Murdoch stores Australia's ads

Have you ever wondered what happened to your favourite television advertisement?
    Well, this famous advertisement, along with thousands of others not-so famous, can be found in Australasia’s first-ever national online advertisement archive being set up at Murdoch University.
    The Australasian OnLine Advertising Archive (AOLAA) is a searchable Internet database of political and commercial advertising in Australia and New Zealand from 1900 until the present-day.
    It contains print, audio, video and film records and has been put together in association with the Advertisers’ Federation of Australia (AFA) and the New Zealand Advertisers’ Association.
    According to Murdoch’s Chair of Mass Communication and Archive Convenor, Dr Mark Balnaves, for a low annual subscription, advertising agencies will be able to upload their own digitised material directly to the archive.
    “Alternatively, we have the technology to digitise advertising content for agencies — thanks to a Murdoch University equipment grant for $48,000 received in conjunction with the AFA,” said Dr Balnaves.
    “Historically there has never been a system for ongoing collation of the thousands upon thousands of ads covering all parts of our lives. In Sydney alone last year there were somewhere in the region of 12 to 16,000 radio ads and as for television ads, it’s anyone’s guess.
    “Other advertising includes that on billboards, trains and buses, even packaging, such as Colgate toothpaste boxes, and much of it has become iconic.”
    Dr Balnaves said that archiving of advertisements did not seem to take a high priority as a matter of heritage as, say, films did.
    “Advertisements are a medium that I think is equally important,” he said.
    “They are also at the cutting edge of technology and business — a crossroads for public relations, commerce, multimedia and online advertising. Just how we take complex media forms and put them out in the form of advertising — through online, print, TV or radio — has never been recorded in such a co-ordinated and uniform way before.”
    Dr Balnaves said the archive was all about the preservation of both digitised advertisements and hard copy.
    He said a good example of the ad hoc nature of Australian ad preservation in the past was that of the very first colour television advertisement ever made in Western Australia.
    “This particular advertisement was for a long-defunct local retailer,” he said.
    “It had been preserved by an individual who, unfortunately, lost the soundtrack. If the Australasian ad archive had existed then, that ad would have been recorded in full.”
    Dr Balnaves added that those early ads were created completely by Australians.
    “With media globalisation, many ads today arrive from overseas and are simply overlaid with Australian content. This is not a criticism but simply highlights the difference between our own ads and those from overseas, when looking at heritage and local production.”
    The ads for the new archive will be kept on computer at Murdoch’s Centre for Research in Culture and Communication (CRCC).
    Input will also be provided by Dr Geoff Roy of Murdoch’s School of Engineering in Rockingham and Head Librarian Nada Nadanasabapathy from the Murdoch Library, particularly in the area of digital technology.
    “The software engineers at Rockingham will be doing advanced content retrieval research to highlight the techniques and styles used to create the ads,” said Dr Balnaves.
    “This is not as simple as say retrieving a book from the library — it is highly specialised. For example, you could find out how many ads had blue skies in them or how many people wore pink dresses in car ads.”

Further information