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.
The Advertising Archives
The Advertising Archives – an Instagram account of a paid-for archive of print vintage advertising, marketing ephemera and stills from TV adverts.
The Drum
The World’s Best Ads of All Time – The Drum pulled together some of the best adverts tougher in their editorial team’s opinion.
The Inspiration
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.
Related to advertising archive ideas
Activation ideas
Creative moment
Creative Moment – is a free to access archive of campaigns curated by creatives for creatives. It covers:
- Advertising
- Broadcast
- Experiential
- Out of home
- 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.