• Ad Access - The Ad Access Project, funded by the Duke Endowment "Library 2000" Fund, presents images and database information for over 7,000 advertisements printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955. Ad Access concentrates on five main subject areas: Radio, Television, Transportation, Beauty and Hygiene, and World War II.

• Ad Age - Online website based on the print journal that surveys the advertising industry. You can also subscribe to off-shoot services like AdReview and AdAgeGlobal.

• Ad Busters - Promotes information unflattering to the advertising industry including spoofs, campaigns against ads, un-commercials and an online magazine.  

• Ad Critic - Website that provides access to current TV commercials and mechanisms to critique just how good they really are. Here is where you will find practically any ad you have seen on TV. Includes a viewable archives of the Top 100 Commercials. 

• AdEater - This site' offers access to the Jean-Marie Boursicot's Film Library. It provides a huge database of more than 550 000 commercial from worldwide agencies. Browse our online database and watch your favorite commercials in Real Video or Mpeg format... all for free ! 

• Ad Flip - The world's largest archives of classic print ads. The database can be searched by year, brand and product type.

• AdSlogans Unlimited - This commercials service creates ad slogans for interested businesses. It also features a database (Hall of Fame) of the top ad slogans from the past century  and a Directory of links to other advertising sites offering historical information.

• Advertisement Avenue - Great collection of TV ads in video format. You can search for commercials under such categories as By Company, By Product, By Category, and By Event. The web site also has a section featuring Celebrities and popular TV characters in TV Ads.

• Advertising Archives - Top 100 Ad Campaigns of the Century.

• Advertising Education Foundation - The AEF provides educational content to enrich the understanding of advertising and to expand and elevate the advertising discourse on-campus, in our society. and in the industry.

• Clio Awards - This organization provides the international advertising and design industry with the world’s best-judged creative competition in the areas of TV, Print, Outdoor, Radio, Integrated Media, Innovative Media, Design, Internet, and Student work -- and in so doing, to honor advertising and design excellence worldwide (sometimes referred to as "the Academy Awards of Advertising).

• Coca Cola Television Advertisements - The Motion Picture Archives of the Library of Congress presents Fifty years of Coca-Cola advertisements. The highlights consist of a variety of television advertisements, never-broadcast outtakes, and experimental footage reflecting the historical development of television advertising for a major commercial product. Featured advertisements include the 1971 "Hilltop" commercial with an international group of young people on an Italian hilltop singing "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke"; the "Mean Joe Greene" commercial from 1979; the first "Polar Bear" commercial from 1993; the "Snowflake" commercial from 1999; and "First Experience," an international commercial filmed in Morocco in 1999.

• Commercial Closet, The - The world's largest collection of gay advertising. All the TV commercials in the archive are classified by "Gayness" into one of four areas: Positive, Negative, Neutral and Gay Vague. One of the archive ads includes football superstar quarterback Joe Namath in the now infamous 1974 Hanes' Beautymist commercial where he wore panty hose. 

• Commercial Icons of the Sixties - TV Party's "Video Vault" collection of classic TV commercials from the 1960s.

• CreatAbiliTOYS! -  Online since May 20th, 1996, the site has more than 650 images of advertising dolls and artifacts (Jolly Green Giant, Tony the Tiger, California Raisins, etc). In addition, there are nearly 700 individual documents within the site. Visitors can either take a leisurely browse through the museum, visiting each wall of exhibits as if in the real Museum, or the option of quickly locating a toy using an online search engine is available. The Toy Index search engine helps you find any of the hundreds of advertising artifacts item in the database.

• DeeTs 70s Page - Nice collection of sound recordings from many classic 1970's TV ads.

• Emergence of Advertising in America -  This archive presents over 9,000 images, with database information, relating to the early history of advertising in the United States. The materials, drawn from the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University, provide a significant and informative perspective on the early evolution of this most ubiquitous feature of modern American business and culture. The database can be searched across all or within individual categories. Also check out Harp Week Present: 19th Century Advertising for a database containing over 40,000 advertisements that appeared in Harper's Weekly Magazine from 1857-1871. In addition see Advertising Age Timeline, and Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History.

