As long as there have been movies, there have been people trying to convince other people to see those movies. Marketing has been a huge part of the movie making business before Hollywood even began.

Here’s a brief rundown of the historical highlights.

Sell-Uloid Factoids: A Brief History of Movie Marketing

Does it seem like most of Hollywood today is just a cynical exercise in product placement and marketing tie-ins? It was way worse.

Product placement was rife in the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood. The first ever Best Picture winner at the Oscar’s was 1927’s Wings starring Gary Cooper, which blatantly spruiked Hershey’s chocolate.

Sequels are basically marketing in the purest sense, banking on a brand loyalty to maximise profit margins. And they’ve also been an integral part of Hollywood since the start. The title for first ever sequel belongs to 1916’s Fall of a Nation, a sequel to 1915’s Birth of a Nation.

Racists – ruining Hollywood since 1916.

Trailers get the fans salivating for your flick before it even comes out. No surprise then that they go back as far as 1913, when it seems like the movie itself wouldn’t even have been as long as its trailer.

That year a short promo for the musical The Pleasure Seekers came out, sparking a trend for short snippets of film being used to tantalise, or tease, audiences.

Performing outrageous stunts to get some buzz is a trick as old as time. Back in the day, outrageous stunts meant hiring a plane to carry ten Canadians to the premier of your movie. That was exactly what the makers of 1937’s The Prisoner of Zenda decided to do.

It seems positively quaint today when a guy can parachute to the Earth from orbit, but things were different back then.

Back in the day, summer was the worst time to release films. Any movie that opened then was basically dead in the water. Until, 1975 when Steven Spielberg came to town in 1975.

His movie Jaws had a $7 million opening weekend and made back its production budget in two weeks. The first big budget summer blockbuster was here.

Crowd funding for films, essentially online pan handling, really began in 1999 when Mark Kines raised $125,000 to make his film Foreign Correspondents. Today, the Veronica Mars movie managed to raise more then $5 million. To help put that into perspective, that’s almost five million one-dollar bills.

Not having a website for your movie is unthinkable for marketers, but it took people until 1994 to cotton on to this ‘internet’ thing. The first official movie page was Stargate, appropriately enough. It’s been revamped a few times since then but it’s still an important part of web history.

Did you know? The original Space Jam page is still up and running in its original 1996 glory. If you want to satisfy your 90’s era geocities yearnings, come on and slam.

Before viral marketing became a tedious buzzword, it was an exciting concept that was blowing minds. 1999’s Blair Witch Project released short ‘found footage’ videos, astro-turfed forums, released ‘news segments’, basically did everything they could to make people think a witch in woods of Maryland ate three film students.

Costing $60,000 the film made $248,639,099. That’s four thousand times its budget.

Part of the reason marketing budgets for movies are so enormous today is because people just don’t go to the cinema anymore. Why pay for something when you can torrent it for free? And people have been torrenting for a while.

The oldest torrent is a documentary film about open source software called Revolution OS, uploaded in March 2004. The oldest comment is presumably ‘FIRST!1’

Thank you, hope you learned someanecdotes to impress your mates.

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