We were going to sit back and take the high road on this competition, letting things flow organically but, what the hell, AdFreak isn't and the competition is a battle after all so we're bringing out the guns. Let's show the industry a small upstart like Adrants can crush the big VNU-backed AdFreak. But let's remember it's all in good fun. To bring you up to speed, Adrants was named a contender in AdLand's Battle of the Ad Blogs in the Best Commercial Ad Blog category. We are joined in that category by some other very fine ad blogs including Adhurl, AdJab, the aforementioned AdFreak, MarketingVOX, The Spunker and Fast Company. We're honored to be among such a fine collection of fellow advertising opinionites but we're confident Adrants readers will rally to the cause of standing up for the little guy...even though we're not really all that little anymore, mind you.
So drag your mouse over to the Battle of the Ad Blogs, scroll down to the Best Commercial Ad Blog category, vote for Adrants and smoke AdFreak's ass.
This morning UPN and WB decided to throw in the towel as competitors and, in September, join forces to become a bit more substantial together than the also-rans they were separately. The new network will be called CW. MediaLife reports, "UPN president Dawn Ostroff will head entertainment for the CW, and WB chief operating officer John Maatta will become the CW's COO." The new network will be owned by CBS and Warner Brother together. Ah, that's where the CW came from.
Through a partnership with Portfolios.com, Adrants has launched Adrants Portfolios, a service for creatives to exhibit their portfolios and get it seen by hiring companies and for companies in search of creative talent to easily search a large database of creative portfolios and find the right creative for the job. If you are a creative, of course you already have your own website with all your brilliant work on it but no one's going to see it unless there's qualified eyeballs pointed towards it. That's exactly what the Portfolios service will do for you. Your work will be hosted on Portfolios.com and you will be able to point searchers to your own website as well.
For companies seeking a designer, illustrator, photographer, art director or other creative talent for an upcoming project, the databased can be freely search by various criteria yielding the right talent for the job. Yes, it does cost money ($9.95 - $49.95 per month) for creatives to join but it's a far more efficient method of getting your work seen that aimlessly emailing and calling marketers and clients who never return your phone calls. Give it a try. You can check it out here or access it from the Portfolios link which will always be at the top of all Adrants pages.
It sure would be nice to live is a world without advertising but until aliens land and introduce an entirely new economic system, advertising will continue to make the world go 'round. We appreciate that there should always be a wall between advertising and editorial but we don't subscribe to the notion that advertising devalues content as do the folks over at Ad-Free Blog. The group places blogs on a pedestal and claims that advertising on blogs devalues the medium. Again, we could go into our tirade about how blogging is just a really easy way to publish a website and not this new uber-religion it's made out to be but will spare you that tired rant.
Contrary to the groups mantra, all blogs should not be ad-free. If all blogs should be ad-free, why not all websites? Why not all media? Why should blogs be held to this artificially higher standard? If the group is so adamant about advertising devaluing blogs, shouldn't they be out trying to stop advertising from devaluing all media? Climb out of the clouds and smell the real world.
