Geoff Willard Blog #7: Ads of the World

Ads of the world is exactly what it purports to be: a compendium of international ads in various media formats. They call it a "commercial advertising archive," and it's as slick as you'd expect ad archive would be running on Drupal, an open source content management system.

Collection Principles

Their use of the word archive doesn't jive with what we expect from an archives. Ads of the world lacks a collection development policy, description of access rights, and any mention of intellectual property rights. Jupitermedia, a publicly traded for-profit image company, runs this archive, although that shouldn't excuse them from having user-transparent collection principles.

On principle I think rating and commenting systems can be useful, but why can't I sort by highest rated? Or most commented on? Or if I can, why is it not obvious in their browse tab? Their hierarchical keyword organization at the top of each object page is useful for contextual relationships, I'll give them credit for that, but their pseudo-faceted classification is more frustrating than it should be. Not only is it problematic to de-select browse criteria (see here), but I can clearly select a combination of criteria that will throw a big fat '0' for results.

Object Characteristics

The majority of the images are medium-high quality JPEGs (72 DPI, often bigger than 500x500 pixels), with apparently no restrictions for reuse. Images can be zoomed in at 2x and saved without any trouble. Websites are captured with a JPEG screen grab, but a direct link to the site is also provided. Videos & audio are encoded in Flash. I don't see any unique identifiers, either within the page metadata or on the media themselves. Names are concatenated from the title of the image. No textural description is given for any of the objects, nor are there alt tags for the media links - bad for accessibility.

Metadata
Metadata varies across the board, but the Advertising Agency is always included. You may also see listings for directors (creative & art), illustrators, copywriter, managers, and where the media was grabbed from. I would include all of the commentator notes as descriptive metadata as well.

Intended Audience

Ads of the world hope their archive will be "useful for creatives who want to see what their colleagues are doing around the world."