Archive of Television Ads

AdViews is a fun archive of TV commercials from the 50s and 60s. The commercials have been made available for "research, teaching, and private study". Duke University, where the collection is housed, is not the copyright holder. You'll have to track down who controls the images if you want to use them commercially. Although, I suspect the age of some of these puts them into the public domain. There are also some French commercials such as the ads for Fluffo! I've spent way too much time today watching old advertisements.

One note. You need to access these ads using iTunes. There is no cost but you still need the Apple program to gain access

[via Boing Boing]

[Image captured from "Fluffo Shortening, 1960s (dmbb09814): D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles advertising archives]

Who controls television content?

Neatorama had an interesting piece recently called, "Who owns what on television?" I was facinated to see how a few corporations control most of the big media outlets. I think I probably already knew this, but seeing it all laid out was pretty eye-opening. If I were teaching at the moment, which I'm not cause it's the middle of summer vacation, I'd bring this up as a topic of discussion.

As an example, the graphic here, shows all the stations owned and operated by Time Warner.

I'll bookmark this page and come back to it in September to show my media classes.




[Image captured from Neatorama: http://www.neatorama.com/2008/07/07/who-owns-what-on-television/]