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I would like to wish you a happy and successful 2009. Hope you win your first lion this year. Hope you will find your true love. Hope you get whatever your dreams are!

2008 was great for our community. AotW has grown to 51,000 registered users and readers looked at 230,000,000 pages throughout the year. We have great plans for 2009.

It would be interesting to know what everybody's new year resolution is. Let me start the list below!

AotW: Which advertising award show do you think is the most prestigious and why? Where does CLIO stand?
MC: Winning a Clio award is an internationally-recognized sign of prestige. Unlike many of the newer award schemes it has been going for half a century and is therefore well established as the foremost mark of creative excellence in advertising. The only close international equivalent would be would be the awards given out at the annual Cannes advertising festival, although it is arguable that the growing multiplicity of award categories has diluted the prestige associated with winning a Cannes Lion. The event in the South of France undoubtedly draws a larger crowd, perhaps in part because of its location!

AotW: Do you think the role of small hot shop agencies will have more significance in the next 5-10 years than today? Are we seeing a decline in the popularity of large multinational advertising networks among clients?
MC: There can be little doubt that small, specialist shops have become more significant and will continue to do so. The impetus of media fragmentation alone will ensure this. But they will not necessarily become more significant at the expense of larger agencies and networks. The latter bring important economies of scale and are by and large remaking themselves in bid to be as responsive and creative as newer, smaller shops. Over time the picture that will emerge is probably a more complex matrix of competition and partnerships between specialists and large networks.

AotW: One-to-one advertising is gaining momentum over mass media. Do you think on the long term mass media will seize to exist and all communication will be personal?
MC: Even in the long term, firms will need to get messages to large audiences, but there can be little doubt that going to the mass market will become less common. The rise of online social networks and techniques such as behavioral targeting facilitated by the Internet will mean that specific groups will receive marketing messages that, in theory, are much more relevant to their needs and tastes. So marketing communication will become less ‘mass’ and more personal but it is unlikely that ‘all communications will be personal.

AotW: Is TV really dead? Is the significance shrinking? What's taking its place? Online?
MC: TV advertising is far from dead. According to researcher eMarketer, US spending on TV advertising will have increased by nearly 3% in 2008 to a total of $70 billion. Though 2009 will inevitably see a fall, the total is likely to remain above $67 billion through 2010. US consumers are, however, multi-tasking more than ever, which means that the online audience is growing faster than the TV audience and the ad dollars are following; eMarketer projects that having reached $24 billion in 2008, US online ad spending will total $26 billion in 2009. Print ad spending is a whole different story...

The AotW-R competition is an amazing success. Even after yesterdays extended deadline we're still receiving so many submissions, which I will put up till the end of the week.

I'd like to thank you so much for all the effort you put into this competition.

Now it's time to check out all the work and give your votes and comments. The 3 winners will be decided partly based on your feedback and partly based on my and my collegues decision.

Click here to check out the work!

AotW: Lot of people accuse advertising awards that the winning work isn't real work done for clients, but so called chip-shop or scam work that is only prepared for awards. Is this true? Do you mind?

WY: The juries that CLIO assembles are of the highest caliber and recognize these “scam” ads immediately. Once they are recognized as such, jurors usually vote accordingly, and the work doesn’t make it past the first round of judging.

AotW: Some say good ideas need to be recycled once in a while to keep them alive. Others say, it's inappropriate to have old ideas presented in a new form to win awards. What's your take on this issue?

WY: CLIO’s theme for the 50th Anniversary Celebration addresses this issue head on. CLIO is asking the industry, “What have you done that hasn’t been done?”

AotW: As multinational companies reach across the globe to advertise their products they greatly influence local cultures and they homogenize the world. Do you feel advertising is killing local culture bit by bit? Or advertising is just part of a bigger movement of globalization and there is nothing we can do about it?

WY: Advertisers are spending more time these days personalizing their messages to certain markets so instead of losing the local culture, they’re playing into it and in some ways promoting it.

AotW: Is there a wisdom you would like to share with our young student readers? Is there something you would recommend them to focus on to be successful in the next 40-50 years of their advertising career?

WY: CLIO knows that students are the future of advertising. I would say to them when asked to come up with a solution to a clients’ problem, put your time, effort and resources into developing powerful ideas as opposed to high-end, glitzy production values. Without an idea, you have no foundation on which to build on. Also, focus on how and when the consumer wants to receive messages from advertisers. This is even more important now in the technology-driven world we live in.

Zune Paint from Sibling Rivalry on Vimeo.

