Profit Margins: Silent Era Precursors of Online Advertising Tactics

New media, in the process of stabilization, always encounter the challenge of consumer-goods advertising. This challenge takes recognizable form when successful (and unsuccessful) ideas developed for one medium are revisited as ways to integrate advertising as palatably as possible into a new medium. A study of early film and the early internet reveals historical parallels: the advertising industry conceived of techniques which it failed to integrate into motion picture exhibition, but which have returned and begun to flourish online. Using patent information, materials from academic and trade advertising journals, and examples of internet marketing, this paper reveals the complexity of interactions between emerging media and advertising, and the importance of a study of failed and fringe concepts to a complete understanding of media and marketing development.