Interview with Ted
Read the interview with Ted Disbanded. It is a blog about Disbanded people and Disbanded philosophy: things and persons who change the things. Apparently a lot of people from Italian advertising read it.
Ted: When did you realize AOTW was becoming so important?
Ivan: AotW was important for me from day one. But I realized it has become a factor in the industry when I started seeing creative CVs listing the appearance on Ads of the World as an achievement. At that point I realized that I have a responsibility here that goes beyond my own playground.
Ted: Who decides the entries in your blog?
Ivan: I do. When I'm in doubt I have a circle of friends and bloggers who occasionally give me their votes. Frederik Samuel from Canada, who does Adgoodness.com is one of them.
Ted: Do you think the ARCHIVE magazine hates you?
Ivan: I have full respect for Archive, it's a beautiful magazine, but it's too expensive and slow in 2008. They wanted to buy me off because there were people within the company who saw the potential, but Mr Lurzer didn't have the cash to buy me off.
I used to receive many emails from our members who told me they stopped subscribing to Archive, but not anymore. I wonder if they have any subscribers left. ;). I read on their site that they have 15 thousand subscribers for their quarterly magazine. And, I thought that's really low, because we have more than 40 thousand unique visitors per day! So I guess Archive doesn't hate me, they hate the internet as a whole. They hate change as every old company. They will never go away, but they will have hard time growing unless they do what every smart publisher does nowadays. They have to reinvent themselves.
Ted: How many people are in the AotW staff?
Ivan: It's just me as editor and webmaster and my parter from 2bits.com who does the backend and development of the site. We had to move servers 3 times and we went through one major engine upgrade too. There is so much technical stuff that you need to take care of when you have big traffic.
Ted: Show me at least 1 future gold at Cannes!
This campaign from Fortune Promoseven Dubai received great feedback from the advertising community and great rating too. I think it will win at least a silver at Cannes this year.
So many good campaigns coming out of the network since then. Again, it has been proven that people are the most important in an agency, nothing else.
Ted: You see all the ads coming from all over the world: why Italian advertising is so weak? Who is worst than us? Ha ha!
Ivan: Italy is not that bad. Your thinking is different. What's funny, cool or smart for you isn't so funny, cool or smart for an international audience. Italy has a very special subculture that references itself and nobody from outside gets it.
Indian advertising has a similar bad reputation as Italian advertising. But they have a very different issue. In India you find literally thousands of exceptional creatives, who produce excellent work that can be understood internationally as well. But for every such brilliant mind you will find a thousand desperate students and early professionals at the beginning of their careers trying to get as much exposure as possible. So they push their work like crazy even though it's not at a high level yet. This lowers the Indian average. I fully understand the reasons for this. India is probably the most competitive regions in advertising and many people literally do ads to feed themselves and their families, unlike the in the West where adman do ads to support their lavish lifestyle.