An advertising archive can come in all shapes and sizes from a hobbyist love of a particular brand as advertising archive through to professional resources for academics, marketers and intellectual property lawyers. I am not going into an argument for what is, or is not advertising as I don’t think it would be particularly productive for this post.
Without further ado let’s get into all things advertising archive related.
The list
Absolut Ad
Absolut Ad – a hobbyist website that collects Absolute Vodka ephemera as a one-brand advertising archive.
Adaily
Adaily – Adaily has a ChatGPT-like interface that allows you to interrogate its advertising archive of award-winning campaigns for inspiration. Their database currently only goes back as far as 2018.
Ad Branch
Ad Branch – a blog that hasn’t been posted to since 2013 that presents advertising work from some of the best known American brands.
Ad Forum
Ad Forum – Ad Forum has a wide range of award-winning ad formats from a range of awards including its own PHNX awards – which covered campaigns from around the world.
Adland
Adland Superbowl Commercials – Adland is a great source of US advertising industry news. Their advertising archive of Super Bowl commercials represents some of the best examples of video TV advertising creativity.
AdsMagic
AdsMagic is a YouTube video channel as advertising archive. It hasn’t been updated in four years, BUT, is still full of creative inspiration.
Ads of Brands
Ads of Brands – nice searchable site, lots of yellow if that’s your thing.
Ads of the World
Ads of the World – part of the Clios Network of sites, created around the advertising awards. It has global reach and well respected.
Ads Spot
Ads Spot – subscription based advertising archive with global reach in terms of its content examples. The search function is just ok.
Advert Ge
Advert.Ge – minimalistic design of the advertising archive with global footprint and details on who did the creative. Good for inspiration, but can’t be embedded in a presentation.
Agency Asia
Agency Asia – good for discovery of inspired print and television advertising. The video is embedded from YouTube.
Best Ads on TV
Best Ads on TV – while the website feels as if it was designed in 2003, it surfaces some great inspirational advertising.
Campaigns of the World
Campaigns of the World – is based on user-submitted campaigns, lots of good stuff there, but I wouldn’t be surprised if at least some of it was student projects rather than advertising used ‘in the wild’.
Creative Brief
Creative Brief – a rival to the likes of Contagious in terms of ‘marketing intelligence’. Creative Brief’s content skews progressive and UK market focused. Your mileage may vary.
Creative Criminals
Creative Criminals – a useful site that leans more towards the need of strategists having case studies rather than creative inspiration.
Daily Commercials
Daily Commercials – an advertising archive built by agency submissions with a range of international markets represented in its archive. In terms of completeness, it could challenge some of the sites based on award entries.
Deck of Brilliance
Deck of Brilliance – the advertising archive is grouped into 52 creative provocations using the ads as examples that illustrate the theme rather than a conventional brand / category / country organisation that you might see elsewhere.
Famous Campaigns
Famous Campaigns – a mix of campaigns and activations with a big focus on the UK.
History of Advertising Trust
History of Advertising Trust – supported by some of the UK’s largest brands and agencies. It has over a century of searchable archives.
Internet Archive
Internet Archive – although overlooked the search function of the internet archive is a great place to go for inspiration as you have an advertising archive in different formats for many brands. Its content isn’t indexed that well in the major search engines. An honourable mention to Flickr which always pleases with its serendipity.
Little Black Book Online
LBB (Little Black Book) is a more accessible resource than the likes of Campaign or AdWeek. It has managed to collect some great work together in one site in their Creative Library section. They also build profiles of ad folk based on their Immortals awards programme, here’s mine.
Lürzer’s Archive
Lürzer’s Archive – Lürzer’s Archive is the Wallpaper* or Monocle of the advertising archive world. A strict paywall and a love of print and typographic design with usefully themed books as well as the digital archives. It’s beloved of university students who think that they are creative saviour that the advertising industry needs, client services drones who want visually appealing coffee table decoration and pretentious strategists like your humble writer. Their archive is surprisingly good but focuses on quality rather than being comprehensive in nature.
A mix of email newsletter and online collection. What The Inspiration loses in comprehensiveness as an advertising archive, it gains in not being attached to a pricey subscription.