Several readers asked for larger images in the RSS feeds of Ads of the World, so we implemented it.
You can subscribe to it by clicking the larger button below. :P

The feed url is: http://adsoftheworld.com/node/feed

Brains wanted!

This time we need your brains again! Only, not for evaluation and clever commenting but for creating something stunning and fitting for our new project: Ads of the World Research.

About

Ads of the World Research is a new service offered from Ads of the World and GlobalAdSource. Ads of the World Research provides instant access to global advertising content with an easy-to-use database.

Our search engine provides up-to-the-minute sources regarding industries, brands or campaigns from all over the world. Subscibers have instant access to high resolution advertising content as well as simple metadata. We have over 2 million advertisements from over 40 countries. One can begin using the database immediately by creating searches.

The task

Create a winning campaign to make a glorious launch of Ads of the World Research. Well, not necessarily glorious, but make it memorable, great and groundbreaking - at least! It's so simple with brains like yours! What we need from you is basically a creative concept but keep in my mind that it has to be adaptable to web, since its main appearance will be in the form of a banner campaign.

The competition

Submit your works in form of a jpg (full page print ads) and optionally as a flash banner (768x90px web banners) until 30th of November. (UPDATE: New Deadline 15th of December 2008). In your emails please include "AotW-R competition" in the subject. Your works will be evaluated in part by a professional jury and in part - as usual - by the visitors of the site. Get ready to show off with your work and dare to face the challenge of those (in)famous comments!

The best part

Once you're a winner, not only fame, but fortune kicks in too. The winners of the 1st-3rd prize will be awarded respectively 1 year, 6 month and 3 month subscription for Ads of the World Research.

Give us all your best parts!

A provocative movie about advertising. What do you think?

"What connection, if any, exists between religion and our buying behaviour? Are there similarities between the way our brains respond to religious and spiritual symbols, and the way they react to products or brands?"

Martin Lindstrom, author of the forthcoming book Buyology – based on the world's largest NeuroMarketing study peering inside 2,000 volunteers to understand our true feelings about brands, advertising, product placement has been on a four year mission to find a link between brands and religion. "The entire scientific team was shocked as we for the first time ever realized the true connection between brands and religion" says Lindstrom in the lead up for the global release of his next book.

Many people asked me in email what's the benefit of registering on AotW. So, I thought it would be useful to collect the reasons and list them here (not in order of importance):

1. You will see latest content 15-30 minutes earlier on the front page compared to anonymous users.
2. You will be able to comment and express your views.
3. You will be able to rate work.
4. You will be able to create forum topics in the exhibition section (to post your work), dungeon (to discuss anything advertising) and post in the job section.
5. You will create a profile on Ads of the World with as much as information as you like including an a picture of you.
6. You can link your blog from your profile and your comment signature, which will bring you traffic.
7. You can set whether you want to be contacted for job offers or freelance assignments in your profile.
8. You will be a valued member of the biggest online advertising community (almost 50 thousands members) in the world.
9. You will optionally receive the monthly AotW newsletter that includes the AotW winners of the month.
10. You will be able to track the discussions you participated in by pressing the "Recent / My recent posts" menu items on the left.
11. Finally, you will be able to use your ID on other Drupal powered sites, such as creativebits.org and thousands others.

Oops, that 11 reasons. Either way, if you don't have an account yet, go for it! It's free for life!

EepyBird's Sticky Note experiment from Eepybird on Vimeo.

Looks like post-its are getting popular.

Here is an email I just received about the infamous Seinfeld Microsoft ad.

So, imagine you are stranded on a desert island. No, wait, how about this: imagine you found a magic lamp. Oh, no, no, we've got it -- imagine you had 300 million dollars to spend on an advertising campaign for a brand that has been made the butt of one brilliant ad after another at the hands of your competitor. With that much money, hey, what would you do first?

Apparently, you can take 300 million dollars and use at least a chunk of it to hire Jerry Seinfeld to re-run his shtick, this time with Bill Gates in tow -- a man so uncomfortable on screen he ignites dreams in Al Gore of staring in a reality show. And, apparently you can also, as an agency, forget completely what advertising is supposed to do. Oh, right, yeah, sell something. That is so, ugh, traditional.

For those who have had the good fortune of not seeing the maiden voyage of the new Microsoft advertising campaign from the too-cool-for-research guys at Crispen Porter + Bogusky, let us explain the premise. This guy walks into a mall. Wait, it's Jerry Seinfield. Wait again, there's Bill Gates, buying shoes on the cheap -- pleather to be exact. After some discussion about Bill's shoe size, loyalty points, and mall food, they leave. The punch line? Bill Gates adjusts his shorts. We couldn't make this up. We're funnier than that.

