“Advertising is selling Twinkies to adults.”

“Advertising is selling Twinkies to adults”
Donald R. Vance

That quote made me wonder if I could find an ad about Twinkies to illustrate it. Well, thanks to Philipp Lenssen from Germany (he currently lives in China), there is. He has developed a search engine for vintage ads aptly called the Vintage Ad Browser where he has indexed over 123,000 vintage ads.  He gets the ads from a variety of sources, including comic books, CD-Roms, websites, APIs, your submissions, book, magazine & comic book scans, and more. Finding a Twinkies ad was a breeze on his site.

If you would prefer this quote, “Advertising is the ‘wonder’ in  Wonder Bread.” by Jef I. Richards, then you could easily find this ad featuring Wonder bread. This may seem like a pretty narrow use case, but for anyone looking for vintage ads, Philipp has created a unique and useful tool that works very well and does exactly what it claims to. But there’s more. If you’re a graphic designer who for some odd reason needs to work with a particular color, this same site can bring up all the ads that have that color. That’s not a new trick, but it’s a handy feature. But Philipp doesn’t stop there, check out his masterpiece after the break:

Cover Browser is a search engine for comic book and related covers – almost half a million of them from thousands of comic book series! You can also search by the artist or again by color. The real fun stuff is kept in his labs here.  So if you just happen to be looking for The Hulk comic book covers – in French – it’s Cover Browser to the rescue:

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If you work in advertising, graphic design, or if you just love comic books, without a doubt you should bookmark this marvelous pair of search engines.