Since I re-launched The Ad Feed several months ago, I’ve grown to love and hate certain things about it. I hated seeing duplicate news posts, which were out of my control. I loved finding interesting creative and sharing it with you each morning (well, most mornings). I hated myself for not writing remarkable content, let alone any content, for the blog. I loved all the e-mails I received each day from agencies submitting creative.

So a couple weeks ago I decided to give it another try, focus on what I loved about The Ad Feed, and hope you would too.

Instead of several rss feeds, there’s one (which you should definitely subscribe to). There isn’t any duplicate content and other than finding, writing, and sharing creative, almost everything manages itself. There’s a sense of consistency that the last site greatly lacked, and an emphasis now on visual discovery. All in all, this new version is simple.

I used to scramble to find 8 or so pieces of creative each morning and post them at one time. That’s changed. I’ll now keep my eye on the hundreds of sources I’m subscribed to and share the best of the best as it rolls in.

Where’d the feeds go?

To be honest, I didn’t read as much of the news on The Ad Feed as I thought I would. Kept rolling back to my rss reader. If you don’t already use an rss reader, you should. There are several great free readers available.

I also suggest you subscribe to all of the wonderful feeds we used to syndicate. Each and every one of them are essential reads for anyone involved in marketing or advertising.

New features

Over the next little while, all of the existing creative will be updated to be better categorized, and include any available details about the pieces.

You can browse by category with the new drop-down list in the top nav; very easy way to filter the creative. When it comes to the details, if you look in the right sidebar of a single piece of creative, you may notice the source site, brand, agency, and country of origin. Any of these can be clicked on and will search for pieces that match it. This allows you to find more work from a certain agency, or brand, etc…

You can also now comment on every single post. If you like or dislike a piece, or have a question about it, comments are kept open on everything for several months, and we always love to receive and respond to them.

You’ll also notice a block of 5 bars in the top right hand corner of each post. You can use this to rate creative and posts, which then makes it easy to see whether or not a piece is popular and well-liked. When it comes to popularity, we now have a page that lists the 10 most popular posts in the past couple weeks.

Last but not least, if you take a look at the single page for any post, you’ll noticed a couple related pieces at the bottom of each one. Again, handy if you’re looking for creative from a certain brand or agency.

That’s it.

I hope you enjoy this version of The Ad Feed, and as always, would love to hear what you think in the comments.

For the past 18 months, a group of 100 or so people faithfully visited The Ad Feed each day. Even though I seemingly abandoned it long ago, every morning, afternoon, and evening, there you were. You made use of a bare bones system, that was created as more of an experiment than anything else.

You, the persistent readers, are one of the main reasons for me resurrecting this site. Under the darkness of the night (naturally nocturnal), for the past 6 or so months, I’ve been secretly building what you see before you. It was an immense learning experience that required patience, more than anything else.

The Ad Feed was created to help anyone interested in advertising and marketing easily find great content; and while doing so, helping expand the readership of those that create the content.

A group of 30 select feeds compose the main section of this site. These highly influential feeds automatically update around the clock, and are archived forever. I tried to present the feeds in an easily digestible format and enable you to view, search, and interact with them whenever you wish.

We also have a creative section, where we link to 16 different pieces of creative each weekday, and can feature full pieces of work that are submitted directly to us by agencies. Over time, this will grow to be an enormous collection of print, television, online, and inspirational creative, which again, you can view, search, and share at any time.

We then have The Ad Feed Blog. It’ll take a couple weeks to get the ball rolling while we finish up all the launch tasks, but we do have an editorial calendar of excellent content ideas. We’ll be publishing our own unique posts in the Blog on a regular basis, which will hopefully be extremely resourceful for you.

One of the great things about this version is you can now subscribe to each of those sections via RSS feeds or e-mail. Hover over the “Subscribe to The Ad Feed” box in the top right-hand corner of this site to see the links for the Blog, Creative, and Featured Creative subscription options.

Over the next couple months, I’m going to progressively roll out features and content based on your feedback and the response to The Ad Feed. Please do share your thoughts, suggestions, and hopefully warm remarks in the comments below.

An enormous tip of the hat goes out to all of the Feeds that allow us to serve their content, and our beloved host, (mt) MediaTemple, who has been powering The Ad Feed since day one.

There are still dozens of details that I haven’t managed to design and bugs to be fixed, but had I sat on this site any longer, I would have gone a little (more) nuts. Some links may not work, I’m sure the site looks wacky in Internet Explorer, but as Bill O’Reilly said, “We’ll do it live. We’ll do it live. Fuck it!”