The One Club related archives
The One Club for Creativity (One Show Awards archive) – an archive of award-winning campaigns for inspiration as advertising archive focused on the healthcare sector. Check out their archive of winning entries for the Young Ones student awards covering a range of consumer-facing brands ONE Screen focuses on advertising film entries here, the ADC award archive only covers the past decade of the awards century plus activity, so while vast in terms of area of brand related design from architecture to typography, it could be so much more.
.Coffee
.Coffee – the great thing about .Coffee as an advertising archive is the grouping of examples around industries like travel, tourism & transport or beauty.
Creative Moment – is a free to access archive of campaigns curated by creatives for creatives. It covers:
Advertising
Broadcast
Experiential
Out of home
Print
Public relations
Social
Video
Packaging of the world
Packaging of the World – Mark Ritson wrote a recent article about the importance of product for marketers. The gist of Ritson’s argument was that product is central to marketing, yet most brand marketers tend to focus on the communications part of the marketing mix. With that in mind, I thought it made sense to share packaging of the world.
Two more things
Portfolios such as mine also act as an advertising archive that you can explore. I have compiled a complete and ongoing list of advertising archive related links in the Pinboard social bookmarking tool. If you haven’t subscribed already, I would strongly recommend it for research and inspiration purposes – once you get used to it it’s life-changing.
I got a chance to judge the UK Young Lions advertising awards and Adforum’s PHNX awards. The Young Lions responded to a common brief with the solution viewed through their specialism:
A communications activation plan.
A creative concept.
The standard of thinking was high, but I could also see the benefit of more agencies and brand teams tasking younger members of staff to enter the campaign. I was expected to having to wade through dozens and dozens of entries; there wasn’t that many.
Adforum’s PHNX advertising awards attracted global entries and took a long time to go through the entries that I saw. I got to see a lot of good work and wanted to showcase some examples later.
PHNX were more complex in nature compared to the UK Young Lions, with many more categories.
Advertising awards mistakes.
I saw a few unforced errors:
Category -spamming – award entries were submitted for categories that they weren’t appropriate for. You would see the same work turning up category-after-category with no relevance. You could see other judges becoming frustrated in the electronic chat function that ran alongside the entries.
Link the work tightly to the challenge that the client faces. You would be surprised how many entries failed to do this.
Have your entry in a language that the judges are likely to understand. You can only get so far with Google Lens when trying to tease out winning nuance of advertising awards.
Advertising awards entries that caught my eye.
There were a number of Adforum PHNX advertising awards entries that caught my eye and some entries that inspired me.
Advertising for advertising
A few years ago, LONDON Advertising (who I have freelanced for previously) ran an advertising campaign to demonstrate the power of advertising.
This was possible due to the cheaper media rates available early on during COVID-19 as brands paused spending.
It’s a very unusual tactic outside of advertising festivals and trade publications. So it was interesting to see a Spanish agency submit a couple of films into the Adforum awards that purely showcased their craft capabilities for use on different aspects of advertising.
It’s not Studio Ghibli, but still really well done by La Caseta. It was still surprising for me to see it entered for advertising awards.
Inspiring content
Grab Thailand
Uber analogue Grab ran this advert in Thailand to promote its version of Uber Eats, showing how the app is on the side of the consumer in terms of pricing, choice and speed of delivery. It uses thai boxing as a metaphor and features Bella as the main protagonist. Bella is a much loved soap actress beloved in Thailand. Her coach in the corner is a highly regarded former thai boxer.
Lux
For me Lux beauty soap was a brand that I associated with my Granny in Ireland, who used to alternate using it alongside Oil of Olay soap.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that Lux is still alive and well as a brand half-way around the world in Asia and Africa. Lux’s ‘change the angle’ campaign was a collaboration with female athletes to try and change the way they are portrayed in live sports coverage.
Mistine
Mistine is a Thai beauty brand founded in 1988. It became the go-to beauty brand in Thailand. The company sold its products via direct sales, wholesale, online, retail, and the export market. In recent years it had focused on expansion into China, but had lost touch with younger generations of Thai women. It was seen as a low-class, outdated brand. The brand team started with a campaign with a film of young generation focus group discussing on societal judgmental issues while having a make-up session. None of them chose Mistine as they were all judgmental to the brand name.The film signed off with an apologetic message to Mistine users and have been insulted by negative associations with the brand name “Sorry that my name is Mistine.”
It’s a brave move to take that raw insight and build a campaign around it.
That then drove a six-fold uptake in search volume and media impressions.
