We’re only two weeks away from the December 31 deadline for Ads Worth Spreading – TED’s initiative to recognize and reward innovation, ingenuity and intelligence in advertising. Please remember to enter before the holidays are here, as good intentions to submit your incredible work might give way to celebrations and vacations.

As a holiday bonus, we’ve got great news! Five agencies who enter the Ads Worth Spreading initiative will be randomly selected for a visit from TED. Our team will curate a special session for your agency, staged in the first half of 2012. These agency visits are designed to spark deeper conversations between TED and the global marketing community.

We look forward to seeing your work on the Ads Worth Spreading channel on YouTube, and to the possibilities of visiting the incredible places where you work, live and create.

Have you seen an Ad Worth Spreading? Our nomination teams want to know. As part of the Ads Worth Spreading initiative for 2012, TED picked six teams of two — a TED speaker or Fellow teamed with one of the brightest thinkers in advertising — to find and nominate ads that showed intelligence and ingenuity. Each team was charged with finding ads in a specific area of interest.

Two of those teams have gone above and beyond the call, creating amazing websites to help find the most incredible ads out there!

Jinal Shah of JWT New York and artist Raghava KK collaborated on this website and crowdsourced Pinterest (above) in their search for Creative Wonder, finding work that elevates the craft of the creative in advertising, that is ingeniously clever or technically brilliant, using technology in ways we’ve never seen. These ads showcase compelling writing, amazing musical compositions, cinematic art direction or high-impact design, and make information beautiful.

Eliza Esquivel of TBWA\Chiat\Day and Tim Brown of IDEO use the Projeqt/ platform to create this website (below) looking for ads that showcase Brand Bravery, rewarding the brands that have reinvented their image, or even their industry; companies that have it hard because their business or product may not not flashy, but they stand out from the herd with an authentic, engaging, clever campaign; companies that are radically transparent in the face of difficult issues.

We’re really looking forward to seeing the amazing campaigns these teams discover. If you’ve created an Ad Worth Spreading, you can enter it here or browse the entries coming in daily.

Via the YouTube Blog: Last year, TED kicked off a challenge to the advertising industry called Ads Worth Spreading, our global search for innovation, ingenuity and intelligence in advertising. This year, we are delighted to announce that we’re now accepting entries to the current challenge through our Ads Worth Spreading channel on YouTube. The YouTube channel will help promote and showcase submissions, as well as spark conversation.

Even if you’re not an advertiser, you can visit the channel and comment on your favorite campaigns: Which ads are thought-provoking, funny, honest, warm, informative or creatively brilliant? We want your feedback, and the channel is our medium for hearing your voice.

Read the full story on the YouTube Blog >>

Today, TED Curator Chris Anderson announced the second cycle of Ads Worth Spreading at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s MIXX conference in New York.

This year’s Ads Worth Spreading is searching to find the 10 most compelling campaigns of 2011, driven by this belief: that the smartest, strongest ads don’t just sell a product or brand, but express an idea.

TED’s mission is ideas worth spreading. The dream behind the Ads Worth Spreading initiative is to find companies that want to communicate ideas to their consumers in the same way that TED wants to communicate with its audience.

Revealing the way a company thinks tells consumers what that company is and what it stands for. In last year’s contest, one of our final selections, Chrysler’s “Born of Fire” campaign, spoke to people because it communicated an incredible idea — steel is born of fire, and cities that go through hard times aren’t dead forever.

“In our brave new interconnected world, the rules of marketing are changing fast,” says Anderson. “Ambush advertising is broken. We think there’s a better way, based on sharing powerful ideas. Most companies are teeming with amazing ideas that the rest of the world never gets to see. By letting some of those ideas out into the world in an authentic way, companies have a shot at transforming the way they are perceived. We’re looking forward to another fantastic round of entries from forward-thinking companies and people.”

We’re combining curation and crowdsourcing to find the best ads from every corner of the globe. There are four ways for a campaign to make it to the final selection:

• Agencies, brands, producers and individuals are invited to submit work that expresses a clever, compelling or infectious idea. TED will open submissions on October 15, 2011, and close on December 31, 2011.

• Six nomination teams of two — made up of one renowned TED speaker or Fello and one rising star from the advertising industry — will tap their networks to seek out and nominate compelling ads from specific areas of interest.

• TED’s 24 Advocates from the advertising industry will make valuable suggestions and nominations.

• YouTube’s Ad Blitz will help in sourcing all Super Bowl ads.

YouTube will help promote and showcase the Ads Worth Spreading selections online, as well as celebrating all final selections at TED2012 with an artistic installation. Other Ads Worth Spreading industry supporters include Contagious Magazine, AICP, the 4As, IAB, IAA, the Art Directors’ Club, and NiceSpots.

We hope you’ll also support us in this search for innovation, ingenuity and intelligence in advertising — the ads that people want to see, and share with their friends.

We invite you to view them here and join in the conversation about them. (Each winner has a page of its own where this conversation can take place.) TED is charging nothing to show these ads. Instead, we’re simply trying to nurture ads on TED.com that are appreciated by you, our audience. You may have noticed that TED never puts ads in front of its videos. This is a deliberate choice. We don’t believe in shoving ads down people’s throats. We would like the ads on our site to be viewed because you want to view them.

Some people have an instinctive dislike of corporations and hate all marketing messages of any kind. But if you care about a better future, then corporations have to be part of that conversation. One way or another, they have a giant impact on the world. At our conferences, we engage with some of the world’s biggest corporations in a constructive way. We’d like ongoing engagement on our website too — and we’d like you to be part of it.

Because they run after the talks, we can let these ads run longer than a standard 30-second TV spot. That allows them to adopt a different tone. Less marketing spin, more authentic story-telling. We’re excited at the possibility of the emergence of a new, longer form of communication that is more human and more compelling.

But what matters is what you think. So please, check out this collection of ads and tell us what you make of them.

Ideas are free. But distributing them costs money. We count on our partners for that. It will mean a lot to us — and to them — if you will take the time to view the films they’ve created on our site, and give constructive feedback, both this week when the ads are running for free, and in future when they’re helping fund the spread of ideas.

Many thanks,
Chris Anderson
TED Curator