Stuart Wells /

Living in Helsinki is a binary experience. Ones and zeros, black and white, winter and summer.

We’re heading towards the middle of summer, Juhannus as the locals call it, and the city is alive; bric-a-brac markets in full swing, people out having coffee in the pavement cafes, boats coming in and out of the harbour. The sky is blue without a cloud and the sun is hot.

Yes, sunny weather has been a feature of the three summers I’ve been here. And that came as a surprise. A pleasant one, as anyone would know who has spent time in the near total darkness and literally Baltic temperatures that typify winter here.

And the odd thing for me is that the seasons in Finland are actually a crystal clear reflection of how the Finns like to lead their lives – they like to know definites, not maybe’s. They like a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ and there’s no need to expand upon your answer unless it’s worth listening to. They like you to arrive at a dinner at the time agreed, not 20 minutes later for the sake of British politeness (I’ve never really understood that habit of ours).

They don’t really do ‘maybe’ in the same way their countryside doesn’t really do spring or autumn in the way I know it; spring is a short bridge to summer and autumn is the quick return trip to winter.

Which got me wondering – how much is the way we think and behave shaped by the seasonal cycle that we experience?

As I return to my Pimms and copy of The Guardian (international edition), here are a few shots taken this weekend:

Technology is so frighteningly accurate. For instance, 8^th January 2010 at 5.34pm. This, according to my laptop, is when I finished the first draft of a proposal for a partnership between Nokia and Burton.

The project had started a few days earlier; the presentation that I saved on that Friday night was nothing but the result of the corridor conversation between my boss and me.

He had said that we should review partnerships for our flagship products and asked if  I would look into it. My mind was still in the mountains following a trip to Morzine but replied, of course, that I’d love to.

I didn’t come at this trying to find a way to work with Burton and only them. Truth be known, I have been snowboarding for some years now and my mix of brands includes Foursquare (arguably Burton), Bonfire, Lib Tech, Dakine and also the ubiquitous Burton (a pair of Mission bindings in case you’re wondering).

What attracted me to Burton was a combination of factors. Compared to Nokia they’re a small company, but there are a lot more similarities than differences.

Like Nokia, Burton was a business that was started with a pioneering spirit and a willingness to bet the farm on a new, uncharted product territory.

Also like Nokia, Burton benefits by having a belief in innovation and driving its category forward.  (As an aside, it may sound odd for me to claim innovation as a core belief of Nokia – but this is one of the many challenges of being a marketer in the company at the moment. We invested around 40 billion euros in R&D over the last two decades and registered no less than 11,000 patent ‘families’; we just haven’t been great at telling that story).

Both brands have a truly global reach and had built up a global community of fans, critics and others somewhere in-between. In other words, people we can engage with.

As part of the presentation there were some initial thoughts of how the two brands could work together.  These ranged from a mobile Web TV app to showcase their tons of content through to an idea that we called “Board’s eye view” (NEVER underestimate the power of a pun in a presentation….); a project that would allow you to see a rider’s journey through the half-pipe using the technology found in one of our devices; gyroscope, GPS, cameras, wi-fi and so on.

The Board’s Eye View project was initially a joining of some dots.

Dot 1: The successful Push N900 project had produced a skate hack, which brought together the physical skate world and its virtual gaming world cousin; literally identifying a skateboarder’s trick (from a list of pre-programmed tricks) and assigning a score for a successful Ollie (or whatever).

Dot 2: More and more the work I’m doing is about continual consumer engagement, which involves communities doing something that they are passionate about with our devices and then getting their deserved kudos for doing it.

Dot 3: We were looking for like-minded brands to partner in our marketing in 2010 and 2011.

Dot 4:  We had a powerful device coming to market (the N8) that’s packed with technology and we needed to demonstrate that.

Dot 5: On a purely selfish level, Helsinki had been -20c for the last two months and I needed to get out of the cold and darkness. And hell, if Vermont was good enough for Ben & Jerry’s then it was going to work for me.

So I temporarily escaped Finland and we pitched ourselves to the guys at Burton.

I’ll never forget that first meeting. Five of the team (three from Nokia and two from our agency, Hyper) trooped into the marketing meeting room at Burton Headquarters in Burlington, Vermont.

