Product placement began in the nineteenth century. By the time Jules Verne published the adventure novel Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), his fame had led transport and shipping companies to lobby to be mentioned in the story. Whether Verne was actually paid to do so, however, remains unknown.[11]
Self-advertising: A German countess holds a copy of the magazine Die Woche in her hands. The photo appeared in 1902 in an issue of Die Woche (detail of the actual photograph)
With the arrival of photo-rich periodicals in the late 19th century, publishers found ways of lifting their paper's reputation by placing an actual copy of the magazine in photographs of prominent people. For example, the German magazine Die Woche in 1902 printed an article about a countess in her castle where she, in one of the photographs, held a copy of Die Woche in her hands.[12]
Product placement was a common feature of many of the earliest actualities and cinematic attractions that were the first ten years of cinema history.[13]
During the next four decades, Harrison's Reports frequently cited cases of on-screen brand-name products.[14] He condemned the practice as harmful to movie theaters. Publisher P. S. Harrison’s editorials reflected his hostility towards product placement in films. An editorial in Harrison’s Reports criticized the collaboration between the Corona Typewriter company and First National Pictures when a Corona typewriter appeared in the film The Lost World (1925).[15] Harrison's Reports criticized several incidents of Corona typewriters appearing in mid-20s films.
Recognizable brand names appeared in movies from cinema's earliest history. Before films were even narrative forms in the sense that they are recognised today, industrial concerns funded the making of what film scholar Tom Gunning described as "cinematic attractions",[16] short films of one or two minutes. In the first decade or so of film (1895–1907) audiences attended films as "fairground attractions" interesting for their then-amazing visual effects. This format was better suited to product placement than narrative cinema. Gurevitch argued that early cinematic attractions have more in common with television advertisements in the 1950s than they do with traditional films.[17] Gurevitch suggested that as a result, the relationship between cinema and advertising is intertwined, suggesting that cinema was in part the result of advertising and the economic advantage that it provided early film makers.[18] Segrave detailed the industries that advertised in these early films.[19] In the 1920s, Harrison's Reports published its first denunciation of that practice over Red Crown gasoline appearance in The Garage (1920).[20]