iSPY ... www.adcritic.com

You gotta love them Yanks. Some 88 per cent of them have never

applied for a passport, 8 per cent of them don’t have running water, but

a solid 97 per cent have a TV, and boy do they live by those tubes.

What’s more, they don’t have that terrible cynical streak that so ails

(or should that be aids) the British public, so the commercials are as

much a part of the entertainment as the programming (from what I’ve seen

of the programming, the ads were, in fact, better).

It is no wonder then that Adcritic.com, which is brimming with videos of

wondrous US TV ads, has gained quite an online following in the

States.

The site takes a record store-style approach with a ’Top Ten Ads’

chart - as voted for by the site users - and another section listing all

that week’s new releases. You can watch the ads in full, with attendant

jingle, provided you have downloaded Quick Time.

Current chart toppers include a gem from Allbusiness.com, which shows a

man going to a sperm bank, being handed a copy of Playpen and a jam jar,

but then furtively replacing the porn mag with a copy of Business Age

before retiring to his cubicle. The tag line is: ’We’re very, very

dedicated to business.’

The site also has a news section, which carries stories from CNN, Cnet,

MacNN and InfoBeat. The stories do not have the gravitas of a report in

Campaign, but they are pretty darn funny. Only in America could you read

this: ’Pets.com says the friendly reputation of its spokespuppet was

defamed by a foul-mouthed dog-puppet on NBC’s Late Night with Conan

O’Brien.’

The site also carries news on political advertising, an alphabetical

database and a music-for-ads section - when you click on a particular

tune you are miraculously transported to the Amazon page where you can

buy the song.

For the ad fan, or any student of American culture, this is a

fascinating site. There doesn’t seem to be anything quite the same in

the UK - although bognor.force9.-co.uk/adverts/ has a good database of

ads - but Campaign Screen Online must be only months away.

This article was first published on Campaign