Creative Interviews - Åsk Dabitch Wäppling
press interview dabitch

Creative Interviews - Åsk Dabitch Wäppling

Dabitch
Dabitch

Creative Interviews has interviews with current creatives in advertising, editorial and publishing. They interviewed me here . Here is an archive.

"You are the force behind Adland, one of the most influential advertising blogs in the world.  Tell us how you came to set up your own website back in 1996.

Two cats were ad-related on the web back then, and you probably know them. Dave Dumanis wrote adlib every Friday, and Jeffrey Zeldman set up the ad graveyard and lots of fun projects. I thought, heck, I’ll join these guys and set up a Badland corner for twin ads & bad ads, and proto-blogged about advertising on static HTML pages. Nobody else had done the twin ads thing on a website then, so I figured I could start there. I wanted to discuss advertising, I was in usenet groups doing it, I created a mailinglist for this purpose, and I built a website where everyone could join in by commenting on it. This kind of place didn’t exist yet, so I made it. Zeldman was giving away free advice on how to make pretty websites and Lynda Weinman of Lynda.com was teaching everyone how to do it as well with her website on web design. I rolled up my sleeves and got to it, that’s all.

It changed as it got bigger, I had to do video, I had to learn how to run linux server clusters, how to build servers, php, mysql, how to handle super bowl traffic, all that jazz. My first server was on the backbone of the Dutch internet, and shared with a guy who ran pornsites, this was my baptism by fire on sudden traffic spikes....."