How a 1950's Movie Studio Invented Click Bait.

We would like to think that click bait is a phenomenon that can be associated with the internet age & salacious news headlines that are too tempting not to click on. But the concept of click bait has been around for nearly 100 years.

During the golden age of Hollywood, movie studios had control over the production & distribution of their movies (which is much like today) but that system was broken up for decades due to the Paramount Decision.

Movie studios began to lose money when the power was put into the hands of the theaters who could decide the films they would run. This opened up the market for A-Movies (Blockbusters) & B-Movies (smaller & cheaper films) which created the well-known Double Feature.

Many studios lacked the resources to make A-Movies & so they would make B-movies that were purchased for a flat fee by the theaters.

Enter American International Pictures (AIP) who had no interest in the flat fees & opted to produce two B-movies & sell them as a package to the theaters. They knew that it would be tough to convince theaters to purchase these films so they did something unheard of.

Movies are a risk & because of that there is a process of buying scripts that were already written, making movies from those greenlit scripts, & commissioning posters from the finished film. American International Films took a chance & decided to reverse the process.

The AIP marketing department had a list of titles & the best one being picked, would be sent to an artist who would design the poster. Once approved, they would put the poster in front of focus groups until they found the best version.

With just a poster, they'd commission a writer to write the script based on it, & hire a filmmaker to shoot the low-budget feature. Surprisingly, this method worked & API started to crank out tons of B-Movies that were making them money.

The posters drew audiences in with epic tales that overpromised sex, action, violence, & the overall scope of movies. Many would sit for what they assumed would be an incredibly high blockbuster, only to get two very cheap B-movies that they were lured into seeing.

AIP's strategy made them into a profitable studio & those tactics reverberate into our modern day. You can't go a day without finding yourself encountering click bait. It's a marketing strategy that has proven to work & it will always be used to vie for our money & attention.