What prompted me to write about Geico advertising was a stream of news from marketing services companies about the state of technology company advertising. At the time of writing Stagwell are just the latest marketing services firm after S4, IPG, Omnicom and WPP have pinned declining profits on a reduction in technology company advertising spend. Then this story broke about Geico advertising: Insurer Geico made more money after benching its famous gecko | Quartz – and my first reaction was that the wrong lessons might be taken away from this.
Geico advertising – a primer
Geico îs an unfamiliar name to most people outside of the US. If you’ve read American magazines chances are there was a print ad or two in there with their iconic Gecko spokesperson. It’s a similar case on American television.
Geico advertising and their Gecko are as familiar to Americans as the meerkats of Comparethemarket.com are to your average Brits.
The truth about technology marketers vs. Geico advertising
Having worked with technology brands on and off for the past three decades, I have enough experience to know that generally, they aren’t great marketing organisations.
Coinbase’s Super Bowl ad drove traffic to a site that fell over.
Geico reinforced brand equity in the insurance space and pointed out their 24-hour claims hotline (I imagine that this isn’t an exclusive feature, but you wouldn’t know it from the advert).
Growth mindset ≠ marketing mindset
As organisations, they have a growth mindset, but not a marketing mindset. Before the internet, this meant a powerful field sales force organisation and marketing meant a bit of branding / design work coupled with case studies for the sales people. With the internet came constant iterative ‘growth hacking’ on digital channels, that mirrors agile software development rather than the best practices of marketing science.
There is a good reason why organisations like the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science are supported by FMCG manufacturers, luxury goods makers, media companies, marketing services firms and pharmaceutical companies, BUT has no technology company sponsors.
The reasons are cultural in nature:
Engineering – if I haven’t heard of it or invented it then it’s not valid and you’re just a suit. At best great product is the marketing – and that’s great if you have a clearly differentiated great product which is self evident. The engineering mindset is also why they trust adtech and marketing automation services which outsource your marketing communications approach to a black box
Sales – marketing is just support. Which is the reason why my early clients (like old school Silicon Valley royalty LSI Logic) promoted long serving secretaries and administration staff into marketing roles
Even if they had a marketer who knew about Ehrenberg-Bass they wouldn’t be able to get in buy-in from the wider organisation to participate and they’d likely be fighting other dumpster fires elsewhere
Secondly, their laser focus on data affects their outlook. To paraphrase the comedian Bill Hicks: they know the price of everything, but the value of nothing. Because they are only looking at short term data. Great marketing and advertising also has long term effects that both screws with the short term marketing data focus.
Marketing and growth hacking are considered synonymous. It would seem ridiculous for me to to claim in any large marketing orientated organisation that sales and marketing are synonymous. The differences and complementary aspects of both would be well known. Yet in technology companies, this isn’t the case.
By contrast Geico as a brand is an organisation who understood marketing. You make your car or house insurance decision at best once a year (though there is friction in making a change).
The technology sector approach would be for Geico to bid on search ads and aggregators to acquire customers and then do direct mail or email when it comes to renewal times. But Geico advertising does something different. Geico advertising builds mental framework, so that Geico means car insurance and will be one of the brands that you consider.
This achieves a few things:
You are less likely to move away from Geico, you may not love them, but searching for an alternative might be too much of a hassle.
You may be reassured that you have chosen ‘the’ car insurance
It helps new customers get over the ‘which car insurance company to choose’ decision
It helps with upsell on the products due to the reassurance of the brand
Technology companies deal with these problems in a slightly different way:
Certification of engineering staff. If you are Microsoft certified or Cisco certified, you are less likely to use open source software or Juniper Networks products respectively. It would be against your self interest and the investment in terms of time and money that you have made in your self development
Contractual lock-in – self explanatory
Technology lock-in. You can put your data or programming code into a particular system, but its much harder and more expensive to move on to another system
Owning the entire technology stack. This is the approach that Adobe Systems have taken, gradually acquiring over the years the entire marketing, workflow and creative systems used by ad agencies, media agencies and their clients
So why was Geico advertising spend cut?
This is the crux of my point about how the wrong lessons might be taken away from the Geico advertising spend cut, with no ‘apparent’ impact.
