Prior to 1954, the growing domestic film industry in Iran did not use film trailers to advertise their productions prior to theatrical release. Despite dissent from his producer, Armenian-Iranian filmmaker Samuel Khachikian crafted his own trailer for the release of the first film he both wrote and directed A Girl from Shiraz (1954). With the film far exceeding the popularity of his previous project, Khachikian continued to expand his marketing methods to newspapers, trade publications, and marquee posters, relying on images rather than text alone to entice audiences, and seeking out international platforms to display his films. This paper examines the history of film marketing in Iranian popular cinema, particularly through the implementation of film trailers and publicity campaigns. I argue that through the pioneering marketing strategies of film industry figures within ethnic minority communities, domestic Iranian commercial films were able to compete against American and European features and win over audiences across multiple social classes. Historians of Iranian cinema have focused on the commercial cinema of the 1940s-1970s as a form of entertainment primarily driven by working class tastes and amateur and shoddy production values. This period’s commercial films were exhibited, they state, in lower-tier theaters for lower class audiences and portrayed themes and narratives in line with working class ideals. The resulting reputation of Iranian commercial cinema as a low culture phenomenon obscures the varied marketing techniques filmmakers and studio owners were employing to distribute and exhibit their films to a diverse audience that cut across all social classes in all theater tiers and could effectively compete against foreign features. This project draws on historical case studies of filmmakers and studio executives, including Khachikian, to emphasize the parallel advertising and lobbying efforts of expanding the Iranian commercial film market, both in Iran and within neighboring countries. The work of minority figures to focus additional attention on marketing through ads and greater involvement of minority actors both marked a new step towards industrialization that was not based solely on film production and ensured the popularity of this cinema throughout Iran and abroad, the upper and lower classes, and multiple ethnic communities. This project situates the production of the film trailer as a pivotal moment of the expansion of industry methods through which filmmaking in Iran could professionalize and diversify.