(After reading about the invention of Coca-Cola, dont forget to visit the American Memory presentation Fifty Years of Coca-Cola Television Advertisements. Here you can see a variety of television advertisements, never-broadcast outtakes and experimental footage reflecting the historical development of television advertising for a major commercial product. Featured advertisements include the 1971 Hilltop commercial with an international group of young people on an Italian hilltop singing "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke"; the "Mean Joe Greene commercial from 1979; the first "Polar Bear commercial, from 1993; the "Snowflake commercial from 1999; and "First Experience," an international commercial filmed in Morocco in 1999.)
In the Did
You Know? section of The Branding of America learn how the Arm and Hammer design came into being or how the changing face of Aunt Jemima mirrors the countrys changing perceptions of African American women.
Other advertising materials are in The
Emergence of Advertising in America. Here you can view more than 9,000 advertising images from the period 1850-1920. A Special
Presentation documents highlights in the history of advertising. For example, in 1841 Volney B. Palmer opened the first American advertising agency, in Philadelphia.