We presented from the slides we’d carefully crafted and, frankly, were met with a rich mix of amazement, wonder, suspicion and scepticism.  “You guys really think you can do that?!” seemed to be the response we were met with. However, to their credit the Burton team saw the potential of what we were talking about and wanted to join forces.

From there we worked through the summer, investing seed funding towards hiring a brilliant team of product developers and starting to assemble some idea of what was possible.

As we worked on the project we refined our thoughts on what we wanted it to be and not to be.  A lot of the discussion was around how the project would complement a lot of what’s already happening in the sport and also make it even more fun for the people that would opt to use it (if we got to mass production stage).  We also want it to have the potential to allow anyone to get involved – so we’ve already released the test data and we’re producing a framework to make it easy for developers to create apps, games or whatever their imagination comes up with (huge thanks to Clovis for his work on this). Again, the mass participation of this will probably rely on taking the well-crafted hardware protos that we’re making and turn them into a commercially viable product.

At the same time, we acknowledged and embraced the thought that this isn’t designed to replace some very human aspects of boarding; the judges’ eyes and opinion in competition and the very basic, but hugely important, fact that some people’s enjoyment on the mountain is about getting AWAY from technology and closer to nature. We respect that and are not about to try to change it.

The launch event was held at Nokia World 2010. The reason for choosing this event was that we wanted the developer community to appreciate how serious we are about doing this and, as further incentive, we announced a competition to find a top-notch developer to work with us as a member of the team.

Our first full testing session was in early November and (praise the lord) it was a real success – check out the films on the blog soon.

That pretty much take us up to date.

And that, in a way, is the beauty of this project. It’s current. So scarily contemporary that the narrative is being written as I’m sat on this plane on the way home to Helsinki (only -15c at the moment).

We have a hunch that this will work but we don’t really know. It could go terribly wrong and be ‘car crash marketing 101’ but at the same time it seems to be going well and people have enjoyed the roller-coaster ride so far. Above all, I for one am happy to keep going and seeing where we get to.

So we’ll keep developing, testing, falling, getting back up, testing again and hopefully come to the Burton US Open with something that shows the brilliance of open development, the power of the N8 and the partnership with Burton.

For now, there’s snow in them there hills and I for one am loving it. Just need an app to make me ride a snowboard as good as the kids in Finland……

Follow the project at:

http://blogs.nokia.com/pushburton/

And #pushsnowboarding or @blether on twitter

After the perennial restructure at Nokia in 2008, I was politely asked / told to move up to the global headquarters in Finland.  18 months later and I like to think I’ve settled in quite well.

I now understand that when crossing the road you have to obey the green or red man. Anyone who fails to do so will be met with the collective look of disgust from the 20 or so fellow Helsinkians on the other side.

I also trust that the bus timetable is pretty much accurate to the second, whilst the same can’t be said about the trains.

Tram tracks no longer fill me with dread when walking across them – initially I was convinced I’d be another name in a long list of stupid foreigners electrocuted by the rails. It turns out I was the stupid foreigner but only for not understanding how trams work.

Then there is the language.

Reputed to be influenced by Estonian and possibly some Asian languages, Finnish is one of the most complex (THE most complex?) of languages.  Upon arrival, I related living in a Finnish speaking city to listening to a TV that’s on but hasn’t got a signal; the ‘white noise’ of Finnish conversation was initially deafening but soon became silent as I accepted that I couldn’t distinguish a single word and subsequently my mind ignored it.

Over time I have learned the phonetics of the language and have picked up a few key words along the way; for example, ‘hyvaa huomenta’ (pronounced much like Hoover-Whore-Menta) means ‘good morning’.  However I’m very lucky because English is the first language of Nokia and the Finns generally have an exceptionally good understanding and use of my mother tongue.

That said, I’ve often find myself in the position of fairly convincingly starting a conversation with my pigeon Finnish and then almost immediately tripping up when a series of indecipherable words are thrown back at me.

I, therefore, am a fake.

I give the impression of knowing what I’m doing but the second I’m presented with anything remotely above the very basic my guise is taken.

And, importantly, I’ve let my conversational partner down. He or she has been engaged in his or her language, responded accordingly and all I can do is say ‘ummm, sorry, English?’.

