1: Adland can be reached by quite a few URL's. One of them is Adland.eu which we don't brag about because the .eu thing is still too darn exotic. ;)

2: Adland is a common expression in the UK, which is probably why executive creative director and ex-vice chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Patrick Collister calls his column at the First post the Ad Land Column, as Tim at Adfreak alerted us to. There's also Duncan's TV Adland, Adland TV and a classified ads system called Adlandpro and many more.

3: People like to call Adland by it's URL rather than its name, which explains why there are so many mentions of "AdRag", "Ad-Rag" and "commercial archive" out there. We don't do that though, because calling "Adscam" for "www.adscam.typepad.com" or "Adfreak" for "adweek.blogs.com" or "Advertising design/Goodness" for "frederiksamuel.com/blog" is just such a mouthful. Come to think of it, "advertising design/goodness" is a mouthful right there. We simply say Adland to mean the whole enchilada here, the commercial archive, adforums and badland included. It's descriptive.

4: We coin words and expressions here. Tim from adslogans (may he r.i.p. he was a great guy) called the Badlandian pairings for "dupliclaims" which stuck, I called the rants section for Adrants way back in 1996, which these days is also the name of another well known adblog (hi Steve!, member since April 10, 2001). But the best part is that the made up word "adgrunts" spawned its own comic around life as an adgrunt. Neat.

5: All of Adland's servers have had names that are four letter words, ever since the first machine Humpty crashed badly and all the kings horses and men couldn't put it back together again. Acme, Apex and Aeon picked up the slack. Two machines were actually built by yours truly. Aeon which we use now lives in the UK and is hosted by memset.

6: Back in 2002 when the server lived in an extremely hot co-location space, I had to add an industrial size fan to the machine to keep it up. Since the fan didn't fit I got a little creative with a sponge to fill the gaps. The sponge-machine ran like that for another two years.
(See image at top of article - the soldering iron is my favourite tool. Yes, that is a snakeskin skirt.)

7: Our very first cease and desist letter came from Universal Studios back in 1999 for hosting this particular Atari christmas commercial starring E.T. . We speculated Universal was ashamed for having their character associated with a game so bad there are rumours about landfills full of unsold copies, and it might have been the nail in the coffin for Atari. We never posted the letter, simply replied and Universal realized their mistake, damn. Could have become supah-famous right there had we blogged our private correspondence like so many do these days. Doesn't pay to have class. ;)

8: Speaking of C&D's, these days they seem to be a barometer of an agency loosing the account - our most recent came from Deutsch about some Expedia films . Two weeks later it was announced they lost the account. We'll never look at a C&D the same way again.

9: There are currently 36864 Quicktime commercials in the commercial archive section alone.

10: During Adland's lifetime Dabitch has lived in San Francisco California U.S.A., Stockholm Sweden, Amsterdam The Netherlands, New York City N.Y. U.S.A, Copenhagen Denmark, and now Malmö Sweden. In that order.

BBDO, Düsseldorf makes food look sexy and classy in their new campaign for the Braun Multiquick.

Alien vs. Predator 2 film directed by Tight Films: Greg Strause (pictured l.) and Colin Strause (pictured r.), who comprise the tight directing team The Brothers Strause, will be making their feature film debut with ALIEN VS. PREDATOR 2, for 20th Century Fox and Davis Entertainment. The Strauses’ vfx company, [hy*drau"lx], will be creating visual effects for the film, which goes into production next month. Recent spot projects helmed by The Brothers Strause include a Coca-Cola campaign via McCann Erickson/Shanghai, Gatorade “Winning Formula” via Element 79 Partners/ Chicago, Fresca “Dance” via Campbell Mithun/MN, and the music video for Flyleaf’s “I’m So Sick.” [hy*drau"lx] recently created visual effects for spots, including Gatorade “Winning Formula,” Lincoln “Landmarks,” and Sony PlayStation’s “God of War” campaign.

Barbara Kopple returns to commercials: Bicoastal production company Nonfiction Spots announces two-time Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple is available for commercial shoots, following the completion of her recent documentary feature, “Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing.” Barbara has worked with Nonfiction Spots as a commercial director since 1995. She has worked for the world’s top ad agencies and renowned brands, including Sprint, Target, Applebee’s, Target, and Ford, to name a few. Most recently, she completed several spots for Ogilvy & Mather’s Grand EFFIE Award-winning Real Beauty Campaign for Dove. Click here to find out more about Barbara’s latest commercial reel.

Northern Lights scores big at the AICE Trailer Park competition: Three Northern Lights assistant editors nabbed the Grand Prize, Special Special Recognition and Honorable Mention at the awards for the competition held in NYC. Read more to see the winners.

