When Mad Men kicked off its fifth season earlier this year, we encountered Don Draper and Peggy Olson brainstorming an advertising campaign for Heinz baked beans. The goal? To make this staple of the American diet sexier to a younger generation.

In 1995, a group of 5th grade kids in Helena, Montana got together and made a PSA for the Internet (above). And, man, were they hip, with their techno music and their “by the time I’m in college, the internet will be your telephone, television, and workplace.

In 1976, Martin Scorsese made a chilling cameo appearance in his thriller, Taxi Driver. Perhaps you remember the scene: Playing a bearded, nameless character, Scorsese enters a cab, bosses the driver around for a while, then proceeds to explain, in an uncomfortably matter of fact way, how he plans to kill his wife.

Before coming up with the slogan “Utz Are Better Than Nuts!” for the real-world Utz potato chip company on Mad Men, Don Draper and his crew had to study the competition, like this ad for Beech Nut or this one with Andy Griffith for General Foods.

One of the scariest things about air travel is the seating assignment. You never know who you’ll end up next to. This classic 1968 advertising campaign from Braniff International Airways lets you imagine what it would be like to find yourself elbow-to-elbow with Andy Warhol and Salvador Dalí.

In a world of accelerating obsolescence, of plastic products and digital information, a few old-school craftsman are still hanging on. But they’re getting harder and harder to find. In this pair of short films we meet a few craftsmen on both sides of the Atlantic who are stubbornly persisting while the world changes around them.

Earlier this month, we posted a pair of Wes Anderson-directed television commercials advertising the Hyundai Azera. While I understood that, at one time, a known auteur using his cinematic powers to pitch sensible sedans would have raised hackles, I didn’t realize that it could still spark a lively debate today.

You have to appreciate the paradox of Banksy: A commercially successful anti-capitalist. A vandal who adds value. It’s the sort of amusing contradiction that appears often in the artist’s own work.

Joseph Stiglitz teaches at the Columbia Business School and Columbia’s Department of Economics and, of course, won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001.

Doc Zone, a documentary series produced by CBC Television, is now airing, Meltdown, a four part investigation into the great financial debacle of 2008.