Adland is in Dagens Industri today.

The article about Adland in Dagens Industri (a.k.a Sweden's pink paper) today focuses on the "Chinagate" affair. "Death threats from angry readers commonplace for Ad-blogger" reads the headline.

For those of you who missed it, the posts about the Swedish Red Cross Youth human rights campaign drew a lot of attention. One adgrunt, whole9yards, spotted that some photographs in the campaign depict police in Nepal rather than China - see Red Cross (Youth) pulls "Olympic" human rights campaign in Sweden - and voiced his concerns about this. Other commentators attracted to the posts weren't anywhere near as decent and well articulated as he was, and soon the comments became a regular flame-fest. What you see on here the site is not everything that was posted, since most of the comments were flagged as spam by the automatic spamtrap, but it will give you a general idea of what was being said. Emails directed to me personally were a hundred times worse, and it culminated in late night phone calls and even death threats if I did not remove the campaign and apologize for its existence. Not to mention the DOS-attacks, spambombings and google-bombings attempting to link Adland with the word prostitute. A few events were serious enough to warrant a call to the police. The Swedish Youth Red cross have had to endure the same, and several facebook groups were started rallying people to join in the hate for them.

For the record, I never remove campaigns submitted unless the creators of said campaign asks me to.

Links on anti-cnn regarding that campaign can be seen here: [本版提示] 瑞典青年红十字会借西藏炮制辱奥广告[广告已撤销!] and Unbelievable: The Red Cross——Hypocritical and misleading !.

Resume.se also had an article a few weeks ago about the threats I've received for publishing that campaign (and the note that the campaign was pulled). See : Adlands grundare hotas för OS-kritisk reklam. The anti-cnn sajt is created by students to expose what they call "Western Goebbels' Nazi media" - that is, Western media's biased coverage of unrest in Tibet. See news.com Australia: Chinese students launch 'Anti-CNN' website

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Anonymous Adgrunt's picture
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Dabitch's picture

PS - yes that's a Ties Suck (in binary) tie. I can't be that serious!

EricR's picture

You're famous!

What's a pink paper? Are they homosexuals?

Why were people posting pictures from Iraq on a post about Tibet and a Swedish ad campaign?

Dabitch's picture

Am I the only who says pink papers? The Financial Times is pink - most countries have their own version of FT which is also pink to signal that it is a business paper. I guess I am the only one who calls them pink papers.
Not sure about the IRAQ logic, I guessed it might have been Iraq = Human rights issues + UK troops + London hosting the next olympics. Or something. But it's just as likely them saying "look there are human rights issues here too".

RLDavies's picture

I made the same leap of logic: pink = gay. Don't think I ever heard the FT described as a pink paper. Although, technically, it is.

Apologies for any typos. I stepped on my glasses last night. My monitor is at arm's length, which puts it firmly in the blur zone.

[sudden idea] Oh, much better at 200% zoom. Still blurry, but readable.

Neo's picture

Holy shit death threats? Late night phonecalls? For publishing news about an ad campaign? That's beyond fucked up.

Why aren't other adbloggers rallying in your defense? Seriously death threats?

nice tie

Neaner's picture

Nevermind just adbloggers - ALL bloggers (and papers) should care about this.
If Dabitch has to endure hacktivism and death threats for simply reporting on an ad campaigns existence, imagine what reporters who write about China have to go through. Fucked up.

Robblink's picture

Yeah! They used the wind-swept photo!

Dabitch's picture

It's not completely ignored - Mediabistro's AgencySpy wrote about it: Adblogger Gets Death Threats etc. Over Human Rights Ads posted on Her Site.

Allan1's picture

It is a great photo of you!

Neo's picture

Man, the shit you have to put up with.

purplesimon's picture

Yeah, as someone who only commented on the piece here, I got a fair share of crap thrown my way, but no death threats.

Weirdly, I put across a measured argument to [insert username here] and the others that constantly hounded me for a week, and they seemed to back off. Seems they considered Dabitch an easier target. How silly of them, I'm much easier to put off!

Dabitch's picture

It was likely triggered by the closing of comments in those posts when I had enough of their crap.