"Ads and their keepers" in Brand Equity, India

Well well, this is pretty neat as our smirk graces the Economic Times India's "Brand Equity" on Wednesday morning. It's a look at the ad archives like ourselves and legends like Kim Shaw from BestadsonTV. We shared a few back and fourth emails with the journalist Shephali Bhatt pondering how we collect these ads, and what we do they they turn out to be scam ads or ghost ads.

How do you normally deal with controversies?

I pour gasoline on them and get marshmallows.

Advertising's most bookmarked websites showcasing world's most creative ads

Adland.tv is one of the oldest of the lot with over 40,000 followers on Twitter, many of them being Indians. Founded in 1996 by Åsk Dabitch (the nom de plume of Åsk Wäppling), the site has a mammoth collation of over 30 years of Super Bowl commercials.


It's also conspicuous for calling a spade a spade and putting out a list of scam winners after every edition of the Cannes Lions. All this besides being a commercial ad archive that gets 10-35 campaigns to review on weekdays. Before Adland, Dabitch used to curate ads in scrapbooks and on VHS tapes.


Pretty ancient, no? "I wanted to show my collection to people so that they could use it for research or just save it as a part of popular culture," she recounts.


Adland started off as a paywalled website, for Dabitch was convinced that advertising on top of advertising, so to speak, was like a 'cake on a cake'. Over the years, she has warmed up to the then unsavoury idea of lending ad space to agencies, production houses and brands.