UPCOMING FEATURES ON LÜRZER’S ARCHIVE ONLINE

Creatives will play a great part in our website’s exciting phased relaunch.

The decision for us at Archive to take a big leap into the digital age was guided by Fernanda Romano who developed the concept for our new website. It is based on the bottom line “from archivists of outstanding advertising to curators of inspiration.”

In this age, where information is everywhere and belongs to everyone, we felt there was a great need for selected media to be curated. Call it you if you will, a kind of digital-age “Readers Digest” for creatives. Our new website is, however, also meant to integrate users in the “Archive experience.”

So far it seems that our daily features, as well as additional slots like Inspiration, which provides just that with contributions that range beyond the world of advertising, have met with a highly favourable response. Gauged through our Facebook page, where we’re rapidly approaching the 27k fan marker,  the  statistics tell us that that our postings have been reaching a whopping 400,000 users for a while now.

We sure have come a long way since our former website first launched 12 years ago: it was little more than a search engine for our online archive and naturally had far less reach. One of the “old” site’s features, however, which is also going to be a big part of our new website once its phased relaunch has been finally completed, has always been our Ranking.

There you can see how many times an agency, art director, copywriter, photographer, etc. has been featured in Lürzer’s Archive with their work over different time spans – from the last year or throughout the duration of the magazine’s existence (since 1984), and at what rank that puts them. It’s quite easy to understand why this has always been most popular. Today I wanted to give you a glimpse at what this Ranking feature is going to look like on our revamped site.

Image: This example of our upcoming revamped rankings shows Nadav Kander as the photographer with the highest number of campaigns featured in Archive since the magazine was founded.

Image: You will also be able to view an individual’s creative profile of featured work and more by simply clicking on their name.

Image: Have you visited our Inspiration page yet?

Creatives featured over the years in our magazine, you’ll be automatically included in our Profiles section and your body of work featured in the magazine over the years will be accessible to everyone with an online subscription.

If you’re one of the lucky ones and your work has been published in Lürzer’s Archive you can send us a portrait shot of yourself to be included in your profile.

For those who worry about which picture to send, I have the reassuring news that once the rest of the website is up and running, each of our creatives will get the chance to edit their pictures as well as their “Beyond Archive” profile in which you can tell our readers more about yourself, for instance:  if you play in a punk band, are part of a rugby team or have a fondness for macramé. 

As far as the actuality of your personal portraits are concerned you may, however, side with the magazine’s founder Walter Lürzer:  For years, up until 2000 and beyond, he used to insist of having a certain picture of him printed in which he can be seen enjoying a fruit tart.

This was actually taken at the occasion of the signing of Lürzer’s Archive’s ill-fated and short-lived collaboration with the German Handelsblatt Group in 1988. The reason its breakdown finally came was because Handelsblatt’s ad sales staff found it quite impossible to sell ad pages in our magazine.

For this they had a number of very well-put and exceedingly persuasive excuses. The irony of that is that since 1991, when we took things into our own hands again, ad sales for the magazine and our special issues have turned out to be the areas through which Lürzer’s Archive has been making most of its profits.

Image: Walter Lürzer at the signing of Archive's short-lived collaboration with the German Handelsblatt Group in 1988.

Image: Lürzer's Archive can also be found on Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram.