The hidden history of product placement

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

Complexity in Tie-Ups: It (1927)

An example of the intricacy of the connection between silent film moviemaking and the commercial sphere was the romantic comedy It (Badger, 1926). The movie, a story of a department store ribbon clerk who wins the heart of the store manager, was credited with ensuring the stardom of Clara Bow. Released in February 1927, the motion picture was one of the year's top-grossing pictures for distributor Paramount and was connected by title and timing to a two-part Cosmopolitan magazine story by Elinor Glyn, who earlier had achieved notoriety for her romance novel Three Weeks and had been brought from England to Hollywood in 1920 to write screenplays for Adolph Zukor's Famous Players--Lasky film production company (Franke, 1994). In the opening scene the department store manager's companion, played by William Austin, waves a copy of Cosmopolitan and a says that "everyone has been reading It in Cosmopolitan." He carries the magazine through the following sequences. Later in the movie, another group of characters discuss the Cosmopolitan story, and author Elinor Glyn, playing herself, appears in a nightclub scene to define the combination of youth and sexual attraction that is "It."

The sophistication of the tie-up is seen in the timing and content. The motion picture It was released in January 1927, coinciding with the publication of the two-part Glyn serial that began in the February 1927 Cosmopolitan. Glyn, who was paid $50,000 for the screenplay (It, 1927), was the author of the print serial, but the two pieces share only the title and the definition of "It." Advertising to movie exhibitors in Variety left unmentioned the gap between the two stories, bannering It as "Elinor Glyn's IT/Cosmopolitan Magazine Story." Glyn (1927) noted the differences between the screenplay and the print story in the preface to the novel by the same title, published later that year. In the years to come, many magazine articles would become movies, but few became movies simultaneously with their publication.

The Business of Tie-Ups

The use of tie-ups was regularized throughout the 1930s. The Walter E. Kline Agency in Beverly Hills provided studio executives with multiple-page lists of products available for on-screen use in motion pictures, including Remington typewriters, IBM tabulating machines, Singer sewing machines, and appliances from General Electric. Products were offered rent free in return for publicity stills for use in manufacturer's advertising (Kline, 1931). A second agency, the Stanley-Murphy Service Agency, offered a similar props-for-plugs arrangement, and C. E. Hooper added tracking of on-screen advertising to its radio service, with the addition of a full-time researcher in the New York office who screened motion pictures for plugs ("Firms Get Free Ads," 1939). Carpet manufacturers offered to weave rugs specifically for use on movie sets, asking for no on-screen credit but the opportunity to create ads based on the picture for their 45,000 dealers (Home, 1932). By the end of the 1940s there arose a name for the product placement specialist at public relations firms and advertising agencies: the exploitation agent. The New York Daily News's Hollywood correspondent, Darr Smith (1949), wrote of exploitation agent Ted Lewis, who claimed to have placed brand-name candies, athletic equipment, kitchen utensils, and even branded sacks of animal feed in movies such as The Men, Honeymoon for Five, and The Iron Cage. The Motion Picture Herald estimated that by the end of the 1940s at least two dozen pictures in current release or production featured on-screen cameos of products in return for the opportunity to run offscreen advertising, including Ronson lighters in Woman of Distinction, Dictaphone in Bing Crosby's Top of the Morning, and New Haven clocks in Guilty Bystander (Spires, 1949).