Got up, sipped coffee, casually scrolled Twitter while figuring out what to wear, when the video of a Boeing in flames caught my eye.
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“Aha!” I thought, “I shall wear my Boeing shirt!” A very long time ago, when I lived in Amsterdam I befriended an American artist who was living there. His dad worked for Boeing. “That is soooo cool!” I said to him, in earnest, “it's my favorite logo, I would love to have that on a shirt!” “Really?” he said, quite surprised that someone was so geeked out about a logo, “I'll tell dad to get you one.” And that was how I was gifted a gen-u-iiine Boeing shirt, the real dealio, the classic logo, and I wore it beaming with pride. For some daft reason I still believe I have this shirt. Alas, I do not.
So I made a new one. With an updated logo. You can wear it too.
I tried to get “Gumroad” working today, because I was a momentary idiot and thought it was alright to use a third party. It's really never okay. I should really buy a house and some land to grow my own food, because as simple as it is to just leave stuff to other people and companies, they will pretty much always fail you when you need them. Like Gumroad did to me, today. The “temporary code” they sent never arrived, so I could not login. Instead I threw my hands in the air and installed a fresh version of Prestashop to connect to my printful where I print my shirts.
So you can buy that shirt right here, right now in my little shop.dabitch.net if you'd like. 🙂 I bought some for myself. (edit – I moved servers and killed that shop
Now as it turns out there are a lot of things that are no longer compatible with one another. Prestashop and Printful are some of those things, so here are a few notes in case someone finds this. Get Prestashop 1-7-7-3 at a minimum, it'll give you no issues when you install it and use it with php-7.3. You'll find that the Prestashop module has had some updates 6 months ago (which broke my setup), but not much else in the activity and discussion side at Github, where many people are lost and looking for answers. In my search for a fix even ran into a note I accidentally left for myself in August 2021 battling this exact issue.
From that I sussed out what the problem was. So I began from scratch with the above mentioned variants, and I edited the “printful.php” page in the printful module before I uploaded the .zip to read like this starting at line 83:
Yep, I'm essentially just lying to the module about it being compatible with Prestashop 1.7.7 – and it works.
Oh, and a funny thing about Gumroad, turns out I've blocked their entire domain because they send out spammy messages all day long which are impossible to unsubscribe from, so I accidentally locked myself out – not realizing they would eventually move to “we email you a security code” even if I log in with my Twitter or my Stripe. Good riddance.
So Adland turns 28 years old now, officially. I know that's “settle down and get married have kids” kind of old. But Adland is just a website, see, she has all the time in the world to figure herself out, she can become anything! But really.
Either way, colleagues old and new have been sending me congratulations on Linkedin for weeks now. Which is sweet but I don't use Linkedin…
So. Awkward.
(You are all appreciated! Everyone! Even on an app that I don't use!)
Decades ago I set the official birthday of Adland to be April 1, simply because I couldn't remember when I had begun working on it. I knew the year, just not the exact date. So an April Fools joke it was. Later, all these dates and info became a way of filling in forms when you began a “brand” account.
This is why the LinkedIn app on my phone keeps pinging me right now, and I keep swiping it away like I'm annoyed by a blowfly.
The bizarre thing about Adland as a website is that I made it on HTML and floppy discs that I carried to internet cafés and libraries long before I owned a computer that was connected to the internet. With that kind of beginning, in-jokes were bound to happen. As in-jokes where I literally only spoke to myself and didn't expect anyone else to discover the hilarity.
So now that y'all are giving me high-fives for running Adland for this long, I'll share the silly with you. For 28 years, I've been embedding Ascii art into the headers of Adland's source code. Just because it's funny.
ASCII art has a special place in my heart, because when I studied advertising, this brilliant man named Paul Arden taught me about the freedom of limitations. “Always art direct your ad from the ugliest aspect,” he said, “If it's the (colors of) the brand logo, so be it.”
