Adland-meme?

Clayton alerted me and the adlisters to a new site out there this morning, Marketing-Myopia.com, and I looked it over briefly, not all too surprised about its similarities with Adland, until I read the part on how he found it:"FYI: This was found via a June 5 mention at zeldman.com Jeffrey Z's usually against this sort of thing, 'specially since his site's been scavenged by others so many times - is this Alanis Morissette-style irony?"
The fifth of June was my B-day (a huge deal for me - alright?), and Zeldman is the man who's advertising graveyard inspired me to put up the first Badland pages years ago in the first place.

Him of all people, announcing the birth of a site that feels a little bit like mine is just such a bizarre twist. He suggested that I email Matt at designflea about myself and adland.

Meanwhile, the adlist mailinglist broke out in countless conspiracy theories, where I even accused them of masterminding the whole thing as both Zeldman and my birthday are listed on dabitch.net. (hey - they are adgrunts - I expect the worst from them *hehe*) and they responded with even wilder conspiracy theories with a laugh as we tried to find out more about this sites 'twin'.

MarketIng-Myopia have a link to the "truth in advertising" film on the first page, and over here that film is one of our top stories as we posted that film in October last year. They rant about advertising and sneaky marketing tricks. They don't have any "Badland" style dupliclaims though.
There are - a million soon I bet- websites out there using phpnuke. I myself run three. That coincidence is just the cherry on top!

Clayton again, quoting from Marketing Myopia:

"Marketing Myopia is a place to vent, and call out the darkside of marketing and advertising.... ad campaigns, bullshit marketing ploys, evil corporate P.R. machines, etc. "

And the fact that the URL uses a dash (marketing-myopia), just like our beloved ad-rag a la dabitch - it's not that common of a stylistic device, and kinda stands out. It just kinda tastes like New Coke all over again to me."

This is the email I sent to Matt Rea and later to Chad Davis.

Hello there, my name is Åsk, I am also known as Dabitch behind adland @ ad-rag.com Once, a good friend of mine said that "ideas seem to work on their own agenda" when we were discussing how it's funny how similar ideas just pop up and happen several times all over the world at once, or in succession. And I for one, truly believe that ideas float in the ether, replicate through the meme pool, gnaw at everyone's subconscious until they erupt. It's not impossible that a class of thirty come up with four identical ads in response to one brief, and so then it can not be impossible that two groups of individuals saw the signs in the air and perhaps a need for sites taking a critical look at advertising. The execution made with PHPNuke can be one of Mother Natures jokes, showing us that we too are following a herd of people flocking to the nifty software to help run our sites. I've read around your site and I am kind of curious. Have you ever seen adland at ad-rag.com? Do you think our sites are similar? And what made you want to build marketing-myopia.com ?

Matt replied soon enough and allowed me to publish it here.

Hello Åsk, I'm glad to hear from you, and I would have to say that your friend is right. Ideas do work on their own agenda. I think there is a recognized need for a countervoice. A group of people who don't buy into what the mainstream advertisers/marketers are saying. People who can use a tool, such as the internet, to spread the word about unethical, or just plain bad ideas related to big media and marketing. At least that is what I'm trying to do with marketing myopia. I haven't had a chance to really look into ad-rag that much, but I get the general feeling that you (and your members) are concerned with the same things as me.... or are you more geared toward rip-off ads? or is it a combination? I first encountered your site the day we launched. We originally had a link to the truthinadvertising.mov, hosted at a different location, when we noticed that the link was broken about 10 minutes after it had been linked from a pretty high traffic site. So, in searching for another truthinadvertising.mov, chad (groundscape.org) came across the copy on ad-rag. actually kind of eerie .... Since then, we've been busy trying to fix some Nuke bugs, and attempting to gain some members and participation. I noticed Ad-rag has over 300 members. How long did it take to accumulate that many people? You must be quite happy. Thanks for dropping me the note, and I hope maybe marketing myopia can expand, and be as successful as ad-rag. I hope its soon, because its becoming a pain to come up with new stories everyday. I need some submissions. Regards, Matt

and shortly afterwards, Chad replied as well;

Hey Dabitch, Yeah, Matt read me the email, which I thought was very good. If that makes any sense. It's just well put. I actually found Ad-rag not long after 'going live' with Myopia... Matt had put a link on Myopia to the Truth in Advertising flick on another site. I started checking for errors on the site after Zeldman posted about it ('cause I'm on top of things... oh yeah) and noticed that the link was no longer any good. So I hit up Google for the file, come across ad-rag and it went a little something like this: "Hey, there's another 'Marketing BS Community site out there that's... oh fuck... it's even in Nuke. Shit." I should have emailed you then and 'splained myself ;). Matt had the idea for 'some sort of site about marketing bullshit' before I met him. Then along comes me (PHP Nazi) who was familiar with Nuke and the rest is what you see there. You voiced this occurrence quite well in your fourth paragraph. I think phenomena similar to this is probably happening (and will be happening) much more frequently in odd ways such as this as more people become familiar with tools like the Nuke. It's really the execution (the Nuke) that makes this thing weird. I hope it keeps on getting weirder. I get tired of having to explain to people what PHP, MySQL, etc are and why there are things like Nuke, phorum, etc. Seems like it's the obvious evolution, but the vast majority of people in the States do not evolve past their Microsoft way of thinking. Respectfully, Chad

There you have it kiddoes. Ideas belong to God. Mother Nature has a twisted sense of humour. And we all swim in the same meme pool. *splash*!!!!