Duke University Markets and Management Professor George Grody used vintage commercials in the AdViews collection in his Fall 2009 course, “Marketing Across Borders.” In this video, five students from the course discuss their experiences using AdViews in their class.
In addition to to the Marketing Across Borders feature, we’ve also published our fourth and final batch of newly digitized content: [reposted from The Devil’s Tale]
One of the things we enjoy using the Digital Collections Blog for is to highlight notable items from Duke’s digital collections and tell you why we think they’re interesting, or thought-provoking, or important, or funny. But there are some digital objects where it’s obvious why we love them, so no explanation seems necessary. This image, from the Sidney D. Gamble Photographs, is one of those.
This is Tiger Baby, who we love BECAUSE HE IS AWESOME. Seriously, come on. You can’t not love this.
What are your favorite things you’ve found in our digital collections? Leave a comment about it and share it with the world!
The Diamonstein-Spielvogel Video Archive was one of our first video digitization projects. Available free in both YouTube and iTunes U, the collection features interviews Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel conducted with prominent artists, musicians, architects, designers, photographers, directors, actors, writers, and art collectors, documenting the arts world during the nineteen seventies and the nineteen eighties.
We were delighted when the Atlanta Decorative Arts Center (ADAC) and Atlanta Homes & Lifestyles magazine found these interviews and planned a series of screenings for design professionals, entitled “Style on Screen: Films of Design Icons.” The first event is planned for tonight, June 17, 2010. If you can’t make it to Atlanta for the event, the three designers featured in the screening are…
Continue reading Style on Screen: the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Video Archive
May is here, which means summer vacation is just around the corner. Those of you who have children are probably asking yourselves, “How on earth am I going to keep these bored kids from driving me crazy all summer can I make this a productive and educational summer for the little darlings?” By now most of the best (i.e. least unaccredited) out-of-state camps and military boarding schools are all booked up and you may be wondering what you’re going to do. Well, cry yourself to sleep about it no more, because your friends here at Duke Digital Collections — many of whom have advanced degrees in child psychology or other fields (OK, mostly other fields) — have been thinking about this so you don’t have to. We love kids, and in fact some of us used to be kids ourselves, but we also know that sometimes, especially at the end of a long day, they’re at they’re most lovable when they’re in another room being quiet. Here we present some valuable tips and ideas on fun summer activities for kids found in our Protestant Family digital collection. You can click on the thumbnails for a larger view of the image — trust us, some of them really need to be seen in their original glory to be fully appreciated.
Guerrilla training. A good way for children to meet others in the neighborhood and to get some exercise in the fresh air is to organize themselves into roaming gangs of armed bandits, like these kids. These boys may not be learning meekness, but they do seem to be learning what their roles in life will be: from left to right we have the smart one, the shy one, the loose cannon with a heart of gold or whatever, and Schroeder from “Peanuts.” Continue reading Here comes summer
The Internet yukked it up this past year over the stone-washed camp of the blog Awkward Family Photos. It became an instant meme, and even led to a forthcoming book blurbed by no less a joker than Judd Apatow. If the phenomenon got mileage from the bad ‘dos and goofy pleats of decades past, at its heart lay the simple pleasure of bringing our own frames of reference to intimate portraits of strangers.
Duke Digital Collections published the Hugh Mangum Photographs collection a few years ago, and while it inspires maybe a more dignified response and less of the beverage-snorting amusement, it affords many of the same simple pleasures. Mangum was an itinerant portrait photographer who set up shop along rail routes in North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia. As Karen Glynn, our Visual Materials Archivist wrote, “Mangum photographs are distinctive for the level of comfort exhibited by his subjects in front of the camera.” Using inexpensive negatives, he took numerous shots of his subjects, capturing them in relaxed poses.
This week we added images of the 688 negatives – many of which contain multiple exposures – to our flickr account. We hope they will inspire appreciation, but also closer examination. We would like to identify the subjects of these photographs, and enhance our frame of reference for them. Please help us if you can, by adding your comments to the versions of the photos there.
As I uploaded the photographs to flickr, I took a few moments to re-connect with this collection, one of the first digitization projects I worked on at Duke. I took particular interest in the small number of outdoor shots. In nearly all of Mangum’s photos the setting is the studio, but forty of them are exterior shots. Our metadata notes the distinction, so it’s easy to pull them up in a search. This link will list them all on a page, but I recommend selecting the 3-d wall option to view them in cooliris.
Continue reading The Hugh Mangum Photographs: People in brushy patches
A new exhibit entitled “Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam in Contemporary Chinese Art” opens tonight at the Nasher Museum of Art here at Duke. In the exhibit, four contemporary artists respond to the Three Gorges Dam, a project to build a hydroelectric dam across the Yangtze River, completed near Yichang, China, in 2008. Construction of the dam “displaced more than one million people and submerged more than 1,200 towns,” including some important cultural and archaeological sites.
