I recently had the pleasure to visit the National Media Museum in Bradford. With time to kill before my meeting I looked around the exhibits spending time in the TV gallery. Learning about how television is created and broadcast was great to see, but what captivated me was the classic ads section.

Taking a seat in front of a screen I spent thirty minutes watching classic ads from Smash to Tango, Levi’s to Flake. I noted many of them down to go home and show my daughter on YouTube.

As I was doing my thoughts turned to web and mobile advertising. Will I ever sit in a museum and watch online ads? The museum of the Internet is coming (National Media Museum, 2012) but are there any ads actually worth watching? Will the Old Spice commercials of 2010 be screened next to Seventies classics?

I understand the medium is different, we are no longer consuming media in a linear fashion, but will there be any content worth watching, however we do it?

As the forms of advertising merge into tweets, blips and likes, will the job of a curator (in both the traditional museum sense and the current trendy term for an online collector) be that much harder or will great content still shine through?