Ads Of The World Unite!

Today’s Site of the Day is Ads of the World (www.adsoftheworld.com).

Ads of the World (AotW) is an advertising archive and forum discussing great work worldwide. Ivan Raszl, a Hungarian freelance advertising creative director, started Ads of the World in September 2005. The new site, with capacity for creatives to contribute their work for feature, became very popular in a short time, growing to over 40,000 visitors a day.

Ivan had always wanted a site that has an ever growing library of ads that is well organized and searchable by keywords. He was a fan of Lürzers Archive and read several advertising blogs. He also wanted to discuss ads, advertising trends and techniques with collegues around the world. He wanted a site that was free and community driven. He saw many sites that offered some of each of these features but couldn’t find a site that offered all. And so he began Ads of the World.

So why is the site so popular? For one, the quality of material, both in terms of resolution and in creative standards, is excellent. Comments are made by people who have signed on, which limits the kinds of unkindness made possible by anonymity. Images and videos hitting the front page of AOTW usually end up in several advertising blogs like this one within hours.

It’s free. Now with the high traffic the site receives, that’s no mean feat. To keep that happening, Ivan has entered into a partnership with Jupitermedia Corporation, the company behind Jupiter Images and Jupiter Online Media. Very recently Ads of the World has entered into a partnership with GlobalAdSource to provide a research facility, providing access, at a cost, to over 2 million advertisements from over 40 countries.

AOTW is a global site. Living in Hungary, Ivan is not under pressure to play the politics of keeping the local advertising industry represented.

Forums at AOTW include the Exhibition, where creatives can submit their work for critique, the Dungeon, including conversation on anything related to the advertising world, a job market, and discussions in Chinese, French and Spanish.

Ivan is owner and creative director at advertising agency 7Field and was the founder of his Apple-oriented design blog, Creativebits.org. He previously worked as a creative director at Medina and HCC, and as a senior art director at JWT Bahrain, and FP7 McCann Erickson. In his earlier days he was packaging director at Coca Cola and General Electric Lighting.