Well a merry christmas to us! Adland has had "ad serving disabled" without warning by our dear pals the Google Adsense folks. What did we do? Serve gore to you. It's the top five of PETA's most sexist ads that offends, as there's a woman being clubbed to have her fur stolen, and some lowly mostly nude interns sweating in cellophane in the hot Memphis sun that have blood on them. Like anything PETA, it's a very popular post, partly due to the offensiveness of the imagery. Not sure if it's the nudity or gore that got caught in Google's defunkt algorithm.

As you may have heard Google mistook some lingerie ads on adland for "adult content" and shut down our ad serving quite abruptly. This was very similar to last years Google freakout over the Sloggi ads I was ranting against.

Like I said then, it makes no sense if Google holds publishers to a higher standard than advertisers, and this is exactly what I told Google when I appealed. Now I have this reply:

We've been here before, last February Adland was banned from Google Adsense due to a seven year old post protesting the sexist Sloggi posters. The ad tradepress in Sweden, such as Dagens Media wrote about the strange ban.

Hello! `Tis International Talk like a sea dog tide again. Fer th' past six voyages, we`ve amused ourselves (on accoun' o' we be so easily amused) wi' changin' th' site ever' this tide ever' voyage t' talk like a sea dog. I be shoutin' like a mutinous reef monkey at my own prank. This will be the last year we pull this stunt.

It's a bit difficult to pull off, see, and this year you can only see that the words have changed to pirate-talk in the retweets & comments, but not in the posts. The site has simply grown too large for full-on pirate. Oh nay! What a shame! Ya scurvy dog who ortin' t' be keel hauled!

You remember when Adland was banned from Google adsense for doing what we do - that is show ads, right? It was written up in Dagens Media in Sweden, as well as a few other adblogs, like Adscam who humorously points out that other ad blogs have 'put millions in his Swiss bank account by featuring tits and arse in every post, even if it’s about deep sea oil rigs'.

A Google representative phoned me up to sort out the issue, "I can un-ban your account, but you will have to follow the Google adsense guidelines in the future, of course". I explained to him that Adland writes about advertising, the business that promoted advertising week with a cleavage shot and resorts to using naked bosoms as attention grabbers for an advertising show in Slovenia. "There will be boobage eventually, it is advertising, in fact there will be just as much sexism and skin as you can find in banner campaigns that run on Google adsense" I said. (for example - see the evolution of Evony ads which actually ran on adland in the google adsense space) Advertising, like many other businesses, is pretty sexist in itself, Neil French is one of the most famous creatives in advertising (he has done great work, mind you). And advertising images are full of stereotypes that will offend men, women, and your little dog too - what one target group finds humorous, another finds offensive. In order to discuss these ads, we need to see them.

Well, we can't have any google ads since we're apparently porn-peddlers anyway, which has put Google adsense in the "more trouble than they're worth" category. So we're banner-less now, and as you all know, I'm a softie at heart, so I decided to turn over our banner-spots to hemlösa banners (Homeless banners). It's a banner campaign created by Stockholms Stadsmission, and it hopes to inspire both large and small websites to help give homeless a roof over their heads.

You know that I've hated the Sloggi ass campaign with a passion, now it seems I have another reason to hate Sloggi. I just found this sweet message from Google adsense:

Hello,

While reviewing your account, we noticed that you are currently displaying Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our policies. For instance, we found violations of AdSense policies on pages such as http://adland.tv/content/sloggi-another-bumfight. Please note that this URL is an example and that the same violations may exist on other pages of your website.

So.. You might have wondered what has been going on here these past two weeks. Long story short, hell. ;)

Due to circumstances beyond my control, I needed to move out of the servers we were on, and into something else, in less than 12 hours. Thanks to Rackspace Cloud servers, and in particular twitter rackspace guru/god @rjamestaylor , we did manage a superfast move and stayed up! However, I wasn't up to speed o the whole cloud server thing, and dayjobs were hogging most of my time, so a few kinks that prevented new postings weren't fixed, until just now.

Sorry about that, I'm gonna make it up to you by posting so much stuff now.

Learn More about Rackspace Cloud Hosting and Cloud Computing

Hello all, especially all adgrunts currently logged in (Hi
TheBeanCast, grant.lovering, Stink, HowieSPM etc). Shocking, isn't it? I felt that I should show you what we're doing here, not 100% done yet but pretty much there, and some folks might be thinking that I'm just picking my nose all week, since there's few new posts, but his is what's going on. So now you know. The theme has been change to fit with the input received. Also, we've added ... *gasp*.... banner ads. Did you know that it's against Googles terms of service to ask anyone to click them to support the site? Yeah, totally is. So I'm not gonna ask that. But I think you can guess why I've made banner ads space..... right? ;)

Anyway. Back to work. Pour on the praise, hate and random suggestions pony-wishes in the comments here. Cheers.

Hey. If you're wondering why I'm a bit quiet recently it's because I'm busy backtagging the archive. the community tags / folksonomies that are on each film, that every logged in adgrunt can contribute to needed some populating when it came to those ancient films from way-back-when. Lots of films don't have any tags, and I set out to fix that.

