Film audiences resisted blatant ads since cinema's earliest days. The advertising film arose as a movie that masqueraded as entertainment or instruction to achieve its goals. Martin L. Johnson reveals the evasive history of advertising films through the actions of individuals, corporate sponsors and producers, and government agencies and non-profits that made, circulated, and showed them. An advertising film placed promotional content into movies presented as travelogues, educational shorts, industrial films, or scenes of daily life. Business and government, meanwhile, built systems to distribute the films to unsuspecting audiences in schools, churches, civic groups, and universities. Through experimentation, corporations honed sophisticated tools of persuasion that used moving images to influence the public. What they learned reshaped notions of storytelling, technology, and corporate communication while setting the stage for advertising's symbiotic relationship with television.

Persuasive and expert, Commercial Cinema illuminates the changing fortunes and eventual fate of a film genre in disguise.