AdViews: A Digital Archive of Vintage Television Commercials

AdViews, a free digital archive of television commercials from the 1950s to the 1980s, this site provides access to commercials created or collected by the New York advertising agency Benton & Bowles. The archival collection is housed at Duke University's Harman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History and is a collaborative project with the Digital Collections Program at Duke. Currently more than 12,000 commercials are available through this Web site, including 40 commercials with closed captioning and audio descriptions for users with hearing or vision impairments. On the home page, visitors can begin with a keyword search of the current collection or narrow their search by company, product, or date. The results produce a page of thumbnail photo images of television commercials.

Clicking on an image will result in a page of information about the selected commercial--for example, the company, category and description, subject, and rights for copyright and reproduction (the last of these useful for researchers). One can view the entire commercial only in iTunes (a free download is available on the site). This is an intriguing resource for those interested in early television and advertising. Summing Up: Recommended. All users. -- C. L. Clements, Richland College, July 2010 Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries " the premier source for reviews of academic books, electronic media, and Internet resources of interest to those in higher education"

Look for these books, e-books and dvds in the TCC Library: Advertising to children on TV : content, impact, and regulation, e-book, print, 2005 Killing us softly 4: advertising’s image of women [dvd] 2009 How does advertising impact teen behavior?, 2008 You can’t air that: four cases of controversy and censorship in American television programming, 2007 Sex in consumer culture : the erotic content of media and marketing, 2006 TV commercials: how to make them, or, how big is the boat? 2005 Gadgetmania : the history and evolution of the infomercial, 2003