Spend the Final Days of Summer Watching Vintage TV Commercials

Watch out, YouTube, because wacky wedding videos have nothing on vintage commercials. From Duke University comes AdViews, a growing online archive of television commercials that date from the 1950s to the 1980s. Alongside ads for familiar products such as Crest, Pampers, and an array of breakfast cereals (Honey-Comb’s big! Yeah, yeah, yeah!) are those for brands that have been lost to the ages, including Studebaker, Fluffo, and the sinister-sounding Sugarcane 99, the Splenda of its day. The newly digitized archive contains commercials created or collected by the ad agency Benton & Bowles and its successor, D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles, and can be viewed and downloaded free of charge via iTunes.

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.