There are a number of good reasons why Geico made the cut in advertising spend:
There was a cut in insurance sector advertising overall, so that Geico maintained or even grew its relative share of voice while spending less. This should see it emerge with improved economic performance over time. Procter and Gamble became the behemoth it now is by INCREASING advertising during the great depression of the 1920s. So the idea of relative share of voice and its relationship to market share is older than I am. Further more research by the IPA has found that holding or increasing relative share of voice during a downturn has a positive impact for business performance over a five year period
Geico may have managed to make some efficiency gains, this is most likely to occur in brand activating activities
There is also a bad reason: saving money in the short term. Kraft Heinz cut marketing to the bone under the guise of zero based budgeting (ZBB) – which made a mockery of ZBB as a concept. Kraft Heinz shares massively underperformed and were down 60% in the last 5 years, compared to the S&P 500 having gone up 69%. If Geico is following this route then it bodes ill for the long term performance of the business.
Without us knowing the real reasons and focusing on the short term measure, it reinforces a growth hacking mindset.
Hard times mean no sustainability premium in North America | WARC | The Feed – every single economic recession this comes around and marketers are surprised. Time to pay attention to what the longitudinal research data says. I really like the work that Gallup have done on macro trends and the American consumer, in particular their work on attitudes to the environment.
‘Pokémon Sleep’ Review: Sleep-Tracking Game Made Me Into Snorlax – gamifying sleep. Pokemon Sleep has surged to 3.2M global downloads and an estimated $130k in daily revenue according to SensorTower data. The app ranked in the top 5 in the U.S. Games charts. It’s even more popular in Japan (the home of Pokemon), where it’s number 1 across the App Store categories
Using attention to scale creative excellence at Mars | WARC – Sales, distinctive assets, and attention to advertising are the go-to metrics to guide marketing decisions at Mars. Mars use Attention as a pre-testing tool, to inform creative choices in digital and also proxy in TV. Mars believe that an execution with a better attention score will travel across media channels better and will be a safer bet for you when you need to make a choice. Measuring Attention is a key element in helping us improve the creative hit rate. Advertisers should question how they measure consumer responses and focus on measures of real consumer behavior.
My friends at LONDON Advertising have rolled out a TV and out of home campaign for themselves. Advertising and creative agencies usually market themselves. This might be:
Awards ceremonies
Search advertising
Public relations
‘Thought leadership’ activities
It is usually consumer brand clients, or those that want to promote their corporate brand (think Oracle or Vodafone) that do TV and out of home advertising. Which makes this campaign by LONDON Advertising rather unique. The principle behind it is relatively simple, what the tech industry calls ‘Eating your own dog food’. LONDON Advertising already does advertising for the likes of Mandarin Oriental – why not do the same thing for themselves? So they’ve done TV, OOH and social channel content. The idea is that spending on the dip allowed an enhanced share of voice.
My favourite TV treatment has a voice over by Liam Neeson.
LONDON Advertising
Swiss duo Yello talk about how they produced ‘Oh Yeah’ – which then became famous as part of the soundtrack to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
Georgia Tech looked to bio-mimicry when designing a robot to monitor at tree level the inhabitants and environment at Atlanta Botanical Gardens. The Slothbot prices energy efficiency over speed of movement.
Cameron Paul was one of the first generation of beat mixers in San Francisco. San Francisco’s CBS affiliate eulogy manages to underplay his impact, but has some great archive footage. Cameron started DJing in 1970s San Francisco, when ‘personality DJs’ that got on the mic were the norm rather than someone who could mix.
He founded his own DJ subscription service with exclusive mixes and had his own label. (More on those at Discogs.) His remixing skills helped break Salt n Pepa’s Push It. He probably doesn’t have the profile he deserves because his sound historically was closer to freestyle than house. Here’s Cameron talking about the art of DJing in this vintage recording.
Talking of mixing, I have been listening to this mix by The Reflex for Kombini Radio which is tremendous.
Salience is the buzz word of the moment in advertising circles.
What is salience?
According to Siri salience is a noun. It’s definition:
the property of being particularly noticeable or important.
Historically, when you tested an ad through the likes of Kantar. One of the attributes that an ad would be measured on is salience. Relatively recently salience has become a more important attribute in advertising from a marketing science point-of-view. But this shouldn’t be to the extent of eclipsing other attributes such as distinctive brand building.
Salience becomes pre-eminent
But now you see campaigns where salience is pre-eminent. I had only seen this in Asia in the past, where random endorsement choices looked to drive impact.
