I have been asked a few questions about the importance creativity in business cards by the Instore Magazine. Here are the answers:

Why are the creative business cards so important?
Business cards are part of your attire, besides their obvious informative function. People judge your status and taste by looking at your card. Business cards are probably the single most important element of your company's identity. It gets the most attention and it's the most personal of all. It's also a design challenge as it's relatively small, has to be cheap to produce and ideally adhere to standard sizes.

How could you analyze a situation with creativity of business cards in the world?
My estimate is that less than 10% of cards can be considered well designed. Even big corporations tend to print good design poorly, which destroys the effect. People don't realize that their cards are a piece of their image and persona given away to other people, it's not just a piece of paper holding information. Cards are like shoes in a way. Both can say a lot about you.

Have to be all business cards creative?
Creative business cards with unusual solutions have their own place and not for everyone. Certain conservative professions require simple and elegant typography. Everyone else should have a creative card if they can find an idea. Sometimes it's really hard, especially if you need to design a card for yourself. It requires a certain critical and cynical view of yourself, which is very hard to attain. It's much simpler to draw a mental caricature of others.

For what positions can be creative business cards harmful?
High positions of all kind, such as CEOs, political leaders. People in a position where confidentiality or trust is important. Such as doctors or bankers. But there may be exceptions to there generalizations. I can imagine a cool card for a dentist or a loan agent. Humor can break the ice and it may help build personal relationships with their clients.

You can see a bunch of creative cards I collected here and here.

We've just launched a cool new service: Ads of the World Research. In a nutshell it's an advertising archive with a huge archive of more than 2 million ads carefully keyworded and categorized. It's a pay site, but hey people digitizing all these ads don't work for free. ;)

Hope you will find it useful when you really need to research an industry or brand to know what has been done already.

I've found out about several of my distant relatives besides the family branch in Hungary. We have relatives living in Brazil and the US. I will try to build our family tree to make it as full as possible. Of course in reality we humans are all relatives, and even all living things are relatives. It all depends on how far you go back in time.

I'm only saying a few sentences:
The public is very tired of old formulas. It's very important to do fun stuff. Come up with a great story, which can survive on its own and then just attach your product to it. Obviously the two has to be related somehow. But, the whole idea is that you have to entertain the public.

We've introduced Brand, Agency and Country categories on AotW. Now you can not only browse through agencies and look at DDB ads, Saatchi ads, BBDO ads or Ogilvy ads etc., but also look at Nike ads, Toyota ads, or Absolut Vodka ads too.

Most importantly now on the browse ads page you can create your own combination of categories. This enables you to create custom pages, like Print ads from the USA or Automotive ads from Europe.

Hope this new feature will help make the site even more useful for inspiration and research!

If you have nothing else better to do, follow me on twitter! :)

Read the interview with Ted Disbanded. It is a blog about Disbanded people and Disbanded philosophy: things and persons who change the things. Apparently a lot of people from Italian advertising read it.

Ted: When did you realize AOTW was becoming so important?
Ivan: AotW was important for me from day one. But I realized it has become a factor in the industry when I started seeing creative CVs listing the appearance on Ads of the World as an achievement. At that point I realized that I have a responsibility here that goes beyond my own playground.

Ted: Who decides the entries in your blog?
Ivan: I do. When I'm in doubt I have a circle of friends and bloggers who occasionally give me their votes. Frederik Samuel from Canada, who does Adgoodness.com is one of them.

Ted: Do you think the ARCHIVE magazine hates you?
Ivan: I have full respect for Archive, it's a beautiful magazine, but it's too expensive and slow in 2008. They wanted to buy me off because there were people within the company who saw the potential, but Mr Lurzer didn't have the cash to buy me off.

I used to receive many emails from our members who told me they stopped subscribing to Archive, but not anymore. I wonder if they have any subscribers left. ;). I read on their site that they have 15 thousand subscribers for their quarterly magazine. And, I thought that's really low, because we have more than 40 thousand unique visitors per day! So I guess Archive doesn't hate me, they hate the internet as a whole. They hate change as every old company. They will never go away, but they will have hard time growing unless they do what every smart publisher does nowadays. They have to reinvent themselves.

Ted: How many people are in the AotW staff?
Ivan: It's just me as editor and webmaster and my parter from 2bits.com who does the backend and development of the site. We had to move servers 3 times and we went through one major engine upgrade too. There is so much technical stuff that you need to take care of when you have big traffic.