Aamir Khan goes to great lengths to promote his films. This trend might have very well started 25 years ago when a teaser campaign prior to the announcement of Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (1988) caught the interest of many.

Qayamat se Qayamat Tak (QSQT) ran a teaser ad campaign to promote the film. It was an outdoor teaser campaign with question headline as the teaser element. It started with the first teaser ad screaming ‘Who is Aamir Khan?’ A nameless faceless ad, followed by a spate of teasers on Aamir, who was an unknown entity back then.

The final revealer ad opened the mystery with full blown launch poster of QSQT with its release date and caption reading introducing Aamir Khan as the lead actor.” [Source – PDF]

Excerpt from Everybody Wants a Hit: 10 Mantras of Success in Bollywood Cinema, by Derek Bose.

At times a filmmaker like Mansoor Khan comes up with a tag line on billboards, “Who is Aamir Khan?” – this when nobody knew the star and the director was making his debut with Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak in 1986. The answer to that was not another billboard: “Ask the girl next door!” The campaign caught on so fast that by the time Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak hit the screen, Aamir was a household name and the film, needless to mention, became a runaway hit. It is another matter that Aamir had appeared in two film earlier – Aditya Bhattacharya’s Raakh and Ketan Mehta’s Holi.

Bose may have got the year of release wrong.

2013 year marks the 25th year since the release of the landmark film that brought back melody to Hindi cinema.

(This post is a part of the 100 Years of Indian Cinema series on Cutting the Chai)