technology were blurred (at least temporarily). We have gathered a panel who will first share their personal experiences of the mid- and late 1990s, then comment each others’ statements. The panel consists of Mattias Hansson, Mattias Söderhielm, Johan Ihrfelt, Hans Sydow, Sven-Olof Bodenfors and Rolf Jansson.

The seminar marks the beginning of the ”public” phase of this project. So far we have mainly been working quietly with preparations, but hopefully you’ll see more of us from now on. If you’re interested in knowing more about the project, please come along to the mingle after the seminar, at the Swedish Association of Communication Agencies, Sveavägen 34.

The seminar is free of charge, but please sign up here.

A discussion of what makes campaigns successful

Posted on | december 10, 2009 | No Comments

On 18 November, the three researchers in the project and Morgan met up with half a dozen advertising professionals in Gothenburg, mainly from award-winning agencies Crispin Porter + Bogusky Europe and Forsman & Bodenfors. The purpose of the event was to improve our understanding of what makes an internet advertising campaign successful, innovative, and award-winning. Mathias Appelblad first gave his view of how F&B approached the internet and created a series of highly acclaimed campaigns such as Cannes Grand Prix winning Volvo XC 90 launch from 2003 and gold-winning Drömkök åt alla for IKEA from 2006. The CP+B (formerly Daddy) people similarly explained the background to their acclaimed commercials for Volkswagen, Burger King, and SAS. The panel also gave their view of other pathbreaking digital campaigns such as Farfar’s work with Milko, Nokia and Diesel, and Great Works longstanding collaboration with Vin & Sprit. Towards the end of the evening we had formulated something akin to a shared understanding of the milestones and breakthroughs of digital advertising – technological (Shockwave, Flash, XML, social media) as well as institutional (notably the 2000 IT bust). Thanks to all participants for sharing your time and ideas and helping the project along the way!