At one stage in the early noughties you could see Jackie Chan side-by-side with over 20 products including:
Canon cameras
Mitsubishi cars
An anti-hair loss shampoo that allegedly contained carcinogens
Zhongshan Subor – games consoles with a basic home computing capability. Subor ‘Learning Machines’ had educational programmes, games and provided Chinese children with an opportunity to try computer programming. Think of it as an analogue the Sinclair range of home computers in the UK
Fenhuang cola drink
Jackie Chan branded Canon Rebel T2i / EOS 550D via M.I.C Gadget
A classic example of an ad that personifies salience is Burger King’s The Moldy Whopper.
The campaign is a one-off stunt designed to drive water-cooler talk. Some colleagues were at a breakfast event last week. The outtake that they took from the event was that the future of advertising is PR. Or to be more exact the publicity stunt.
I get it, creative directors are measured on memorable award-winning campaigns. They are less worried about effectiveness and brand lift. It’s sexy. And it moves things away from soul-crushing digital disruption-driven work. Big data, A-B testing that’s just aimed at sales conversion.
But publicity is just a short term effect, contrast this with effective advertising that can keep paying off for decades!
But when you’re doing stunt-after-stunt what does the brand stand for? I agree that a brand has to be distinctive, but to make a brand distinctive you need to reinforce it. Think about Coca-Cola; distinctive and instantly recognisable.
Don’t believe me, here’s what Mark Ritson said about it. Ritson uses ‘brand image’ as a way to discuss brand distinctiveness and visibility at a granular level in the ad:
The new global campaign from Burger King features a month old burger complete with the mould and decomposition that comes with it. Supposedly, this is a campaign aimed to promote the absence of preservatives. But is it good advertising? No. Showing a disgusting, mouldy version of your hero product to target consumers is – believe it or not – a really bad idea. So why are Burger King doing it? First, we see the ultimate exemplar of the focus on salience over image that is sweeping much of the advertising world. “It got me talking about it, so it is great marketing,” has been the response of many addled marketers to the new campaign. While it’s true that salience is a much bigger goal than we once thought, there is still a need to focus on brand image. All publicity is not good publicity. It’s also the latest in a long line of marketing stunts that Burger King has pulled. Hiding Bic Macs behind Whoppers in all their ads, asking consumers to order a Whopper online from a McDonalds, the list is long and stupid. It wins awards and gets marketers talking but it is eclipsed by KFC and McDonald’s less flashy, more enduring and more effective tactics. Same store sales growth over the last two years tells its own story. This is flashy, ineffective fare.
Mark Ritson on LinkedIn
Or Phil Barden who wrote Decoded:
From a behavioural science point of view this is a bizarre use of marketing money; Firstly, our attention and perception are implicit (‘system 1’) processes that are stimulus-bound. System 1 can’t imagine, it responds to stimuli. Kahneman uses the phrase ‘what you see is all there is’ and it is the stimulus (what you see) that will be decoded using our associative memories. The brain metaphorically asks the questions, ‘what is it, what does it represent, what’s in it for me’? The answers to these questions are ‘rotten food’ and ‘nothing’ because rotten food is a threat to survival. This triggers ‘avoid’ behaviour. Secondly, this image is highly likely to trigger ‘reactance’ which is emotional arousal with negative valence ie it’s unpleasant. Thirdly, memory structures are built on the basis on ‘what fires together wires together’. In this case, Burger King and rotten food. Fourthly, the category is hedonic; it’s all about enjoyment. Rotten food and enjoyment have no implicit intuitive association. The only saving grace for BK may be that their logo is such low contrast and the food is so salient that the brand may not be attributed to the image.
Many of Barden’s points are very specific to the mouldy burger creative. But points like attention and perception are implicit processes that are stimulus bound works against salience. It triggers related memories, which is distinctive brand building allows you to tap into. The importance of hedonic enjoyment plays against a lot of shock tactics used to get salience.
I am not saying that marketing campaigns shouldn’t have salience. Some of the best ads of all time use salience like Coca-Cola’s ‘Hilltop’ advert.
But that they shouldn’t be salient at the expense of other attributes of brand building. A side serving of salience adds cut through to consistent distinctive brand building. But balance in different attributes for an ad is needed.
For more on how to achieve a balance in attributes, I can recommend Building Distinctive Brand Assets by Jenni Romaniuk. The book is based on research by the Ehrensberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science.
