Pretty simple idea, really. And a pretty brilliant song.
 

About this time last year, Posten, the postal service in Sweden, launched the campaign Stefan the Swopper. The campaign revolved around Stefan, a young, Swedish man who wished to swap everything he owned in order to gain some excitement and a new perspective on life, and its aim was to encourage the posting of parcels and packets and raise awareness of related Posten services. The campaign became a huge success, receiving over four million hits online during Stefan’s swopping process as well as impressive media coverage for free.

Last month, Sweden’s leading advertising, brand and marketing publication, Resumé, told the story of Anna Lindstein, the copywriter who fell in love and decided to sell everything she owned and move to America. Today, one of Sweden’s biggest daily newspapers, DN, had Stefan the Swopper written all over it as another free-spirited artist decided to rid himself of materialistic happiness – not as part of an advertising campaign or to leave the country, but rather to follow in the footsteps of some monks he once visited in order to regain mental and emotional peace. As well as a tent, a sleeping bag and a rucksack, Claes Svedberg will keep his electric guitar.

Stefan the Swopper is a true viral if I ever saw one. The advertising agency involved won heaps of awards, and bloggers and social bookmarketers went haywire. And now, it seems, we’re swapping lives; you take the old curtains my grandmother left behind, and I’ll take your toaster; I’ll swap my house for your husband, just for the hell of it. If you haven’t got anything to swap, buy my books and CDs, or if necessary just take them – who needs things in this day and age?

Me, I’m quite happy where I am and wouldn’t really like to go to America. And I’d like to keep my laptop if I may. I wonder who Posten would like to swap with?

I love the fact that advertising is becoming a little less like advertising by the day. This, for example, is this advertising?

Well if it isn’t, Chanel must be laughing.

But then there are days when I feel like advertising is taking over the world. When advertising doesn’t stick to its traditional formats and all media seem gatecrashed by ad agencies, it’s hard not to wonder where the brain washing stops.

When I saw this video, I was convinced for about five minutes and five seconds that some clever copywriter out there would get the honour to wrap up the whole shebang with a poignant line or two, that clearly it was so brilliant that it must have been planned by a creative team and simply executed very well.

How refreshing that I was wrong.

This blog is all about communication. This is where I will post brilliant adverts I come across, rave about brands I love, and complain about communication which fails to communicate.

I am a writer above all, and much of my admiration of other professionals relates to words and writing, but that doesn’t mean that words are always at the forefront of everything I like. Good communication, I believe, is so much more about knowing what you want to say and who you want to talk to than knowing where to put a semi colon, and sometimes, even though I hate to say it, a picture (or a song, or a video, or a thing) says more than a thousand words. And I’m not here to be a snob, so if I like it, I’ll post it – wordy or not.

Some clever writer once said that most people recognise good design when they see it, but only very few can create it. I believe that the same argument can be applied to a good concept, but just because most of us are able to point them out, I don’t want to stretch as far as to say that pointing them out is therefore unnecessary.

You only write as well as you read, all creative writing students have been told, and I’d like to think that you only create as well as you criticise. This blog is where I criticise – sometimes angrily, sometimes passionately, and hopefully sometimes in a way that inspires.