Finding Print and Broadcast Advertisements

Research about advertising sometimes involves finding actual advertisements; this can often be challenging. This guide lists sources for finding print and broadcast advertising, in both a current context and a more historical view.

Advertisements - Current

CLIO Awards. International competition winners in all areas of advertising.
D&AD Yellow Pencil Awards. Categories include digital, graphic design, illustration, outdoor advertising, and more.
Effie Awards. Awards recognizing the most effective advertising each year.
One Show Design. Examples of award-winning full page ads. 1991-present.
Ad Council. Good for examples of public service announcements.
Vanderbilt Television News Archive . In addition to streaming video of news broadcasts, the archive includes commercials from those news broadcasts from the mid-1990s to the present.
Advertising Age Best Ads, as chosen by the editors of Creativity.
Magazines in Google Books. An erratic but intriguing source of ads from a large number of magazines, including trade publications. It offers random years of each magazine.
... and there's always YouTube. For instance, try: "Ford F150 ad"

Advertisements - Historic

AdViews. A digital archive of vintage television commercials from the 1950s to the 1980s.
Ad*Access. Images from over 7000 advertisements in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955.
Emergence of Advertising in America. 9000 images relating to the early history of advertising in America.
Medicine and Madison Avenue. About 600 health-related advertisements in newspapers and magazines from the 1910s through the 1950s. These first four historic sources are all courtesy of Duke University.
Advertising Collections from the Library of Congress. From its American Memory project.
The Historic New York Times and the Historic Los Angeles Times both offer the option of searching for display ads of a given product. On the search screen, enter a keyword (example: bathing suit or swimsuit); then enter a date range (example: From 01/01/1928 to 12/31/1932); and then, under Document type, enter: Display ad
Adclassix.com. They describe themselves as "the specialist in original vintage advertisements."
Gallery of Graphic Design Advertisements from a variety of magazines.
Classic TV Ads. 1950s to 1980s.
AdCouncil Historic Campaigns. Public service advertisements.
The Living Room Candidate. Television advertisements from every U.S. presidential campaign since 1952.
Early Advertising of the West, 1867-1918. 450 print advertisements from Pacific Northwest magazines, city directories, and theatre pamphlets. (University of Washington)
Fifty Years of Coca-Cola Television Advertisements, from the Library of Congress.
Ivory Project: Advertising Soap in America, 1838-1998. Over 1600 advertisements of one of America's longest-lived commercial products.

Advertisements - Historic, in print magazines

There's nothing like getting your fingers dirty in good old paper magazines. The UO Library has many of the iconic general interest American magazines in print. Among them are:

Atlantic Monthly AP 2. A8 1857- present
Good Housekeeping TX 1 .G7 1885-1976
Harper's Bazaar TT 500 .H3 1867-1976
Ladies Home Journal AP 2 .L135 1887- present
Life magazine AP 2 .L547 1937-1974
Saturday Evening Post AP 2 .S33 1901-2009
Time AP 2. T37 1923- present

Other Library Research Guides to Finding Advertisements

Advertising (University of Washington)
Selected Sources of Print and Broadcast Ads (Boston College)

Maintained by: Paul Frantz, pfrantz@uoregon.edu
Last Modified: 03/02/2012