And that's probably how I ended up with a personal blog, written in Perl, limited to character width and color, with only ASCII art in monospaced fonts as decoration.
This was a few years before my daughter Perl was born, which isn't related. Certainly not her name. Wink, nudge. Say no more. That 100% Perl blog looked like this in 2003, and a Perl script (naturally) changed the “sig file” quip on the right every three minutes or so, using over 6000 sig files of funny lines that I had made up and collected over the years.
So, ignore the drama going on up there, I can't recall exactly how my bought and paid-for domain was hijacked like that, but it was just dumb security on the registrar's part. Be careful with your registrars. I would use Namecheap or Joker, but nobody else at all today. Never go with GoDaddy.
Anyway,
Back in 2006, this is what Adland told anyone who looked at the source. Which I assume people did. 🙂
Adland front in 2006Adland inside the source, 2006
“Built on beer and bravery” was the line, always. I think it's a pretty good one, even if I am not a copywriter.
I like this one, it's my perfect “2013 troll sarcasm” dry meh kind of illustration. She was the “perfect troll” of the source in 2013.
troll!
I could probably show you more, the point is simpler – if something has been going for over twentyfive years, it might be run by someone who has a passion for it.
Everyone has a passion for new media, but do they every figure out how to keep it?
As if the world just let out a big collective sigh, having to hide their likes, control their comments and bite their tongue for four years for fear of the opinion police. The opinion police who would begin by blocking you, and in many cases try to cut you out of the industry completely.
Then came the Jaguar ad. The advertising industry went wild tearing down a Jaguar ad with disdain in the comments about the ad being “gender-bending woke LGBTQ” with the fervor of the strictest conservatives you might find, and I find myself just as perplexed now as I was when the ad industry adored “gender-bending woke LGBTQ” ads and installed special LGBTQ+ ambassadors at every agency. The industry was so sold on gender-bending as a quick fix for garnering new awards that questioning it would get you written up in Shots for being a “bad feminist”, that is, the kind that centers women. I know, it's fascinating that there actually is any other kind.
Rick Owens fashion week looks.
I'm partially confused because there is no gender-bending actually going on in this advert. There are androgynous models, like dancer Anna Engerström, and there is Rick Owens bought on TEMU style fashion in the latest Pantone palette. All women are in skirts and all men are in pants, albeit silly looking versions. Models walk around looking model-ly, in a pink desert landscape, teasing a new Jaguar look which will include a new logo and a new car. It's very “high fashion” in a way that isn't revolutionary in advertising at all. In fact my immediate thought was that it looked like a blend of 80s Benetton ads and 1960s Smirnoff ads.
The backlash was so catty and loud, it seemed to me this was a big exhale from walking on eggshells in the creative industry too. It takes a long time to create a new design, a brand campaign, and launch it. This ad is like a disco-album released two weeks after Disco Demolition Night in 1979. So hopelessly passé with it's multicolored group of fashionistas.
Now everyone is mocking it, including small content agencies, and brands on social media.
Even the Guardian, the “wokest” of all papers, hated this rebrand, calling it a tired mess.
…two weeks post a Donald Trump election victory, and amid the undeniable sense that there has been a vibe-shift on the era of woke capitalism that has perplexed and delighted consumers for the past few years, in distinctly unequal measure.
The designer of the logo noted the “post Trump” correlation in a hilariously well-timed quip on X.
in our defense, when we were doing the jaguar rebrand, we thought for sure kamala was going to be elected.
People were quick to point out that “copy nothing” still copied something,
Australian advertising legend Ron Mather weighed in with a suggestion the creators leave advertising all together in Campaign Brief.
Don't hold back, Ron.
How did it all come to this?
