Join the Adrants Super Bowl Chat Before, During and After the Game


Join us before, during and after the Super Bowl to talk about the ads in the game. Praise Them. Crap on them. Wish you created them.


Click here for a full sized version of the room with a window where you can upload commercials and view those others have uploaded. As they say, join the conversation.

by Steve Hall    Jan-29-08    
Topic: Announcements, Super Bowl 2008



Adrants Announces 2008 Diversity in Advertising Conference Series

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Adrants is happy to announce its continued partnership with Business Development Institute and its ongoing series of Diversity in Advertising conferences. Aimed at addressing an issue that usually receives nothing more than lip service, the conference series hopes to keep the discussion of diversity in advertising alive and to broaden the appeal of a career in advertising to all.

This year, there will be four events. On February 12, the Second Annual Advertising and Marketing Industry Diversity Job Fair will be held at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. On February 27, the conference will travel to New York's NYU. In March, we will hold our first job Fair conference in Chicago. And during Advertising Week September 22-26, we will hold our second Experienced Hire Diversity Recruiting program.

We'll share more details with you as they become available. The BDI website will also carry updated conference information and details on how to attend and/or sponsor.

by Steve Hall    Jan-10-08    
Topic: Announcements, Industry Events, Trends and Culture



Obama Girl Declares Love For Adrants

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It's not often one of the hottest women on the planet creates a personalized video just for you but that's exactly what our fave political babe, Obama Girl, did for us today. In the video she calls for a return to values, honesty and patriotism. She then says when it comes to reading about advertising, it's critical she reads Adrants. OMFG. We think we just fell in love!

OK. Fuck that "we" shit. I think I just fell in love! Amber Lee goes on to say Steve Hall is "the kind of American we can all aspire to be." I'm not sure that's true but I'm not going to argue with someone as nice as Amber Lee Ettinger. Thank you, Amber Lee. Thank you, Ben. You both rock.

See all the Obama Girl videos here.

by Steve Hall    Jan- 7-08    
Topic: Announcements, Cause, Celebrity, Good, Video



Please Take the Adrants Readership Survey

It's been two years since we asked you to take a readership survey to offer us input on how we do things around here and to tell us a little bit about yourselves so we can help insure the ads on the site are as relevant to you as possible. After all, no one wants to see an ad for collector's edition cast iron door knockers on Adrants when all we care about is advertising. So please take a few short minutes to answer this two page survey so we don't burden you with unnecessary messages about idiotic front door bling.

by Steve Hall    Dec-10-07    
Topic: Announcements



Enter the Adrants Holiday Party Shenanigans Contest

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Every year around this time the schadenfreude-fueled emails start pouring in from those who revel in the unfortunate (or fortunate) positions in which co-workers (or they themselves) sometimes find themselves at the annual holiday party.

Over the years we've had a director of broadcast at Crispin Porter + Bogusky reveal his ass crack and an Arnold staffer pole dance.

more »

by Steve Hall    Dec- 7-07    
Topic: Announcements, Industry Events



Facebook Ad Announcement Leaves One a Little Wanting

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Yesterday Facebook unveiled its online ad plan to New York advertisers hither and yon. Here's the scheme prematurely hearkened as a contender to AdWords: advertisers can make their own branded pages!

For free!

And that's not all.

You can also buy banner ads -- LINKING TO YOUR PROFILE PAGE!

Overwhelming? Something like that. But it would be wrong to say Facebook disappointed its masses. It did toss in an analytics feature, after all, and friends can actually endorse stuff they recently bought, which then appears in news feeds.

That last part might be the most meaningful aspect of the announcement. If there's anything the inception of WOMMA taught us, it's that word of mouth has been a wildly underrated resource that fuels the success of any company. Our industry has been hard-pressed to generate WOM in a way that doesn't alienate buyers -- or worse, ring inauthentic.

So kudos to the Facebook team for thinking outside the box. We'll see how this simple idea affects the online ad mix.

by Angela Natividad    Nov- 7-07    
Topic: Announcements, Events, Good, Online, Social, Word of Mouth



Winners of Adrants 'Mad Men' Contest Announced

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With the season finale of Mad Men behind us it's time to award a few lucky Adrants readers some Mad Men schwag. Earlier this week we asked readers to identify in which episode the Roger Sterling character poured himself and glass of milk and added a bit of Smirnoff to it. The correct answer was episode seven and the lucky winner who guessed correctly is Janice Navea. Janice will take home a beautiful coffee table book filled with ad campaigns from the sixties and, in addition, a Mad Men branded martini shaker.

Four other lucky winners will become the happy owners of the Mad Men branded martini shaker. Those winners are Craig Peters, Kevin Dugan, Jordan Farkas and Patrick who has no last name. The winners have been notified and their prizes will arrive soon.

Congratulations to all. We're happy we could offer up a bit of advertising nostalgia to a few lucky readers.

by Steve Hall    Oct-19-07    
Topic: Announcements, Cable



Adrants Gets Cozy With Watershed Publishing

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So yes it's true, Adrants has sold a percentage of its soul to Watershed Publishing, the company behind MarketingVOX (which, back in the day, I had a hand in founding), MediaBuyerPlanner and Marketing Charts. But, not a majority of it's sole so things will remain as they have always been around here and under my control.

In terms of the deal, Adrants will benefit from having an actual company with actual people behind it who will improve Adrants' infrastructure, sales and growth. Adrants isn't just a little ad blog any more - and hasn't been for quite some time. Now, in partnership with Watershed, all four publications reach an audience twice the size of Advertising Age's online properties and 15 percent larger than the sum of those from Nielsen Business Media's advertising properties which includes AdWeek, BrandWeek and MediaWeek. Hey, we're just saying. We still love all of you.

more »

by Steve Hall    Oct-17-07    
Topic: Announcements



Adrants Offers Readers 'Mad Men' Goodies

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We're going to make this really easy. Mostly because we're just simple like that and because we don't want to pull you away from the foosball table or that cute intern's cubicle for too long. If you watch AMC's Mad Men and you like it, we're offering you a chance to win a coffee table book full of 1960's advertising and a Mad Men branded martini shaker. One Grand Prize winner will get both. Four others will get the martini shakers.

To become eligible to win, all you have to do is tell us in which episode sneak peek (they're all right here) the Roger Sterling character had his morning glass of milk with Smirnoff. That's it. That's all you have to do. Send your answer to madmen@adrants.com and we'll enter you in the drawing to win. We'll announce the winners Friday following the season finale this Thursday night.

by Steve Hall    Oct-15-07    
Topic: Announcements, Cable, Promotions



Adrants Unleashes AdGabber, A Social Network For the Ad Industry

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It's not easy to officially launch anything when you don't even have a logo. Now that we do, we are pleased to announce the official launch of AdGabber, a social network for individuals in advertising, marketing and media. AdGabber, which soft launched in May, has just over 1,600 members with about 40 new members joining each day. An offshoot of Adrants, we couldn't be happier with the growth and the activity we've seen to date on the network.

AdGabber offers all the usual social networking stuff like member profiles, forums, topical groups which member can create on their own, a video section that serves as the ad industry's YouTube, a photo section, a calendar section where industry events are listed, a music player, and chat feature, blogs for individual members and an RSS feed providing news from Adrants. In fact, the thing is so flexible, that anything at all can be added to the network such as daily or weekly survey, ad industry job listings and creative portfolios.

more »

by Steve Hall    Sep-19-07    
Topic: Announcements, Online, Social, Tools