Advertising is central for shaping the history of modern media, but at the start of the project no book-length study existed that would have explored this history from a cinema studies’ viewpoint. The project closed this gap by producing one open access monograph and one edited collection, 19 original journal articles and book chapters, four international conferences, and four new courses taught on Bachelor and Master level. It even included close archival collaboration and the digitization of historically significant materials where necessary for conducting the research.

The project’s starting point was a critique of the history, theory, and method conventionally associated with studies of advertising and film, especially as they have been devised within communication studies. Such studies tend to describe advertising as an institution that is both distinct and unique in its capability to shape human consciousness, a monolithic ‘black box’ that causes either positive or negative effects on culture and society. Instead of studying advertising film within a conventional framework of country and period, the project investigated the relationship between moving images and advertising more broadly. It also adopted a lateral view, focussing on the advertised products and services (or objects), the screens of advertising, its professional practices, and intermediaries such as ad agencies.

In doing so, the project asked questions such as: How did specific forms and formats of moving image advertising emerge across media and over time? In how far do the products and services advertised determine their own representation, and which formal invariabilities (if any) can be found? How to account for a given films’ place in the field of changing media practices? What pragmatic conditions for viewing did exhibition contexts provide? How to select, preserve and present advertising films stored in existing archival collections?

The project was conducted by three film scholars working at universities in Sweden and Germany. Its main organizing device was a jointly written monograph, with three chapters assigned to each of the project members that would focus on histories (Florin), concepts (Zimmermann) and methods (Vonderau), respectively. Regular internal project meetings were instrumental for integrating these perspectives and for discussing overarching issues (such as definitions), while workshops with invited guests provided in-depth feedback from international experts. Conferences allowed disseminating the results widely. A key strategy of the research consisted in connecting findings to archival discussions and to make them operational for archival practice.


Realization of Project Aims

An initial idea in the project application had been to adopt serial analysis as overarching method: that is, a methodology of film studies that subjects larger corpora of moving images to an identical set of questions in order to identify recurring patterns, and to trace continuities and links across countries, media, and periods, in order to understand advertisings role in transformative screen cultures. The method had been used in the context of industrial and sponsored film research before. However, this proved difficult because of conceptual and archival issues.

Conceptually, the questions ‘What is advertising?’ and ‘How do advertising practices relate to film-making practices?’ proved more intricate than they sound. Not only is advertising an umbrella term that is applied to vastly different practices and forms. There are also substantial differences in how scholars in the U.S. and Europe, and in communication or film studies have used it. Most advertising research is U.S.-centric, with very little work done by film or cinema historians. The project thus could not simply adopt a definition to select and sort films but had to first define and then to historicize its conceptualization of the way advertising and moving images were related.

Archival issues had first been reported by another Riksbanken-funded project (In12-0496:1) that failed to establish a research collaboration with the Swedish Film Institute in regard to its holdings of advertising film. After initial talks with SFI our project therefore quickly settled on working with both established and unorthodox collections that were open to investigation, including company archives (Volvo), YouTube, and significant dedicated collections abroad (Deutsche Kinemathek). Key challenges remained, such as an over-abundance of materials, a lack of metadata, access restrictions, and the fact that screen advertising films are textually instable (i.e. often reversioned), handling-intensive, and very time-consuming to work with.

Accordingly, the project developed and adapted its analytical tools in the context of exemplary case studies that came to form the basic unit of research, with each of us working with different collections, and relating the project’s main parameters of objects, screens, practices, and intermediaries to a given interest in developping histories, concepts, or methods for research, respectively. In doing so, the project has amply demonstrated what cinema studies can do for advertising research – and vice versa.


Key Findings

In general terms, the project revealed, first, significant differences between U.S. and European screen advertising histories. This is not to say that there are no overlaps or similarities. For instance, brands or theories well-known in the United States likewise shaped the professionalization of advertising in Europe, where it was fully institutionalised as an industry by the 1910s. Yet there are remarkable differences as well, such as the showing of screen ads in cinema which remained a common practice in Europe since the 1910s while in the U.S., it lost in importance after the 1920s. American advertising also relied on a more strict division of labour between advertising, publicity and promotion experts. Differences even include the codification of trademark law; as key criterion for distinguishing goods, trademarks are central for establishing the right of sellers to exclude others from using the sellers’ reputation for the quality of his goods.

Second, it became clear that any conceptualization of the relation between advertising and moving images needs to be broad and inclusive, rather than narrow and functional. Too often, the study of advertising is reduced to selected ‘ads’ (spot commercials), that is, to direct forms of promotion made for cinema by recognized advertising professionals. Yet moving image advertising as a phenomenon also includes promotional tie-ins, for instance, sponsored ‘educationals’, business films shown at trade fairs, outdoor projections, or animated billboards. It includes work done by avantgardists and propagandists alongside agency employees. Accordingly, we suggest to think of ‘screen advertising’ as a spectrum of forms, or as a set of tensions between institutional and non-institutional processes, commercial and non-commercial as well as theatrical and non-theatrical circuits, or direct and indirect modes of address. Thinking of screen advertising as a continuous line, with differences as variances of degree rather than fundamental oppositions helps to more properly map the field.

Third, it became clear that advertising research requires new conceptual tools and methods devised especially for archives for handling these materials. The project evolved in a continuous dialogue with the archives themselves, especially with Deutsche Kinemathek-Filmmuseum Berlin whose curator Martin Koerber and researcher Annette Groschke had presented their most significant collection (Charles Wilp) at a first, project-initiating workshop in 2011. Complementing these earlier initiatives, the project engaged in a digitization effort that went hand in hand with a discussion of collection policies and classification standards. For instance, future researchers may benefit from specifications such as ad agency, medium/program slot, brand/form of brand mention that are still often lacking today. In addition, a form of storage that avoids unspecified aggregate reels would greatly help accessing materials; yet this implies additional costs for archives that often are underfunded and cannot prioritize advertising and other ‘ephemeral’ materials.


New Research Questions

The project has already prompted investigations of digital methods and Big Data analytics, such as the workshop Video Tracing and Tracking in Digital Humanities Research (Netherlands Institute of Sound & Vision), at the conference Moving Image Analytics: Research Infrastructures for Film Heritage (National Library of Sweden) or the workshop Moving Image Advertising: Future Directions for Research (Montreal) which we organized or participated in. It also has triggered an interest in revisiting industrial  as well as avantgarde and amateur film, through Zimmermann’s contributions to conferences and edited books, and Vonderau’s new project application (with M. Dahlquist, Modern Media and the Oil Industry, Wallenberg Foundation).


International Dimensions

The project has continuously engaged with expert scholars and archivists from abroad. This notably includes Charles Acland (Montreal), Cynthia B. Meyers (New York), Dan Streible (New York), Frank Kessler (Utrecht), Rick Prelinger (San Francisco), Michael Cowan (Edinburgh), Karin Moser (Wien), Greg Waller (Bloomington), the Advertising Research Network at NECS-Network for Cinema and Media Studies, institutional partners as Deutsche Kinemathek-Filmmuseum Berlin, and many others. The output of publications vastly exceeds what had been planned in the application. The main deliverable, a co-authored monograph under contract at Amsterdam University Press, will be accompagnied by a website containing a selection of digitalized advertising films.