AdForum.com, the Hoboken, N.J.-based advertising community portal and online agency directory, today launched AdFolio, a searchable online library of advertising creative work. Linked from AdForum.com's homepage, AdFolio features 2,300 executions of print, television and interactive ads--with 4,000 more to come--that can be searched by criteria such as media type, brand, industry category, agency, country and production company.
"AdFolio provides an easily accessible way for advertisers and agency account executives to watch their competition and benchmark their market worldwide," said Sofia Arhall, AdForum's publisher.
Combining different criteria, registered users can conduct as narrow or as broad a search as they want. For instance, if a brand manager wishes to see creative work done for pharmaceutical companies in the United States, he or she can select the U.S. for the locale, and health, hygiene and pharmaceutical products for the industry category. From the search query, AdFolio will produce a short list of agencies that have done the creative and fit the criteria. The user can then check out a profile of each agency, plus preview the agency's creative work.
Once visitors find an ad of interest, they can go to a more detailed page that contains a thumbnail image of the ad as well as other pertinent information, such as storyline, agency name, agency URL, advertiser, brand and product, country of production, date of first publication and production company.
From there, visitors can download creative for free by clicking on the thumbnail or the play button which opens a page that contains the actual reel or larger version of the print execution. For visitors who want to obtain an offline, higher-quality version of the creative work, AdForum offers a customized CD-ROM costing $50 per TV spot and $30 per print ad.
AdFolio presents an alternative to traditional video or ad monitoring services, said Robert Drasin, vice president of marketing and sales for AdForum.
"Agencies spend huge amounts of money researching reels," said Drasin. "With AdFolio, they can look at a much larger palette and a much larger field."
The ad library, which contains work from agencies such as Young & Rubicam, Publicis, Saatchi & Saatchi, Euro RSCG, Leo Burnett and McCann Erickson, acts as a brainstorming tool for creative people, a new-business generator for ad agencies and a scouting mechanism for brand managers.
For ad agencies, "it's a great way to appear on the radar of potential clients," Drasin said. "It allows the agency to be found and pre-qualified and gets them into pitches."