The Sidney D. Gamble Photographs digital collection offers photographs of people, villages, and Yangtze River life around the Three Gorges and Yichang area, mostly dating from 1917 to 1919. The embedded slide show provides some selected glimpses into this vanished landscape. Continue reading Three Gorges Dam in the Gamble Photographs
The Digital Collections team has been watching a lot of commercials lately. In fact, in building the AdViews Collection, we’ve digitized, reviewed, described, and published close to 10,000 vintage television commercials dating from the 1950s to the 1980s. Over the last year, we’ve learned some valuable lessons from our work on AdViews. For example, 10,000 videos require a lot of server space, spreadsheets can be your friend, and most digital projects take longer than you expect. More importantly, though, courtesy of hundreds of jingles, we’ve learned not to squeeze the Charmin, that Cool Whip comes whipped and stays whipped, and that Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down.
A Little Jingle History
More than commercials today, television ads from the 1950s to the 1970s relied heavily on the jingle. According to a trusted source, the jingle is “a memorable short tune with a lyric broadcast used in radio and television commercials which are usually intended to convey an advertising slogan.” While the 1950s marked a “golden age” of the jingle on television, the jingle first appeared on radio during the 1930s as a way to circumvent industry regulations that prohibited direct advertising of products. With a catchy jingle, advertisers could mention a product name during the introduction to a broadcast without explicitly pitching a product.
In the 1950s and 1960s jingles easily made the transition from radio to television. This same period also saw the rise of the “singing commercial,” a longer format version of the jingle. In the last few decades, however, commercially licensed pop songs have slowly replaced jingles in television commercials, but some believe that jingles may be making a comeback.
Whether its a jingle, a singing commercial, or a pop song, researchers classify these “pleasantly melodic, easy to remember hooks” as earworms. They even suggest that women may be more susceptible to earworms than men.
While some jingles from our AdViews Collection are more memorable than others, here are links to our Top 10 favorites.
Top 10 Jingles and Songs from AdViews (available via ITunesU)
Some of us here at Duke Digital Collections have been in “All Olympics, All The Time” mode the past couple of weeks, and are therefore now suffering through serious withdrawal. What did we talk about around the water cooler and on Facebook before snowboard cross? What gave our lives meaning before curling? To keep the spirit of the Games alive even though they’re over, here are some interesting images from our digital collections that relate to the Vancouver Olympics.
First, here’s a British Overseas Airways Corporation advertisement offering travel to the 1948 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz, the first Games held after WWII (the host city was selected at least partly because Switzerland was neutral during the war). These Olympics were noteworthy for the figure skating gold medal won by Dick Button, now well-known as an “amusingly opinionated” TV commentator. The 1948 Games also introduced a new demonstration sport called “military patrol,” which combined cross-country skiing with shooting at targets and later, of course, was renamed “ice dancing.” (Ha ha, we kid. It became biathlon. But admit it, you would watch ice dancing if there were shooting at stuff involved.)
This ad is interesting for a couple of reasons: BOAC no longer exists, having later merged with British European Airways to create British Airways, but the “Speedbird” name endures to this day as the callsign used by air traffic control to refer to British Airways flights. The $746 round-trip fare is about $6700 in today’s dollars; for comparison, round-trip fares between NYC and Geneva today begin at $448. Of course, in 1948 you probably didn’t have to pay extra for checked baggage, pillows, food, and armrests.
[Note: This is a guest post from Rita Johnston, Project Digitization Assistant for the NHPRC-funded ROAD 2.0 project. Thanks, Rita!]
ROAD 2.0 (Resource of Outdoor Advertising Descriptions) is a project to digitize images of billboards described in the ROAD database and match them with existing metadata. What I find interesting about the collection as a whole is that it offers an abundant variety of examples of advertising throughout the 20th century, and the content often uniquely reflects the times in which the advertisements were designed. This WWII-era advertisement encourages citizens to pay their taxes on time by linking paying taxes with the war effort. [ROAD metadata record: AAA0618]
Continue reading Outdoor Advertising Images in the ROAD 2.0 Project
I’m excited to announce that we’ve launched 3,000 new commercials in the AdViews digital collection on iTunes U.
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/adviews/
This includes over 50 new products and brands, such as the American Association of Railroads, Burma Shave, Bounce, Eastern Airlines, Folgers, Glade, Pepto-Bismol, Prell, Sanka, and Zest. We’ve also added many new commercials for Crest, some fantastic Hasbro toy commercials from the 1970s, and much more.
The AdViews Highlights album now features over 40 commercials with closed captioning and audio descriptions created by the National Center for Accessible Media for users with hearing or vision impairments. Users can take advantage of these accessibility features using the Preferences and Controls menus in iTunes. We’ve also improved the indexing of the collection, making it easier to search for and discover AdViews content from the Libraries website.
Many thanks to Duke Libraries staff and interns, to Duke OIT, and to A/V Geeks for their excellent contributions to the project.
The digital collections team will promote some new AdViews commercials during the next few weeks on Twitter — follow us! http://twitter.com/dukedigitalcoll