• Fun and Smiles - Entertaining site filled with pages of old commercials. Alphabetically arranged by product name, the files are in .zip format. A great site to kill some free time, especially if you like beer commercials ("Wassup!"), and notable celebrities like Britney Spears.

• Great American Automobile Ad - Videos filled with compilations of automobile promotional ads and TV commercials seen on television over the years. 

• Library of Congress  - American Memory Collection featuring images dealing with advertising and marketing history including: Fifty Years of Coca-Cola Television Advertising, a variety of 1920s Film advertisements and magazine advertisements from from 1926 issues of Country Gentlemen, Good Housekeeping,  and  Household Magazine.

 

• Music from TV Commercials -  Archives goes back to 1996. Provides the name of the company, artist/composer, name of Spot and links to Amazon.com which gives "Listen to Music samples. Also check out - Sounds Familiar

• Museum of Broadcast Communications - This Chicago based repository of television and radio history (with over 13,000 television programs, 4,000 radio programs, and 4,500 newscasts) offers access to the  A.C. Nielsen JR. Online Research Center a database with over 11,000 television commercials.  You can search the database online by product type and brand. Contact the museum for guidelines on using the database.

• New Product Showcase & Learning Center Located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, this organization houses a collection of over 70,000 new and once-new products. (food, beverage, household and personal care products) that have been introduced in the last 30 years. Their experienced team uses this unique resource to make new product development faster, more efficient, and more productive.

• The Sounds of Advertising - A short but sweet collection of old radio ads from the 1930s and 1940s. They include jingles and slogans from such sponsors as Halo Shampoo, Jell-O, Texaco, Phillip Morris and Woodbury Soap, among others.

• Television Bureau of Advertising - The Television Bureau of Advertising is the not-for-profit trade association of America's broadcast television industry. TVB's offices are located at 3 East 54th Street, New York, NY 10022. Phone: (212) 486-1111. Fax: (212) 935-5631.

• Telly Tunes - British website with collection of TV theme songs and a section devoted to sound bytes for TV Ads: Clips & Jingles.

• TV Commercial Wav's - Nice collection of audio files for TV commercials from the past.

• TV ADZ -  Gallery of classic toys and model ads.

• TV Jingles - Delightful batch of advertising jingles from the American Food Century 1900-2000 website. It is arranged in categories like Drink, Breakfast Foods, Snacks, Meat & Cheese and Miscellany. Check out Wave Themes.org

• TVParty  - When you donate a mere $8.45 to TVparty, you get full access to the enormous archives - over 500 pages, more than 40 HOURS of streaming media files in Real Player format. Some of the pages are available on line for free including Famous Automobile Commercials, 1960s commercials, and an assortment of Most Outrageous Ads and Crazy Commercials and Outrageous Jingles. 

• UCLA Film & Television Archive - A unique resource for media study, the Archive constitutes one of the largest collections of media materials in the United States - second only to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. - and the largest of any university in the world. Its vaults hold more than 220,000 motion picture and television titles and 27 million feet of newsreel footage. The combined collections represent an all-encompassing documentation of the 20th century. Check out the Television Commercials page for a summary of their TV commercials collection and see the fee-based site VMS Advertising Library, the world's most comprehensive Media Information Source for the largest advertising library in the world (over 1 million TV, radio, print and internet ads).

• USA TV ADS - This organization has been collecting and cataloguing American television commercials since 1975.  Their library boasts over one million commercials in every category imaginable. You can see over 100 specially selected “Golden Oldies” right now. We offer both Windows Media Player Versions for Broadband & 56K modem  as well as QuickTime. If you are looking for any commercial from the last 28 years, we can help.

 

See also - TV RESOURCES - MUSEUMS & TV HISTORY

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