This Microsoft ad is not funny. But, even if it were, the standard it is being held to is that of Apple's amazing advertising about the PC and Vista -- ads so funny they bear up under repeated viewing -- and how those ads sell the Mac with not only a brand position but the proof points to back it up, something increasingly out of vogue in these days of ad-as-slapstick. One is left wondering what exactly the Microsoft ad was intended to do. If not built for the heavy lifting of actually creating an in-market result, was it at least supposed to muscle us into a new way of feeling about Microsoft? If so, what new information were we supposed to take away from this ad? That in the PC-Apple wars, Microsoft is the nerd who, no matter how many zabillion dollars it has, it still can't figure out how to dress itself? The PC as un-cool. Got it. But we already knew that. You know who told us? Apple.

That makes this advertising worse than a waste of money. It makes it a redundant waste of money. And that's about as un-cool as you can get.

I've received numerous request from ad professionals to provide research material for specific industries, regions or brands. First we launched the browse feature here on Ads of the World, which enables you to search about 18 thousand ads. But now we have a much bigger offer to give you.

Ads of the World Research is a new service offered from Ads of the World and GlobalAdSource. Ads of the World Research will provide you with instant access to global advertising content with an easy-to-use database.

Whether you are researching an industry, brand or specific campaign, our search engine provides you with up-to-the-minute sources from all over the world.

We provide you with instant access to high resolution advertising content as well as simple metadata that helps you sort through content to find what you need, when you need it.

We have over 2 million advertisements from over 40 countries at your disposal. You can begin using the database immediately by creating searches.

What if there were no stop signs and a major corporation was charged with inventing one?

I complete more than 10 years of passion in
advertising this month as a teacher and as an ad professional...This piece was written by Ram of Mudra communications - Chennai -India when he felt that nothing was wright there in advertising.. he still is in the line but the feeling ,I guess is true to most ad professionals...so here we go...

Two days back I just felt that advertising is not happening and I haven’t done anything solid that I can talk about…. While this thought was running on my head for quite some time…it just burst out and I felt, I should take a break …… then that million dollar question came and struck my head ,’ if not advertising what then? ‘

Two days prior to the kick-off of UEFA EURO 2008™, adidas presents the tournament’s stars supersized. A 17-meter-high huddle of players welcomes fans at the Zurich train station. At the Vienna Prater, a Petr Cech likeness 42 meters in size sporting eight arms holds even the most impossible shots – and in front of the MuseumsQuartier in Vienna, fans can marvel at giant-sized football boots which are the bigger than life versions of what some of Europe’s best players will be wearing during the tournament.

Zack Snyder is offering you the opportunity to create "Veidt Enterprises" TV commercials that could end up in the feature film WATCHMEN, scheduled to be released in theaters on March 6, 2009.

To get started, download the standard definition and/or high definition assets from the links below, and then shoot your own original TV commercial that advertises one of the products! Remember, the movie is set in 1985, so TV commercials should be in 4:3 aspect ratio (so it looks like standard TV, not widescreen) and they should be either 15, 30 or 60 seconds in length. The products are all made by "Veidt Enterprises," and you can download the product logos for your use as well.

Make your TV commercial in NTSC standard definition (720x486) or higher resolution, upload it, and then others can vote on your work. The contest ends on June 2, 2008. The 40 finalists will win signed posters from Zack Snyder. The top five finalists from user votes will win High-Definition Canon Vixia HG10 camcorders. Up to 20 of Zack's favorite finalists will win $1000.00, and have a chance to be included in the WATCHMEN feature film itself.

Contest Website: http://youtube.com/watchmenmovie

About Watchmen
A complex, multi-layered mystery adventure, the film is set in an alternate 1985 America in which costumed superheroes are part of the fabric of everyday society, and the “Doomsday Clock” – which charts the USA’s tension with the Soviet Union – is permanently set at five minutes to midnight. When one of his former colleagues is murdered, the washed-up but no less determined masked vigilante Rorschach sets out to uncover a plot to kill and discredit all past and present superheroes. As he reconnects with his former crime-fighting legion – a ragtag group of retired superheroes, only one of whom has true powers – Rorschach glimpses a wide-ranging and disturbing conspiracy with links to their shared past and catastrophic consequences for the future. Their mission is to watch over humanity…but who is watching the Watchmen?

For more information visit: http://watchmenmovie.com/

Check out the stop motion video for Get-out-and-play. And here are the making of images and the video too.

We've made a very slight update on the way content is displayed on the site. If you notice anything incorrect please let us know here in the comments. Hope you like the updated look!