TV Commercials' Second Life: Commercials as Remembrance Culture in the Netherlands

The objective of this article is to look at the cultural indicators of television in the Netherlands from the perspective of feature that is essential to commercial TV - audiovisual advertisements.

TV advertisements have been continuously gaining recognition as vital part of shared, cultural memory amongst audiences. It is therefore worth looking into the current practices of archiving and reuse of these ephemeral texts, including the digital environment. Once any commercial is removed from its original context of the broadcast TV flow and of its commercial layer, to be then placed in the archival setting – its meaning becomes radically altered. Consequently, the question is - what is left of a commercial and what becomes a cultural memory, often embedded deeply in collective psyche of generations of broadcast viewers, in the archival environment?