This got me thinking. Isn’t this EXACTLY the same when a brand embraces social media.

It’s obvious, but if you decide to follow a conversational strategy, you have to have the talent within your team and the commitment from the business to understand the ‘culture’ within which you now operate and deliver a long term dialogue that will reward both parties. Not a half arsed equivalent of my Finnish vocabulary which leaves the brand looking just a little bit stupid.

The difference is that I look inept to the shopkeeper, the brand looks stupid to Facebook and Twitter’s millions of influencers.

Thank you or ‘Kiitos’ as the fluent Finnish speakers would say…..

I had the good fortune to visit the South of France last week for the 2010 Cannes Lions Festival (http://www.canneslions.com).

Having arrived on Tuesday evening and, a little late to the party, I joined the guys for a drink at the Carlton Hotel terrace.

The thing about the Cannes Lions Festival is that whilst its main focus is celebrating the achievements of the ad industry, it is also an opportunity for those in the business to simply celebrate.

And, in that vein, 99% of the people around were having a good, relaxed, friendly but (admittedly) drunken time.

Apart from one, who was sitting next to our group.

And so, what started out as a refusal to allow a guy to take a chair because the person had popped to the toilet for a minute, escalated very quickly into our new friend blurting out a series of threats.

We’ll do a roll-call:

Upon politely asking the guy not to take the chair: “fuck you, you have no idea who you’re dealing with”.

Upon being told that he can’t take the chair: “fuck you, you’ve picked on the wrong marine”

Upon being asked what his role in the marines was: “Listen son, I am going to break you in two”

Upon being told that he should just enjoy the evening with his friends: “fuck you, I’m going to follow you out of here and break you in two”.

At this point we pointed out to him that he was an embarrassment to himself and to his company.

The situation finally ended when the guy had got up to his feet, unsteadily squared up to one of our group and grabbed a chair to use in the (apparent) fight he was about to begin. Having had enough of him, we left the bar.

Now, I couldn’t claim to have never said or done something stupid after a few too many drinks, but there’s a context to what I’m writing which makes this particularly interesting.

The guy that was puking ‘bad ass’ attitude was, in fact, a very senior employee of Unilever and was there in an official capacity (he was still wearing his Cannes Lions festival pass).

So whilst he was being generally abusive, back in Unilever’s business HQ the rest of the employees were probably working to “the highest standards of corporate behaviour towards everyone we work with, the communities we touch, and the environment on which we have an impact”, as presented here: http://www.unilever.com/aboutus/purposeandprinciples.

Furthermore, he of all people should know that a small incident like that can have repercussions way beyond a hotel bar.

Clay Shirky recognised in Here Comes Everybody that we are all media outlets – that by either generating content or repeating it from others, we are broadcasters. The irony in this instance is that one of our Unilever friend’s group in the bar was the guy that quotes Shirky (though calls him Sharky) in this clip from a conference way back in 2008 (just watch from 1’06″ onwards) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b7Ylsg8sVc.

So why is this thought provoking? Am I here to say that Unilever is bad and poor judges of character? No. It’s absolutely not my business; they can hire arrogant, aggressive, drunken loud mouths all they like.

To me, it prompts the question of where your ‘professional’ life ends and your social life starts when at an event like this; at what point do you stop being Mr Media at Unilever and start being just a plain old angry drunk? Next is to question how large, global brands make a decision in their hiring process which identifies personnel as being ‘on-brand’ in all aspects of their role – we often hear of businesses’ CSR programmes but when and how do they tackle Corporate (= Agencies and senior staff) Social (= getting ‘loose’) Responsibility (= at Industry Events)?

There’s another angle to this; as an employee of a company that spends vast amounts of money which you have manage on their behalf, do you adopt the power of the money you represent? Or do you, instead, respect that the budget is owned by the shareholders and you have a duty to deliver them a positive return? The incident above demonstrates how easy it is to be drunk on the power that someone else’s money gives you – especially when you have an entourage of fawning agency suits feeding the gut and fuelling the ego.

The incident described was a small, insignificant drama in what was a great time in Cannes. However, it does prompt a few, much larger, questions of where the line sits between individual and company in a more connected world. You would think our friend from Unilever should know better than most.