What am I tagging? Stuff we see in the ad that won't show up in the searches: that is not the brand name nor the product category, or the credits, as all of this is already typed out in other fields and needs no repeating - only stuff we see. Like wedding, dog, anthropomorphic, explosion, stunt, fire, kiss.... and so on.

Here's what the Volkswagen Jetta ad looks like, see the tab that reads "tags"? As a logged in user, you can add your tags to the ad, and contribute to the alternative way of finding commercials here on adland.

Just one of the things that logged in users can do, which anonymous can not.

Aaaah, RSS, the ease of reading news the way you want it. Pretty clever ain't it? Just a heads up to RSS readers that might not notice what's going on, on the site - you can upload your work here, and when you think about it, you really should. It'll add to your google-juice fame, after all.

Lets show off some examples, shall we? See Saatchi Tel Aviv has a page, and on it you'll find their work like the retro yummy pelephone musix ad where everything has speakers. The Perlorian brothers page is looking awesome, as usual. Agencies like King, GSDM Idea City and Shalmor Avnon Amichay-YR Interactive have pages and upload their new work when it arrives. Individuals at agencies upload their work, for example Greg Smith, to show off what they've worked on. Production places, directors and sound design folk add their things like Bent Image Labs, Anonymous Content, Suspect. Directors add their reels, like David Edwards. Now, why don't you?

Oh, and if you're getting into the twitter habit we're @adland on twitter.

Whoah, anyone who follows me ( @dabitch ) on twitter has had to cope with tweets at all hours lately and you might have been wondering why I stopped sleeping. Blame the Super Bowl Commercials archive for that. I wanted to make them all embeddable flash films instead of our old Quicktime fun, so I've been up all hours fixing things. It's now ready - for your surfing pleasure or for your personal "best of" / "Worst of" superbowlian lists in your blogs. I tweeted a "*phew*, all done" yesterday, @adfreak, @agencyspy, @GOOD and @coudal joined in, and suddenly that link was on fire.

Each page in the super bowl archive, for example the 1995 Super Bowl xxix is currently sorted by "Most visited today". Linking your favorite ad may actually send it up the list.

As you may know, we've been publishing the super bowl ads on super bowl Sunday since 1999, our archive has been the source for the New York Times, and come Sunday we'll do it again. Same procedure as last year, Miss Sophie? The same procedure as every year, James!

Related SB ad-fun:
Top five worst Super Bowl ads of all time
The oft forgotten Super Bowl gems
Ten great Super bowl commercials you forgot - or so bad that you wish you had.
A look back on super bowl ads past - NYT picks and Adland picks.

This year, Cannes Lions isn't what it used to be - AdAge reports that Festival Entries Down 20%, Attendees Fall 40%, and we all know about the canceled parties. Some of us will be there though, and those of you who are can show those who aren't in Cannes all the crazy that goes one with a click of a button on your cellphone.

Not only can you see the latest bambused films on the front page (right now) in a box on the right hand side, you can also watch the recent broadcast from the link adland.tv/bambuser. When Cannes Lions begins we will also tweet out the funniest/best/most outrageous Live films to our twitter account @adland. A global audience to your shenanigans, go for it! Simply log in and /user/me/bambuser and you're set. We already told you about the new feature last week: We want you to broadcast LIVE from Cannes Lions, today we bring you the full page complete with a bunch of talking heads films so that you get the general idea of what will be happening. Wrath Of Cannes will be joining us booing loudly all the way from Coney Island New York, and I for one am really looking forward to that.

I will be in Cannes and am keen to meet all you adgrunts - if you see a red mop of hair hollah, but you can also simply DM me @adland or @dabitch or email so we may exchange cell numbers.

So it's 2009 and in the midst of and economic downturn, you're not going to Cannes. There won't be a DDB party on Friday night, Publicis are sending half their usual delegates, and canceling their Thursday night bash. Havas will not hold it's Havas Café by the beach, Leo Burnett are probably cancelling their party as well. Woe is us.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could be a fly on the wall in Cannes and get to see all the gossip anyway, despite being stuck at home? Well you can, with us! (ps - flies wanted!)

Not all adgrunts will be in the office during Cannes Lions - some adgrunts will actually be there (me included). And we'll be your spies in Cannes with the help of video-equipped cellphones and this neat hookup to Bambuser.

All you adgrunts have to do is check your settings at http://adland.tv/user/me/bambuser, and when you point and shoot as someone pushes a creative director into the pool at the Martinez, it will air live on Adland's front page.
No hassle with hashtags, just point and Bambuse. If you ever wanted a global audience to hear your opinion on everything hanging in the Cannes Lions shortlist basement, just bambuse straight from your phone to us and you've got it.

All you adgrunts stuck at home, don't worry, despite the economic meltdown, there will still be plenty of crazy to go around, as I recall the "Dutch parties" we held in Cannes waybackwhen didn't have great budgets, just a very nutty team of "Party-Sluts" to arrange it - and equally crazy performers willing to blow their heads off.

