The hidden history of product placement

Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Dec, 2006 by Jay Newell, Charles T. Salmon, Susan Chang

The Interconnection Between Art and Commerce in Films

That the commercial sphere was interested in using motion pictures as advertising would have come as no surprise to Edison. At least one proposal to bring products to audiences via motion pictures was made in the peephole era, with theatrical producer W. D. Mann publicizing his plan to combine Edison's peephole kinetoscope with the Edison phonograph to create a sound film that would promote his play in the weeks prior to the show's opening ("Theatrical Gossip," 1894). By the turn of the century, industrial films were a popular form of entertainment in the United Kingdom (Toulmin, 2001). For example, the English cookie maker Peek Frean created a 20-minute featurette that followed the baking process from the arrival of the raw materials at the factory to the delivery of the cookies by wagons with Peek Frean biscuit banners (Cricks & Martin, 1906).

In the United States, cinematic art and commerce intertwined in the 1910s and 1920s as manufacturers and government-distributed advertising films that combined drama and commerce to the small-town circuit. Producers of these films included International Harvester, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the YMCA. From 1914 to 1921, Ford Motor Company created a series of newsreels titled Ford Animated Weekly and Ford Educational Weekly. A typical serial included Model T races and news footage that sometimes incorporated Henry Ford meeting with government officials. These advertising films were distributed at low cost to exhibitors and found an early acceptance in small towns, with Ford claiming a viewership of 3 million per week (Fuller, 1996).

American films initiated worldwide trade in American products. A Brazilian lumber baron adopted the use of an American continuous band-saw blade in his mill after seeing it in a Perils of Pauline-type serial. He observed that the band saw produced fewer chips and sawdust than his rotary blade and would be better for cutting lightweight balsa. In Java, sales of foot-operated sewing machines increased after local women saw the machines in the closing segment of a Western (Freeman, 1920). By 1915, films were viewed as an opportunity to do more than demonstrate the product in action--they exhibited the positive effects of the using the product. In France, an advertising film for Remington typewriters tells the story of a young woman who saves her family by opening a typing business after her father's death (Dench, 1916). By the end of the 1910s, Commerce secretary William C. Redfield testified before Congress in an effort to obtain funds to purchase film projectors for use by overseas trade missions to present motion pictures to stimulate consumption of American-made goods (Moving Pictures, 1919). The Department of Commerce argued to Congress that "trade follows the film" (Klein, 1926). On-screen product promotion was not limited to hard goods. Some of the earliest, and certainly most subtle, product placements were for California real estate. Before there was a Hollywood, Los Angeles real estate magnate Harry Culver donated parcels of land for the construction of film studios, correctly predicting that the on-screen exposure of southern California's pleasures, combined with the housing needs of film industry workers, would make his remaining holdings more valuable (May, 1980).