UK TV Advert's Archive

One of the things I have always enjoyed archiving over the years are television adverts, and being from the UK most of those that I have managed to archive are from this tiny island.

There's no real era of focus, or subject focus. Pretty much anything I encounter I'll try and save. So expect adverts from as early as the 1980s through to relatively recent, along with subjects covering everything from UPVC doors and conservatories to cars and toys.

Index

Just a simple table for now, sorted by brand.

Brand is the core product/manufacturer being advertised. This is to try and "tie-together" similar products (like toys made by Mattel for example). This can sometimes be the overall owner (such as Nestlé, Mars etc.) or the general "brand". There's no real science to it, it's just whatever makes sense in my head.

Item/Service is the product, service, event that is being advertised, the "thing" if you will. Some of these adverts are genuinely exteremely vague and are just advertising the brand in general, but most of them are advertising a tangile product or a genuine service.

Year is the approximate date of broadcast, as is often the case some adverts may span over multiple years (certainly if premiered say at the end of the year, their usage may exist into the next year), this data is an approximation taken from information from the original source or another element within the advert.

Length is the duration of the advert in the nearest 5s amount, as I'm yet to encounter an advert shorter than 10s, so increment up. Many adverts are designed to be a few seconds longer, or broadcasters can choose to "hold frame" on the final title card for a few seconds (resulting in say 32 seconds instead of a pure 30 seconds).

Slogan is just an interesting bit of information, if I identify a slogan being used (often at the end of the advert) I will write it out here, if I can't identify one then it will be "N/A", if I need to check the field will be blank.

Captioned of course many of these adverts were never shipped with any kind of subtitles/closed-captions. Some may have had subtitles that would have shown via Teletext but most of the time there would be nothing. These captions are freshly generated and then edited by myself using OpenAI's Whisper platform. I probably won't do it for all adverts, some adverts contain no spoken dialogue, but I will try and endeavour to include captions for the more popular adverts (measued by the amount of engagement on the archive pages). Link is, as you likely guessed, an out-link to the item being hosted on The Internet Archive.

Notes, thoughts etc.

• Mars/Masterfoods many adverts for products produced by Mars can be accredited to either Mars Inc. or Masterfoods, for the sake of sanity all items produced by the company will be grouped by the brand Mars.
• Sources the adverts above come from many sources. Some are from tape transfers I have completed myself over the years, some of these adverst may have been transferred as early as 2009. However as many people often upload content to YouTube, some adverts can originate from various sources on that platform.
• Duplicates it may look like there are duplicates in this list. Some adverts may have variations - sometimes obvious, and other times subtle. As they're in theory a different item, they qualify for a seperate item.
• Quality/Improvements we're ultimately dealing with amaeteur recordings for the most part, and so the quality of the adverts can range from poor to nearly broadcast perfect. Please don't whinge or whine that your favourite advert for your local UPVC Doors and Conservatories company is in poor quality. If a better quality version ever surfaces, I will duly upload it to the Archive.org item. As for improving the content with the use of AI upscaling technology, although something I've considered I would only endeavour to perform such a task as an experiment, not across the hundreds of thousands of adverts that may be listed here.
• Contributions/Donations if you're wanting to contribute, contact me via the contact link at the top of the page. I'm happy to either upload your content to the Internet Archive or if you already have uploaded, consider adding your content to the collection.