I might not be smuggling fireworks into France this time around, but I will be thinking up crazy as usual. See you in Cannes!

Over at Design By Hümans (oh god, the stupid use of a silent umlaut) there's a test pattern "creatures" T-shirt. They look like little pink devils! I should get this shirt, I even have the soundtrack to go with it! :) Let it be the soundtrack for this post:


Seems that I'm not the only one slightly obsessed with Test Card F and test patterns in general. Come to my house and you'll wipe your feet on a test pattern door mat, I got my test pattern earrings on, I check my D&G Medicine Man Test pattern watch. No I don't, I check my test pattern wall clock. Special Sally at Deviant Art has even knitted a really nice TV-pattern pullover. Obviously there's even a test pattern TV cosy.

At 11 minutes past six p.m. my time, that Chinese love toy spammer I've been battling for the past week posted a spampost about their warez, including images of sex toys to the front page. At thirty four minutes past six I looked up from dinner-cooking and saw what had happened and could delete it.

As of right now, posts to the front page are moderated. Say thank you to the Chinese spammer for pissing in our previously open to all friendly adgrunts pool. Eight years of community moderated front page posting, which has been for the most part treated by respect by all members, was just killed by one giant dildo.

Greetings adgrunts, from your very tired hostmaster. The machine we run here has recently been updated to Red Hat 5.3 and since then quirky issues have been slowing the machine down to a crawl. You've probably noticed. I've been up all hours trying to peg what's been going wrong and changes things in php, mysql, and this site's CMS like nuts to try and fix things. I might have finally solved it. I'm still keeping an eye on things and if I can afford to, I will be buying more ram (don't count on that though, I'm skint.)

Meanwhile, I'm rebuilding the wonky search. 5% of the site has been indexed. There are 49775 items left to index. Since the site is large, this may take a while (read at least 2 days)

Hey kids.

So, all superbowl commercials are now available to everyone who is logged in. It's a drastic change, and just a teensy step in the direction of an even bigger change. Come the superbowl I want to be able to set all superbowl ads free for all - the only reason I'm not flicking that switch right now is because we need to move to a faster server first which we will do in a few days (an art director doing data migration. What a nightmare.)

I wish I could be all web 2.0 supertransparent and tell you more about what I plan to do, but since I am but one single person doing all of it, I do not wish to overpromise anything... yet.

Currently ads are not downloadable due to some legal issues. I'll be sorting that out asap as well.

New user signups are closed for the moment still. Can't change that until we've moved server, I'm afraid.

Hello all. And a happy 2009.

Mine isn't happy. It hasn't been happy since 2 pm on the 31st of December 2008 when the adland server - named AMMO - crashed badly for the third time and took all it's backups with it.

This is not ammo that we are running on now. I do not trust ammo anymore, despite new discs (twice) new chassi (twice) and new kernel, that Dell PE2950 twin Quad Core Xeon is without a doubt the most crash-prone machine that I have ever encountered, and there still no word as to why it crashed like that. Three times. Taking three out of six RAID5 discs into never-never-bit-land. Yes, the impossible happened to me, thrice.

So here we are running on a slow previous machine with old backups and as you can see, much is lost. While I do my best to recreate all those posts, I can not recreate users through a series of wild guesses. I can not recreate user uploaded files (but will be fetching as much as I can from various caches on the web) - and all the while, I was working to fix things before the superbowl - and yes all of that work is lost too.

Pardon me if I'm a tad too depressed to elaborate further, I'm also quite busy as we will now have to move this to another machine and that takes some doing (ever seen an Art Director do data migration before? ha!) Because, as always, I am the one that will be doing everything. We don't have a crew of clever techies working for us, just this crazy Art Director here doing her very best. You may hate that your favorite video is now offline (at the moment, but I will get everything back, I'll work day and night I promise), you may curse loudly that your account was wiped, I totally understand. Just remember, my heart is broken too.

I'll give more updates as I have time to share them.

Meanwhile, just so that people don't run into bugs, the signups are off, and the upgrades are off. Luckily I have a copy of those updates in another machines as well - so those who lost upgraded accounts please forward your latest receipt to host -at - ad-rag.com and I'll get you (and a new account) sorted as soon as I can.

Quick nerd-update. Good news, AT&T has removed our IP# from their RBL. I don't know why we ended up on that blacklist in the first place, but it was pretty quick and simple to get off it after filling in a few forms with my name, email and number(s) over at att.net.

So, to anyone who has an emailaddress at an AT&T network, such as people with sbcglobal.net in their addy - you didn't get your mails. But you can get them now. So if any passwords went missing, request a new one.

The mail-server IP address(es) associated with your request will removed from the block list within 24-48 hours from the date of this notification. AT&T, Bellsouth, SBC and any affiliates do NOT intentionally block legitimate mail in the course of our anti-spam initiatives and regret any inconvenience this may have caused. If the IP that was recently blocked begins to exhibit the characteristics of a compromised network object or is compromised by an offender of Acceptable Use Policies, the IP address will be blocked again.