Adland

During the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, Adland defended—and hosted copies of—ads produced by the Swedish Red Cross Youth, which used the iconography of the games and were designed to draw attention to claims of human rights abuses by the Nepalese military. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies forced those ads to be withdrawn from the web, but Adland continued to host copies. Wäppling stated that she had received death threats and harassment over Adland's refusal to remove the ads,[16] and that Adland had been subjected to denial-of-service attacks over the issue.[17][18] The Red Cross Youth stated that "the result of our campaign shows that it is more important than ever to discuss the consequences of human rights violations".[19]

In February 2011, Adland was banned from Google AdSense after a picture from a Sloggi lingerie ad (included in a post by Åsk Wäppling on sexist advertising) was held to be inappropriate by Google. Wäppling described the ban as a case of "American puritanism."[14] However, issues with Google were to recur. Adland was reinstated, then banned again over the display of ads from another lingerie campaign in January 2012, then reinstated once more,[20] and finally banned for good by Google in December 2012 over images of ads from PETA used in an Adland post critical of the controversial animal rights group's advertising.[21]

In January 2016, Adland became the first advertising news site available the Tor Network, designed for anonymous browsing and of the Dark Web. Wäppling describes Adland's .onion mirror as a service to the growing number of Adland readers using adblock software due to concerns over privacy,[22][23] noting that "The way ad networks are today are basically indistinguishable from malware."[24]

On September 19, 2019, the site was taken offline. Adland's cloud server host Vultr received an email from the lawyer Amy Tindell at Holland & Hart LLP in Boulder, Colorado, United States demanding the removal of a Bridgestone commercial from 2002. The commercial, which titled "A Dog's Life," was created by a team at BBDO in Bangkok, Thailand and won a silver award in the 2003 Asia Pacific Adfest. One of the claims the lawyer made in her email, is that by writing "Bridgestone" in the article about the commercial, Adland is infringing on their trademark. The website has been given 24 hours to "remove the domain" from their host.[25]

Since the alert, Adland has stated on their Twitter account that they've been in talks with another web server host, named Packet, stating that Packet has been "extremely helpful and on the ball." Techdirt called it a "bullshit DMCA notice,"[26] whilst Åsk Wäppling says that she is in talks with the "History of Advertising Trust" regarding eventual takeover.[27] Adpulp asked if 'this mess all caused by lack of communication between parties?' to which Åsk Wäppling responded that it has been 16 years since PR was even involved. When asked why she didn't move the Adland archive to YouTube, she points out that Adland, and this contested commercial, is older than YouTube by several years.[28]

In December 2019, the URL for Adland.tv returned an error message reading "502 Bad Gateway". Åsk Wäppling's personal website, Dabitch.net, also returned the same error message. As of January 2020, Adland.tv is currently online again with a completely different web server host.

Adland has created words and expressions that have spread in the advertising industry. Among other things, a comic strip was created with the name "Adgrunts", which is what the members of Adland are called.[29][30] In 2005, the Danish advertising agency "Lund's Byro" announced a competition to name the agency on Adland. The agency is now called "Maraschino".[31]