A01=Martin L. Johnson
advertising
advertising cinema
advertising film
advertising films
advertising history
advertising industry
advertising media
advertising policy
american cinema
american industry
animated weekly
audience
audience engagement
audience resistance
Author_Martin L. Johnson
brand
bureau of mines
business screen
Category=ATF
Category=KJSA
Category=KNT
cinema
commerce department
commercial cinema
commercial film
corporate cinema
corporate sponsorship
distribution
distribution networks
documentary
documentary film
educational cinema
educational film
electric power industry
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
exhibition
exhibitor resistance
exhibitors
film
film distribution
film history
film industry
film libraries
film production
film technology
ford motor company
forthcoming
general electric
government film
industrial cinema
industrial film
institutional context
jam handy
marketing
media history
media studies
minute movies
motion picture
motion picture industry
national association of manufacturers
newsreel
non-theatrical cinema
non-theatrical film
pathe
photography
propaganda film
public relations
publicity
regulation
rothacker
screen advertising
screen magazine
silent cinema
sponsored film
studio system
technology
theater
trade associations
trade journals
trade publications
travelogues
united states bureau of mines
united states department of commerce
universal studios
visual education
Product details
- ISBN 9780252089558
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Dec 2026
- Publisher: University of Illinois Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Film audiences resisted blatant ads since cinema's earliest days. The advertising film arose as a movie that masqueraded as entertainment or instruction to achieve its goals. Martin L. Johnson reveals the evasive history of advertising films through the actions of individuals, corporate sponsors and producers, and government agencies and non-profits that made, circulated, and showed them.
An advertising film placed promotional content into movies presented as travelogues, educational shorts, industrial films, or scenes of daily life. Business and government, meanwhile, built systems to distribute the films to unsuspecting audiences in schools, churches, civic groups, and universities. Through experimentation, corporations honed sophisticated tools of persuasion that used moving images to influence the public. What they learned reshaped notions of storytelling, technology, and corporate communication while setting the stage for advertising's symbiotic relationship with television.
Persuasive and expert, Commercial Cinema illuminates the changing fortunes and eventual fate of a film genre in disguise.
An advertising film placed promotional content into movies presented as travelogues, educational shorts, industrial films, or scenes of daily life. Business and government, meanwhile, built systems to distribute the films to unsuspecting audiences in schools, churches, civic groups, and universities. Through experimentation, corporations honed sophisticated tools of persuasion that used moving images to influence the public. What they learned reshaped notions of storytelling, technology, and corporate communication while setting the stage for advertising's symbiotic relationship with television.
Persuasive and expert, Commercial Cinema illuminates the changing fortunes and eventual fate of a film genre in disguise.
Martin L. Johnson is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Main Street Movies: The History of Local Film in the United States.
