Hello Viking

Dan, the intern

Dan Spillman joined us on Monday. He's our summer intern. Dan goes to MCAD, and is tall. We're excited he's with us. Dan's going to help us with our first birthday celebrations, and various client projects. Welcome, Dan!

2007 in friends and music and other favorites

Hello Viking started six months ago.

Since then, we've had the opportunity to collaborate with wonderful people at Spring, Dentsu America, Venables Bell, 1nteractive, Arnold, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Pinnacle Air and BlueCross BlueShield.

Thank you David, Shannon, Ted, Trish, Rey, Mike, David, Colleen, Lissette, Pierce and Woody.

And thanks to all the amazing people who collaborated with Hello Viking, sharing their skill, wisdom and experience. We look forward to working with you all in 2008!

Amidst all the excitement, we chalked up a few other favorites:

Cornelius' Sensuous
(Especially love "Fit Song")

Common's Finding Forever
("Drivin' Me Wild" might be our single of the year)

Fountains of Wayne's Traffic and Weather
(Okay, "New Routine," "Strapped for Cash" and "Yolanda Hayes" might also be our singles of the year; and we really dug the FoW show at First Avenue)







The Police reunion tour
Okay, so the crowd on the floor was 45+. But these guys were on fire.

The Sea & Cake at the Varsity Theater
We love seeing Archer and Sam. They were fantastic, in a fantastic venue.

moo.com
They love to print and we love the work they print. Beautiful website interface.

Michael Clayton
Might be our film of the year. Tony Gilroy's script was awesome.

Must not forget Basecamp. Or HighRise. Two brilliant web applications from 37Signals. Hello Viking probably wouldn't be as organized (and thus as successful) as it has been without these two awesome applications. And we found ourselves almost totally in agreement with Jason Fried when he spoke about 37Signal's process and products at this year's MIMA Summit.

And we got geeked about Twitter.

And Flickr.

Curse you, Guitar Hero III. You threaten to curb productivity in 2008.

More Vikings-o-rama

More fun to be had searching for "Vikings" on YouTube. Enjoy!

Banjofish - The Viking Song

Playmobil- Vikings Sack a Town

Clear Lake rumble

Viking Challenge

Vikings-o-rama

Let's say it's late at night. You've been working all day. Your crew is punchy. Then someone does a random keyword search on, say, MySpace, for "vikings." And a whole treasure trove of wonderful videos shows up. Clearly, you need to share these with the world. (Inspired by an earlier discovery on the same subject.)

Viking Sponsorship Foundation (2003)

Me and The Viking

Viking Dance

Viking Rock

Tyr

MIMA Summit 2007

So we joined the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association last week, and attended the 2007 Summit today.

(Check out our photos here. And our tweets here.)

Over 630 people showed up. The event was sold out. We got there a bit late and missed the first keynote. But overall, we had a really good time. Our highlights:

"Quantifying the Overall Value of the Web Channel"
Jason Burby, Chief Analytics & Optimization Officer, ZAAZ (Seattle, WA)
Interactive/digital work is inherently measurable--it's unescapable--which is both a blessing a curse. Because on the one hand, we finally have a basis for understanding what works and possibly why. On the other, we've got a massive responsibility to do something with the information. Burby's presentation was a solid exercise in understanding the role of metrics as a foundation for monetizing user behavior -- and then figuring out what to do about it all. We'll be buying ZAAZ's book on the subject.

"Unconventional Collaboration: Insights Gathered from Three Years of Collaboration at 37signals"
Jason Fried, Founder, 37signals (Chicago, IL)
We use Basecamp from 37Signals, so we were biased in favor of this presentation. It was really nice to discover we share many of 37Signals' operational practices: Working apart--working virtually, no (or extremely few) meetings, focusing on smaller decisions that can be solved quickly versus the paralysis of large problems. Plus, Jason sounds oddly like our friend Dmitri Cavander. What Jason proposes is powerful stuff, and it clearly works--the challenge is in scaling the methodology up to larger entities. But an awesome presentation, nonetheless. And we're buying 37Signals' book as well.

We weren't nuts about the huge bottleneck to get to the free lunch, so we ate across the street at Subway. But the open bar at the end was nice. One comment: Seems like a vast majority of interactive marketing people in Minnesota have very well-designed eyewear.

We'll be back.

Techno Viking

First, our pal Rey sent us a fabulous Techno Viking video on YouTube. It's awesome to the point of over-analysis. (What's with the dude handing over the water? What is Techno Viking's Code of Honor?)

But tonight we found something perhaps even better.

Michael Jackson, you have met you match. And he is Techno Viking.

Huzzah, Jan Ulrik Leth!

A fearsome Viking congratulations to our friend Jan Leth on his recent promotion at Ogilvy to Chairman of Vice or some such thing. Well deserved, Jan!

And thanks to Jan's vast knowledge of viking lore, we now bask in the glorious understanding that Bluetooth wireless technology was essentially named after the Viking King Harald Bluetooth.

Hello, Sports Illustrated!

And a helmet tip to our pal Marty for the heads up. Go Sox!

Persuasion

We had a fabulous lunch today at Barbette with Dion Hughes and Mark Johnson of Persuasion Arts & Sciences. (Thanks, men!) The food, the art (seen here) and the conversation were quite wonderful.

It's really interesting to hear the perspectives of two guys with decades of experience who helped make Fallon, Ammirati and a whole slew of traditional ad agencies rich and famous. As they put it, the struggle Mark and Dion face now are the antiquated definitions, methodologies and procedures of the very ad industry that made them famous.

Where are the marketers and ad agencies willing to step outside the established "norms" of strategic development and production integration? There's money to be saved, and effective ideas to be had. Just ask Mark and Dion. Or us.

Hello, Feast

Nice to see Snickers acknowledge Vikings. Thank you, Snickers.