From the mid 70s through the early 80s, the Hostess snack company produced advertisements for a myriad of comic book series. Many of these ads featured Marvel characters and, of course, their delicious Hostess treats. The ads were one-page comic stories that featured a quirky villain and a Marvel super hero who uses Hostess snacks to foil them...proving the known fact that there is no problem that Twinkies and cupcakes can't solve.
It's a brilliant marketing concept when you think about it, turning your ad into a comic...the very medium your potential customer just bought to read. The best advertisements are the ones the customers don't even realize they're witnessing...
Nevertheless, with Spider-Man as the premiere Marvel character at the time, he was featured in numerous ads over this 6.5 year stretch. This section collects all the ads in which he was featured and provides a brief summary of each appearance. Note, this is considered an alternate universe to the 616.
Before you hop into the individual ads, here's a few bits of trivia from this series in regards to Spider-Man. First, there's a character introduced in the 8th ad named Madam Web. Sounds like a cheap knock-off, right? Not the case, in fact that ad was published in July 1977, which means she debuted before the 'real' Madame Web was introduced in Amazing Spider-Man #210 (Nov 1980). Second, this universe was eventually labeled as Earth-51914. However, it only received that designation when its Spider-Man was killed by Morlun during his Spider-Man purging campaign in Spider-Verse #1. It's always tragic to see a name given and its life taken away simultaneously...
I have not been able to track down the writer(s)/artist(s) that created these gems, so they're all uncredited currently.