I felt honored to be invited to Digital Festival 2009 to speak about the subjects of advertising and the digital age. It was great to hear and meet the best of our industry both nationally and internationally.

You can read the article here or below.

Where adverts are the editorial

Although many web surfers block advertisements, some creative ones are worth seeing. Ads of the World collects and rates the best.

There's a Ronseal element to the Ads of the World website, which will prompt most UK users to remember the long-running slogan: "It does exactly what it says on the tin". Ads of the World is a great place to find advertisements from around the world, though not all of them. Searching for Ronseal, for example, finds no results. AotW is selective rather than comprehensive, but there are more than enough creative ads to keep you browsing for some time.

Ads of the World reckons it's "the biggest online advertising community (almost 50,000 members) in the world". It was started by an individual – Ivan Raszl – in 2005, then taken over by a large corporation. In this case, Alan Meckler's Jupitermedia added it to its Graphics.com network. Raszl, a Hungarian, also founded the CreativeBits blog and community in 2004, and 7Field, a boutique ad agency, last year. He also runs an ad blog on Ads of the World.

Addict, the famous anonymous blog regularly dissecting the Hungarian advertising scene featured Ads of the World and 7Field.

Thank you reklambuzi for your kind review and the encouragement to all commenters.

I have been asked a few questions about the importance creativity in business cards by the Instore Magazine. Here are the answers:

Why are the creative business cards so important?
Business cards are part of your attire, besides their obvious informative function. People judge your status and taste by looking at your card. Business cards are probably the single most important element of your company's identity. It gets the most attention and it's the most personal of all. It's also a design challenge as it's relatively small, has to be cheap to produce and ideally adhere to standard sizes.

How could you analyze a situation with creativity of business cards in the world?
My estimate is that less than 10% of cards can be considered well designed. Even big corporations tend to print good design poorly, which destroys the effect. People don't realize that their cards are a piece of their image and persona given away to other people, it's not just a piece of paper holding information. Cards are like shoes in a way. Both can say a lot about you.

Have to be all business cards creative?
Creative business cards with unusual solutions have their own place and not for everyone. Certain conservative professions require simple and elegant typography. Everyone else should have a creative card if they can find an idea. Sometimes it's really hard, especially if you need to design a card for yourself. It requires a certain critical and cynical view of yourself, which is very hard to attain. It's much simpler to draw a mental caricature of others.

For what positions can be creative business cards harmful?
High positions of all kind, such as CEOs, political leaders. People in a position where confidentiality or trust is important. Such as doctors or bankers. But there may be exceptions to there generalizations. I can imagine a cool card for a dentist or a loan agent. Humor can break the ice and it may help build personal relationships with their clients.

You can see a bunch of creative cards I collected here and here.

We've just launched a cool new service: Ads of the World Research. In a nutshell it's an advertising archive with a huge archive of more than 2 million ads carefully keyworded and categorized. It's a pay site, but hey people digitizing all these ads don't work for free. ;)

Hope you will find it useful when you really need to research an industry or brand to know what has been done already.

I've found out about several of my distant relatives besides the family branch in Hungary. We have relatives living in Brazil and the US. I will try to build our family tree to make it as full as possible. Of course in reality we humans are all relatives, and even all living things are relatives. It all depends on how far you go back in time.

I'm only saying a few sentences:
The public is very tired of old formulas. It's very important to do fun stuff. Come up with a great story, which can survive on its own and then just attach your product to it. Obviously the two has to be related somehow. But, the whole idea is that you have to entertain the public.

We've introduced Brand, Agency and Country categories on AotW. Now you can not only browse through agencies and look at DDB ads, Saatchi ads, BBDO ads or Ogilvy ads etc., but also look at Nike ads, Toyota ads, or Absolut Vodka ads too.

Most importantly now on the browse ads page you can create your own combination of categories. This enables you to create custom pages, like Print ads from the USA or Automotive ads from Europe.

Hope this new feature will help make the site even more useful for inspiration and research!

If you have nothing else better to do, follow me on twitter! :)