Patrick Gardner recently wrote a piece called “Why Digital Swedes Are Moving Away From Advertising” for AdAge. He’s an American who’s worked in Stockholm since 1994, and is now the CEO of Perfect Fools, known for their award-winning work for Nokia, H&M and Mentos.

In his article, he talks about how the Swedes don’t actually care all that much about advertising. When they started working with the Internet in the ‘90s, they were just excited by the incredible communication and creative possibilities that the new technology enabled, and only later became to be known as the creators of a really great share of the world’s most innovative advertising. And, Patrick writes, now the Swedes seem to be moving away from advertising into developing their own online products and social tools, and specializing in areas like gaming or corporate dot-com development.

The exact same applies to other Nordic digital agencies: having worked through the developments of the industry in Finland myself, I know that the thinking of the people behind the most innovative agencies there is very close to that of the Swedes. Danish agencies have, as well, contributed their fair share to the pool of Lion-grabbing work from the Nordics.

Part of the success of the Nordics can be easily explained: Denmark, Sweden and Finland all share a culture of elegant design, state support for infrastructure (Finland recently declared access to high-speed broadband Internet a legal right), and a long line of famous architects, product design and engineering. In broadband and mobile penetration, the Nordics have always been ahead of much of the world.

But the second reason to their success has to do with what Patrick Gardner manages to touch only softly in his post: the (mostly) young and wild Nordic kids who are behind the agencies that have since gone to not only steal the attention at Eurobest but to set up offices in the New World as well, didn’t come from a traditional advertising background. When they started creating their digital work, they didn’t think of the traditional model of CD+art director+copywriter, and then add a couple strategists, IAs and developers in the picture. They created their own roles and model of working that is closer to product design and creative software engineering than poster production or scriptwriting. Even when their work turns out to be a YouTube clip similar, in format, to a TV commercial, their non-traditional roots show in both the creative idea and the execution. What they may have lacked in sophistication in message-making, research and measurement, they have always had in sheer creative energy and a realistic grasp of the new digital culture and mindset.

Patrick Gardner’s post falls a bit short and the conclusions in the end seem hastily drawn. Several people note that in the comments. But I hope that his text doesn’t go unnoticed in North America. Because even if the Nordic creators can’t see into the future any better than anyone else, at least they have realized one thing from the start: the future is not what it used to be. It’s something different. We can’t create something new by just taking the old and adding a new layer to it. If the media we use has changed, then why not the org chart and the roles as well? And with the ongoing development of the digital tools and culture around us, we will all need to pay more and more attention to long term product development than short term messaging.

Karri Ojanen