Ten silly things you didn't know about adland

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: "Ad land" 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, Ad Land 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 favorite 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 rumors 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.

p.s. "adland" is a registered trademark.