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Electronic Highways
The historical web: advertising archives
Advertising has existed for centuries. Ancient Greece had oral advertising in the form of street criers hawking their wares. The Middle Ages witnessed the growth of merchants' signs. The 18th century saw the first newspaper ad. But the real development of advertising coincides with the rise of industry in the 19th century.
Considering how inundated we are with advertising, it should come as no surprise that several Web sites are devoted to its history. The John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History (http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/hartman/) is a great place to start when looking for information and images dealing with early American advertisements. The Hartman Center is located in Duke University's Special Collections Library and was established to preserve items dealing with America's marketing and advertising history. The most extensive collection at the center is the J. Walter Thompson Company Archives, the most comprehensive surviving historical record of any advertising agency. Other holdings include vast files of 19th and 20th century advertising, the extensive Wayne P. Ellis Collection of Eastman Kodak Advertising, Sales and Marketing, and records of the Charles W. Hoyt agency. The Web site offers the following databases:
Ad*Access (http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/adaccess/) provides images for more than 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.
Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850 - 1920 (http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/eaa/) presents more than 9,000 advertising items and publications (1850-1920) illustrating the rise of consumer culture and the birth of a professionalized advertising industry.
Medicine and Madison Avenue (http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/mma/) is a database of more than 600 health-related advertisements printed between 1911 and 1958, as well as 35 selected historical documents relating to health-related advertising.
Another highly useful site is Adflip (http://www.adflip.com/), a searchable database of classic print advertisements from 1940s onwards. The ads are organized by category (e.g., automotive, entertainment, fashion, travel); more extensive searching features are available to subscribers only.
Other worthwhile sites include Advertising Age Timeline (http://www.adage.com/century/TIMELINE/index.html), featuring a history of advertising from the first newspaper advertisement in 1704 to Internet ads of 1999; Ephemera Now (http://www.ephemeranow.com/), which includes images of 1950s advertising; Truth in Advertising (http://www.chickenhead.com/truth/index.html), a collection of vintage cigarette advertisements; 19th Century Advertising (http://advertising.harpweek.com/), sample advertisements found in the pages of Harper's Weekly, 1857-1872; Outdoor Advertising Association of America Creative Library (http://www.oaaa.org/creativelibrary/), a collection of images of billboards and other outdoor advertising from 1995 to 2003; and Victorian Trade Cards at Miami University (http://digital.lib.muohio.edu/tradecards/), a searchable collection of more than 1,400 Victorian trading cards.
Most of the sites listed above deal with print advertising. For those interested in television commercials, see the "Electronic Highways" column "Plop, plop, fizz, fizz" (http://www.buffalo.edu/reporter/vol36/vol36n26/columns/eh.html).
—Don Hartman, University Libraries