10 Landmark Movies That Were The First Of Their Kind
7. The First Movie Ad - Admiral Cigarette
One of the more common and petty complaints about motion pictures is the presence of product placement in them, but by no means a modern phenomenon in the slightest, it dates back as far as 1897 with the early films of Thomas Edison. Since smoking before the 2000s wasnt so much a habit as something that 78.5% of people did in general, unsurprisingly the first ad was for the tobacco product Admiral Cigarette. The premise of the worlds first film advert was that when four people of different classes and races (a British gentleman, a native American, etc.) were sitting on a bunch, a box burst open and out came Admiral Cigarette, a smoking woman in a naval uniform - unusual for the time as women smoking in public wasn't socially acceptable until the Women's Suffrage Movement. Anyway, she gives them cigarettes and drops a couple handfuls of cancer sticks on the ground, before the men on the bench then unfurl a banner that says WE ALL SMOKE!" Its a pretty curious slogan, as you wouldnt think youd want to advertise, for example, a restaurant by holding up a banner that just says PEOPLE EAT THINGS. By all the evidence, the commercial didn't work very well anyway and Edison and contemporaries stopped this sort of advertising fairly soon after. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wk5Bqn6VlF0
