Since almost the beginning of the motion picture industry, advertising tie-ups and promotions have stoked audience interest and desire in seeing certain moving pictures and movie stars. Studios quickly learned that partnering with another company or popular product cut the costs of advertising and promotion, as well as created huge audience awareness of their upcoming features. Stars often engaged in production promotion to gain financial rewards as well as to increase their popularity and name recognition with the public. If the studios or stars owned all or part of the tie-ups even better, as they earned huge profits on consumer spending for these items. As Moving Picture World described it in a June 28, 1919, the aim was not only to sell movies to exhibitors, but “to sell pictures to the public.”
In the early 1920s, Paramount Pictures joined in partnership with a novelty company for a special series of tins promoting several of the studios’ stars, in a bid to goose their actors’ popularity at the same time as the exploitation reminded the public of the studio’s development of attractive, vibrant motion picture personalities.
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