Marketing, cultural hierarchy, and the relevance of critics: Film in the United States, 1935-1980

A content analysis of United States newspaper advertisements for films documents that film marketing has increasingly relied on the strategy of reference to expert opinion. Whereas this practice was quite rare at the beginning of the time period, under study, it became more common over time, with the largest increases occurring in the late 1960s. It is hypothesized that this phenomenon is a result of a fundamental shift in the United States film world whereby the nation's most popular form of entertainment was perceived as a legitimate art form. As an art world for film developed in the 1960s in the United States, audiences began to value and rely on critical assessments of films. Film studios capitalized on the new importance of critics by incorporating quotes from critics into advertisements. Two comparisons support this interpretation of the trends in film advertising. First, a comparison with advertisements for fiction literature, an established art form, demonstrates that while fiction advertisements employed critics' quotes from at least 1935, there was a convergence in the late 1960s in the rate at which advertisements for each art form employed critics' quotes. Furthermore, advertisements for foreign-language films, which were perceived as artistic from an earlier point in time, frequently incorporated critics' quotes prior to the 1960s, and only in the late 1960s do rates in English-language films' advertisement equal or surpass those for foreign-language film advertisements. The results support Shrum's (Shrum, W., 1996. Fringe and Fortune. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ) contention that cultural hierarchy is at least partially maintained by a greater reliance on expert discourse for high than for popular art.