I’m a Swedish-born art director, journalist, illustrator, and industrial designer who also ended up running servers, digitizing old commercials at 2 a.m., and talking about ads for almost thirty years. I got the nickname “Dabitch” while playing LAN games with friends, mostly Command and Conquer. One night they convinced me to switch to Duke Nukem. “What should we call you?” they wondered. “Oh, I know—8 chars and you’re the only girl in the room: ‘Dabitch,’” they laughed. We also thought it was extra funny since we all knew about the Russian vice-admiral Nikolai Dabitch. So the name stuck, and here I am, still using it.

About me

I’m from a family with roots across Sápmi, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. When we weren’t in Lapland, we bounced out to Saudi Arabia, back to Sweden, and then out again; I guess the nomadic way of life is in my blood.
After that, I kept moving for school and work: Parsons in New York, the School of Communication Arts in London, then agency and freelance years in the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, the UK, and a few other places that still live in my passport. I’m based in the United States now.

In 1996 I started what became Adland after talking advertising to death on Usenet and mailing lists. It began as a place to collect twin ads and rip-offs. Then it grew into news, reviews, commentary, and an archive I ran for decades as a side project next to agency work.
The technical part was me. I built and ran the name servers, mail server, and web server. I digitized the spots. I built the database. For a stretch the machines lived in a colocation; for another stretch they lived in my house.

This was before YouTube existed. I was putting commercials on the web when “just upload it to YouTube” was not a sentence anyone could say yet.

By 2001 I was uploading Super Bowl ads on Super Bowl Sunday. The New York Times later used that collection for historical recaps. The archive grew to thousands of ads TV, print, outdoor. The good, the bad, the ugly, and the ones that got banned or buried. The Super Bowl holdings became the world’s largest collection, covering 52 Super Bowls by 2024.
I cared about embedding and access, so other people could actually use and see the work instead of squinting at a clip with no credits.

I also got there early on live video. In 2009, with Bambuser, Adland aired live video from cellphones at Cannes Lions so people who couldn’t afford the festival could watch it happen. Dagens Industri wrote it up: users in Cannes filmed on their phones, and the footage appeared on the site in the moment. Yes, pre-Twitch.

Years later I put Adland on the dark web as a Tor hidden service, the first advertising news site to do it. A colleague dared me. I did it in under ten minutes. The Drum covered it. ProPublica had gone up only hours before. I wanted a version of the site that didn’t require handing your reading habits to the ordinary web.

People used the archive to check whether an idea had already been done, to teach, to research a brand or a category, to look at work that official collections wouldn’t keep. Variety called it a center for ad-related news and discussion. Fast Company noticed the group-blog noise. Business Insider put it on a list of influential ad blogs. Adweek kept quoting the coverage. Libraries and research guides listed it. The Library of Congress pointed to it as a source for commercials. People called it the water cooler for adgrunts, and sometimes “the mother of all advertising blogs,” which still makes me laugh.

After a 2019 DMCA takedown over a 2002 Bridgestone spot, my inbox filled with people saying the site was how they actually did their jobs.

It wasn’t only nice emails. Hosting Swedish Red Cross Youth work around the 2008 Beijing Olympics brought harassment and death threats.

I still think commercials are cultural documents, not just sales tools, and that someone had to keep the imperfect, global, unofficial record when ad agencies and rights holders would not.

In January 2025, I shut it down. I didn’t have the bandwidth anymore. (I chose that expression on pun-purpose) Marketecture Media acquired it that April and brought it back. I don’t run adland.tv now. I’m glad that the collection survived.

I make things; I wrote about the industry that makes pop cultural ad things people are forced to watch, and for nearly thirty years I also built the pipes that let the rest of us keep the receipts. I think I'm done with that part.