I love advertising. I work in the advertising industry, and one of my favorite parts of what we do is concepting for new campaigns. That’s when the big gorgeous work – that will inevitably be cut down to size by our clients – comes out with abandon. Still, we’re in a highly specialized segment, and in a pretty nichey part of it at that, so most of what we do won’t mean very much to normal people, which is good in a way, because the really fun stuff can’t be shared around anyway.

Partly because of this, and partly because my love of advertising goes all the way back to my childhood, I watch consumer advertising somewhat closely. Luckily for me, some of the shops making the best ads also have pretty good websites, so if I find a shop whose work I really like, I have somewhere to go for high-quality examples of it. I don’t watch a lot of network television or read a lot of high-circulation magazines, though, so I’ve really come to rely on the Internet – especially blogs and services like YouTube – to aggregate ads for me.

My current favorite is Ads of the World, which aggregates ads in most media from markets all over the world. A friend says he thinks some shops just maintain an office in places like Djakarta solely so they can get hilarious ads clients won’t buy out into the world, and if that’s true, those ads will probably end up here. But the above ad isn’t in that category – it’s just a wonderful, eye-catching sell offering a solution to a real problem. (No idea whether it’s a good solution; my own skin is so sensitive to wool I’d never consider trying it.)