AdViews: Don’t Touch That Dial!

AdViews Logo

The Duke Digital Collections team is excited to announce our newest project: AdViews, a digital archive of vintage television commercials. Our first batch of commercials went live in iTunes U last night (July 20, 2009), and we’ll continue to add thousands of historic commercials to the collection through the rest of 2009. By year’s end, the collection will contain over 10,000 digitized TV commercials from the archives, all available for FREE from Duke’s iTunes U site.

AdViews will provide students, teachers, and researchers access to a wide range of vintage brand advertising from the first four decades of mainstream commercial television. The collection will support interdisciplinary research, not only in marketing and advertising history, but also in visual studies, communication, women’s studies, public health, cultural anthropology, nutrition, technology, and more.

AdViews currently features commercials from the ad agency D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles (DMB&B), a New York advertising firm founded in 1929. The DMB&B archives are held at Duke in the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History, a research center in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library.

Stay tuned! We’ll be right back with more AdViews updates and behind-the-scenes information…

5 thoughts on “AdViews: Don’t Touch That Dial!”

  1. Fantastic collection! love it, love it, love it. I can tell this took a lot of work. It’s going to be a wonderful resource. Great job to the entire team!

  2. Thanks for your kind words, Beth. This has been a real team effort — so many of us have put so much time and energy into building this collection. It really took over our lives, but it’s been a labor of love (well, most of the time) and we’re so glad the world is finally getting to see it!

  3. I’d like to see these, but you’ve only allowed it to be accessible trough iTunes. I don’t use iTunes. Are there any plans to make this available in some other format or distribution method?

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