This almost feels like archival inception and that’s honestly the best kind of inception to me.
archives.design is a digital archive of design-related items from the Internet Archive, curated by Valery Marier. She runs the site in her free time. Naturally, the site itself is beautifully crafted and seeing all the covers on a digital shelf in all their glory is exquisite.
Colombia’s El Tiempo commissioned a set of print ads to highlight the importance of Black culture in history and the news. Each image shows famous settings with Black people missing (Michael Jordan, Jimi Hendrix, Pele, and Muhammad Ali).
In 2006, São Paulo’s mayor Gilberto Kassab proposed a law known as Lei Cidade Limpa (clean city law in Portuguese) which prohibited any form of billboard advertising or outdoor posters. 15,000 billboards were taken down and despite backlash from advertisers, citizens praised the move.
For New York’s WNYC, local São Paulo reporter Vinícius Queiroz Galvão described his experiences:
São Paulo is a very vertical city. That makes it very frenetic. You could not even realize the architecture of the old buildings, because all the buildings, all the houses were just covered with billboards and logos and propaganda. And there was no criteria. And now it is amazing. They uncovered a lot of problems the city had that we never realized. For example, there are some favelas, which are the shantytowns. I wrote a big story in my newspaper today that in a lot of parts of the city we never realized there was a big shantytown. People were shocked because they never saw that before, just because there were a lot of billboards covering the area. São Paulo is just like New York. It is a very multicultural, globalized city. We have the Japanese neighborhood, we have the Korean neighborhood, we have the Italian neighborhood and in the Korean neighborhood, they have a lot of small manufacturers, these Korean businessmen. They hire illegal labor from Bolivian immigrants. And there was a lot of billboards in front of these manufacturers’ shops. And when they uncovered, we could see through the window a lot of Bolivian people like sleeping and working at the same place. They earn money, just enough for food. So it is a big social problem that was uncovered, and the city was shocked by these news.
Check out Tony de Marco’s Flickr album, titled São Paulo No Logo, for a better look.
I love old commercials and I like digital archiving. So when I found out about this YouTube channel, I jumped at the chance to subscribe.
Commercial Break is a way to archive the commercials of an era for future generations to appreciate.
Growing up in the 90’s, most kids would record their favorite shows from TV, those kids grew up and archived those commercials on YouTube. But what about kids growing up today? No one is recording live TV on physical media anymore. Sure there’s DVRs, but people (myself included) would just watch the recorded show and eventually delete it to make more room. I realized no one was saving this stuff, so I wanted to start archiving commercials again for future generations to look back on.
Commercial Break started in February 2019 and each video shows US commercial breaks with time tags for each commercial. As of today, there have been 290 volumes covering channels such as:
ABC
Cartoon Network
Fox
NBC
Nickelodeon
CBS
MTV
It’s funny how we wanted a way to watch TV without the adverts in between—and got it with things like TiVo and PVRs—and now we’re finding ways to capture nothing but the adverts.
Stream all the commercials from 2019 and 2020 below. And if you like the idea of the digital archiving of TV, check out the story of Marion Stokes.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse - action figure commercial.
Pizza Hut pulled out all the stops in the 90s with their unorthodox commercials. But this was features a language from another planet!
Pizza Hut’s Klingon advert was the first full non-English advert on British television when it aired in 1994. While I don’t remember the advert from childhood, I do remember the promotional Star Trek cups that came with them because I had two (which, in hindsight, I wish I’d kept)!
If you plan on emulating this commercial and want to order a pizza in Klingon, here are some suggested phrases:
nuvpu’ Qong (Deep pan, please)
pagh latlh vIlegh’a’? (Can I have extra cheese?)
ghorgh lutu’lu”a’? (Is the base gluten free?)
‘uQ’a’ (Meat feast)
tlhIngan taHqeq chuS’a’Daq yIjaH?! (What do you mean the ice cream machine is broken?!)
When I want to feel warm and cosy, I watch YouTube videos of old 90s TV adverts. They give me a kick of nostalgia and remind me of simpler times when you could hug people without fear of dying. Last night, I watched a video with adverts from 1994 and I spotted something strange. The adverts were from ITV but the intro was one of BBC2’s old idents (the one with the green paint). I thought the video had changed. You never saw BBC on ITV unless it was on the news.
So how did this all come about? Peter York picked up on the story for The Independent back in 1994:
Advertising is in the ‘borrowed interest’ business: famous or beautiful people and spectacular locations are regularly borrowed to add interest to somewhat basic product offers.
