As editor of the Graphics.com site I update the home page with a new item from the AOTW site three times a week, and as a result have gone from an initially skeptical position regarding the Merchants of Dreams to one that's open to fresh, imaginative, useful work. Ivan continues to maintain the site and only posts worthwhile work from the flood of global submissions he receives, and in fact the international nature of the campaigns is a significant part of the interest of the site, since it provides a way to be exposed to current cultural attitudes and agency talent.

The sheer inventiveness of the campaigns is what usually floors me. Take the image above from a recent campaign for an insurance firm from the Netherlands. It seems a woman visiting the Rotterdam Zoo made a point of engaging in extensive eye contact with Bokito, one of its gorillas. The gorilla subsequently escaped and attacked the woman. Why? Apparently one thing gorillas particularly dislike is direct eye contact. That would have been the end of the story except that agency DDB Amsterdam saw this as an opportunity for its client, health insurance firm FBTO, and promptly created thousands of pairs of cardboard glasses depicting eyes looking off to the side—gorilla-safe eyewear, in effect, which it distributed to zoo visitors.

It's clear that ad agency types inhabit a different world than you and I. Sometimes their work is not pretty. But there are times when they get close enough to something perfect that you forgive the industry its collective sins. For a while, anyway. And AOTW provides a great vantage point to watch it all roll by.