It starts with activism, but it really kicks off with awards. Ad agencies and creatives need awards as a way of proving that they know what they are doing. Award shows need new categories to fleece more money out of the industry, so they invent new awards to 'encourage' certain types of work – and these new award categories are headed up by the activists. For example, the “glass lion” recognises creative work that addresses inequality and prejudice. The Channel 4 Diversity In Advertising Award offers an annual £1 million airtime prize which is a tempting prize for a smaller brand, but it is still big brands like Starbucks and E45 body lotion who win. Once awards have been established, agencies can begin pro-bono work for causes that clearly tick those boxes, like Grey did with Gay Times.
And this is where it gets really interesting, advertising agencies and brands have been in bed with publications and media for a long time. A decade plus ago Buzzfeed fleeced agencies to make “top ten lists” that nobody looked at, as a way to support the fledging publication, they toured agencies to explain what a great idea this was and how it was just a tiny crumble of media budget anyway. This gave the media a bit of editorial power on creative – and that's where the trouble began for Jaguar.
Santino Pietrosanti from Jaguar, spoke at the Attitude Awards 2024. The award was also sponsored by Jaguar.
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Attitude is the UK and Europe's biggest-selling LGBTQ magazine. It's no coincidence that Virgin Atlantic is the other big sponsor – remember their ads and new gender non-conforming uniforms?
Darren Styles bought Attitude in 2016, and discussed coming out as gay with Bentley’s BeProud LGBTQ network. Yep, every workplace has a rainbow colored network now, which means that every brand has one, and every ad agency too. Bentley is as unexpected as Jaguar, which is to say not at all. If you wander Linkedin you'll find hundreds of people that sell consulting services specifically on how to make a workplace more inclusive to LGBTQ+MAP, though they don't say the last part of the letter chain out loud. A few years ago you could barely open a Campaign without seeing some famous ad personality claim a new identity as gay, queer or bisexual – even those who were happily married in a heterosexual marriage for decades came out because they couldn't be left behind in the boring bin of straight people.
Would you drive this Bentley?
By 2022 all things not rainbow colored was old scruff and Jaguar happily declared to PR week that the brand has now swapped “reach” for “the right audience”.
In some ways it makes sense, who can afford a really expensive fashionable Jaguar? Someone who works at a high paying job in art, fashion or creative fields who probably isn't spending it on kids. There are a lot of gay men in such positions.
Jaguar buddying up with Attitude magazine and creating ads specifically for their readership even won them accolades as Kantar and Marketingweek announced this ‘Live Loud’ printad ranked among the top UK ads of all time. See how this begins to feed into itself when the magazine and brand pay the market researcher to see how well an ad did in their magazine…?
Attitude Magazine also named Dylan Mulvaney “woman of the year” – there are no coincidences here. Yes, the Dylan who sunk the Bud Light brand.
On December 2nd, Jaguar will be showcasing their new EV which nobody can buy until 2026, at the Miami Art Fest. A blue and a pink Jaguar will be fully revealed in a pink showroom. My my, for a rainbow gender-bendy concept car they sure like traditional masculine/feminine coded colors.
The pushback is partly because this concept is tired, the design is ugly, and none of it is really new or mould-breaking at all. The pushback is precisely because this is the mould we've been forced into for over a decade in advertising, and we're fed up with it.
As many of you know I’m the owner, founder, editor and writer of Adland.tv, the world’s longest running website devoted to all things advertising. I amassed the world’s largest collection of Super Bowl commercials as well as a treasure trove of some of the best — and worst— ads from all over the world.
After twenty-eight years, I’ve made the decision to take it offline. I don’t have the bandwidth to keep it going as I’d like to. Because in addition to running Adland, I’m also freelancing more than ever. And on top of that, I’m taking care of a parent who has Alzheimer’s.
At this point, the labor of love I literally built by hand has become more labor and less love.
So I will be putting up the following domains for auction.
adland.tv adland.eu commercial-archive.com ad-rag.com and sinless.org which has been the legacy nameserver for all of the above.
If there is any interest in the trademark, domains, or data please email dabitch@dabitch.net with a proposal.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