Now Pizza Hut has gone one better: it’s borrowed a television channel. More precisely, it has ‘appropriated’ – as a certain type of intellectual likes to say – the BBC2 logo, in its large, plain, anodised-aluminium form. If you’ve had the feeling that you’re in the wrong place recently when watching ITV or C4, it’s because the BBC2 logo has appeared. It sits in its wind tunnel and is swept with green paint, as usual – but then a yob appears and splashes the camera lens with paint, too. It’s a very disconcerting, memorable media-age joke.
But it turns out “spoof” idents have been around for decades and there’s even a website archiving them. I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who felt a little off by the giant metallic 2 on the “wrong” channel.
The two MJ’s – Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan – may have joined forces in the video for Jam but they were in competition when it came to sneakers in the late 80s.
the detail., a dedicated Michael Jackson channel, made a video discussing the King of Pop’s involvement with LA Gear and how it competed with Nike before its demise and eventual bankruptcy in 1998.
What is LA Gear?
LA Gear is a US shoe company founded in 1983. Focusing predominately on sneakers, the company had a long string of influential athletes endorsing their shoes, including:
But the endorsements stretched further than sports.
Singer Belinda Carlisle appeared in print ads for LA Gear and, of course, Michael Jackson, who had his own shoe: the Billie Jean, released in 1990.
Shoe business
Michael’s endorsement was with $20m and billed “the largest and priciest corporate endorsement deal in showbiz history”. LA Gear saw Jackson as the best person to compete with Jordan and his “Air Jordan” line with Nike.
To target the younger demographic and kids going back to school, the company launched the Billie Jean sneaker in August 1990. Jackson also appeared in a TV commercial promoting them, at a cost of $700k for 30 seconds.
But this wasn’t enough to keep LA Gear from its steady decline.
Retailers immediately reported abysmal sales. Some department stores struggled to sell even a few pairs and were quickly discounted as a way to shift stock. Parents complained about the style, refusing to buy the impractical fashion-oriented sneakers. Many concerned that the studded and buckle-laden design would make their kids look like junior Hells Angels in them.
Quote from the detail.’s video
LA Geared for court?
While parents feared their children would look like mini bikers, the poor sales could have been related to Michael Jackson’s low profile at the time. The slated Greatest Hits he was working on was scrapped (before returning in a different form in 1995) and, instead, he released Dangerous in 1991. This was a particularly thorny point for LA Gear as he had suggested wearing their sneakers in music videos during that period but it never came to be.
LA Gear eventually pursued legal action in a $46m lawsuit, alleging fraud and breach of contract, claiming Jackson had “missed deadlines to deliver footage that could have been used in shoe commercials and had not released the album that was involved in the contract”. Michael filed a $44m countersuit but the stalemate led to an out-of-court settlement.
Nike’s dominance
As LA Gear continues its decline in the 90s, Nike grew from strength to strength. Michael Jordan’s Air Jordan line launched in 1984 and a slew of version came out throughout the 80s and 90s, with Jordan wearing each iteration for every season in the NBA and the Olympics in 1992.
In contrast, LA Gear filed for bankruptcy in 1998 but have made comebacks since then and the company’s products remain a part of retro culture. In 2019, Skechers sold a line of shoes branded “LA Gear X Skechers”. And who founded Skechers? None other than Robert Greenberg, founder of LA Gear.
Can you still buy LA Gear gear?
Absolutely. The brand doesn’t have the same appeal as it did at its peak and doesn’t have any endorsements on the same level of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or Michael Jackson but the sneakers still retain their retro charm.
(Trigger warning: this video contains clowns and some really creepy puppets)
Entertainment company Super Deluxe may no longer be with us but Vic Berger very much is. We featured one of his creations for SD – the will.i.am one (which had been taken down but we’ve uploaded ourselves) – and now here’s another one.
This is a compilation of videos that were on Super Deluxe but were also taken down and they show Vic Berger’s take on daytime TV and advertising as he explains:
If you don’t watch daytime television, Ellen DeGeneres, Harry Connick Jr, Logan Paul, Steve Harvey and MORE show you what you’re missing. This compilation also features creepy children’s programming and commercials for products that may or may not actually help you.
It starts with Kanye’s appearance on Ellen, made even more surreal than the real thing, followed by a commercial for jawzrsize, Paula Deen on QVC, and… well, you’ll just have to watch for yourself to see the rest.
I also want to point out I’m not ignoring all the evil, disgusting things he’s done in contrast to his pizza eating habits. All I’m saying is this is a sign of an evil man and we were warned at least 24 years ago. Make of that what you will.