It seems that no matter how much we point at the send in your reels and the other submit your work pages, few if any read it before contacting us. No worries, we're used to getting all the things we ask you not to send, like wmv files, or the press release text attached in a word document, or your beautiful commercial served up as a youtube link, and we tirelessly ask you kindly to re-submit if we're interested in what you send.

Now, we could mock silly emails we receive and post those sadly uninformed cease and desist orders here on the front page all day long if we didn't have better manners than some other blogs out there - but today I'm afraid, we've met the drop that the cup runneth over by. Don't worry, I won't make it a habit as then we wouldn't have time to post anything else.

Read on to see how not to chat up this particular website to be your "viral seeding" whore. Free advice: for starters, dear Dialog Solutions GmbH, you might want to come off a little less like spam by actually personalizing the personal email.

Recall: Hell Hath no fury like a media-woman scorned?
Well here's the update - even after people sussed out that it was for CourtTV, the web was still buzzing about those posters. Did people get mad when they found out it wasn't real?
Not according to the The New York Times reports "Public Hath No Fury, Even When Deceived "

"Emily is really an amalgam of all of us who have been cheated on," said Marc Juris, general manager for programming and marketing at Court TV. "Clearly, this really resonated with people."
Whether it resonates into higher ratings for "Parco P.I." is another matter. The "Emily" ruse was originally intended to be a stunt to help promote the start of the show’s new season on Aug. 15, but Court TV's marketing group liked the idea so much that they made it a large part of the campaign. The second phase - ads for the show to be stamped over the original billboards - was to start next Monday, but Court TV moved it up to July 26 after all the attention.
Mr. Juris was still marveling: "It's like a flash investigation took place, and within 24 hours we were busted."

People liked Emily? That's not what I heard. She's a "woman" who describes her nipples as erasers and spams real blogs like the "Fork in the Road" where the post just described a car accident with the canned "my hubby is having an affair" message. I don't like Emily. I hate Emily. Describing nipples as "erasers" sounds terribly male writer/penthouse letter, and latching onto real blogs real life events with canned unrelated promo responses is nothing short of spam - comparable to that pharma-spammer who sprinkles his blogspot.com links all over this place these past weeks. But in the old "any press is good press" (as long as they spell your name right) apparently this campaign was a success.

All people not living in the US, but still hanging on the web, can be grateful that we don't get CourtTV I guess, because if that show is executed even half as mediocre as this ad campaign was, it'll blow chunks.
This poster below is on the I-95 North near Jerome Avenue in the Bronx, NY.

86 the onions has created series of stop-motion idents entitled "Homegrown" for FUEL TV, and the animations are truly homegrown - made with a sharpie-pen, some paper and scissors and a camcorder. Sweet.

Sink skating

In an age when high-tech and high-design are the norm, it's now possible for virtually anyone to create entire films with a camcorder and a laptop (iMovie and GarageBand) and bring something seemingly fresh to the table. It's no wonder brands are having a heyday with user-created content. In fact, FUEL TV's "Homegrown" series came about when Charlie Hilton, a surfer and 86's office manager, came to work one day with a short clip she and animator Andrew Dolan had produced. 86's Founder/Creative Director Chad Rea pitched the clip to Jake Munsey at FUEL TV. He liked the idea so much he commissioned 2 more just like it, including original music that was also written and performed by Hilton and Dolan. (more inside)

Partnership for a drug free America have a campaign out created by The Buntin Group in Nashville. Like the Montana Meth Project (phase 1, phase 2) it's scary as it communicates Meth as if it was an infectious disease, and unlike the MMP it uses a lot more alternative media. For example garbage trucks to carry its "infected by Meth" message, wall murals, dirty spoons, painted hallways in High schools and much more inside.

It was bound to happen and it did, while I was still hopping around screaming "FORZA ITALIA - la nazionale italiana é troppo forte!" draped in a flag - the Zidane headbutt replay videos, gifs and little flash games were already arriving online.

Contenders, start your engines - adgrunts, place your bets. What commercial will take home the Grand Prix?
To refresh your memory, links&screendumps to some of last years greatest ads inside. It's our shortlist - all the ads are on the real lions shortlist. Follow me!

"Hollywood has its Oscars. Television has its Emmys. Broadway has its Tonys. And advertising has its Clios. And its Andys, Addys, Effies and Obies. And 117 other assorted awards. And those are just the big ones."
- Joanne Lipman, 1987

Reporting from one of the awards Joanne didn't mention - inside you'll find Kelly award winners and some notable shortlisted ads from 2006. Yummy.