Profit Margins
The American Silent Cinema and the Marginalization of Advertising
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Book Presentation:
Between the advent of print advertising and the dawn of radio came cinema ads. These ads, aimed at a captive theater audience, became a symbol of the developing binary between upper-class film consumption and more consumerist media.
In Profit Margins, Jeremy Groskopf examines how the ad industry jockeyed for direct advertisement space in American motion pictures. In fact, advertisers, who recognized the import of film audiences, fought exhibitors over what audiences expected in a theater outing. Looking back at these debates in four case studies, Groskopf reveals that advertising became a marker of class distinctions in the cinema experience as the film industry pushed out advertisers in order to create a space free of ads. By restricting advertising, especially during the rise of high-class, palatial theaters, the film industry continued its ongoing effort to ascend the cultural hierarchy of the arts.
An important read for film studies and the history of marketing, Profit Margins exposes the fascinating truth surrounding the invention of cinema advertising techniques and the resulting rhetoric of class division.
About the Author:
Jeremy Groskopf is Instructor of Communication Studies and Journalism at Averett University.
Press Reviews:
"Groskopf's book turns existing literature on its head by showing that advertising actually was in and all around cinema long before radio. . . . The author has collected a wealth of archival materials that enable him to carefully study the spread of advertising-related ideas and their adoption in terms of methods, devices, and business models."
-Patrick Vonderau, author of Films that Sell: Moving Pictures and Advertising
"In this meticulously researched, detailed and lively account, Groskopf unearths the lost connections between consumer advertising and the earliest American movie theaters. His fascinating illustrations and archival finds demonstrate that many current efforts to market to media audiences have long roots."
-Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, author of Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy
"In Profit Margins, Jeremy Groskopf uncovers intriguing connections between the film and advertising industries in the early 20th century. Convincingly argued, fluidly written, and supported by an impressive range of archival sources, Groskopf sheds light on the formative struggles that defined the early theatrical experience and its business model. From this we see how today's digital advertising practices date back to innovations made during the early years of cinema."
-Alisa Perren, Associate Professor, University of Texas at Austin
"Jeremy Groskopf's authoritative and accomplished new study ... shows us that precedent can be found not in television, or even in the earlier broadcast era of the radio, but in early cinemas.... [This is] a book that should prove useful not only to film historians and advertising historians but to any scholar interested in the larger history of debates over how visual technologies can manipulate, isolate, reveal, and, of course, monetize our attention."
-Emmet von Stackelberg, Rutgers University–New Brunswick
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