While Dabitch is busy elsewhere after the birth of her baby, the freelance agency has chatted to her about the birth of her other baby - this website. Read the full chat here: on the collectives own weblog.
I started Adland when I lived in San Francisco back in 1996. When I began surfing the web there was nearly nothing related to advertising out there, in 95 portfolios.com [1] (still going strong!), zeldman.com [2], the University of Texas [3] and J Walter Thompson were the advertising sites online worth their salt. There was also a copywriter, Dave Dumanis, who wrote weekly on his website called ad lib about advertising in early 96, which in hindsight must have been the very first sortof "pre-blog" adblog. Zeldman's ad graveyard, Dave's ad lib and the clear lack of websites that gabbed ads the way I wanted to inspired me to start my own site. The 'concept' of the website was to show ads separated at birth [4], much like the ad graveyard shows ads killed by clients or circumstance. I learnt some basic HTML and I collected all the good ad related links [5] I could find on a page so that people who found adland could find more adstuff on the web. As time passed, I started posting my own long rants about the state of advertising, what it was like pounding the pavement with a portfolio looking for work and the pain of bad campaigns in a section named adrants [6], as well as excerpts from advertising books that I had read in the "adbooks" section. Later the commercial archive collection merged with adland in 2000. The whole thing grew quite organically, really.
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