Cinema Advertising Rakes in the Ad Revenue

The cinema industry has high hopes for the future; and rightfully so with a 13% increase of ad revenue in 2015, topping $700 million for the first time.

The Cinema Advertising Council (CAC) recognizes the consistency of movie-goers. In fact, there have been at least 1.25 billion movie tickets purchased every year for the past 22 years! Katy Loria, CAC President and Chairman, notes that, “it [cinema advertising] delivers millennial audiences whose consumption habits compared with past generations are different and elusive… except for movies.”

Theater ads have high viewability in front of captive audiences, as well as the ability to target specific demographic and geographic consumers.

In addition to the ordinary cinema ad on the big screen, with the development of new data and technology, advertisers are beginning to connect brands with consumers before, during, and after the movie experience.

While cinema advertising is growing nationwide, the strongest area of growth is amongst national and regional brands. Two hundred fifteen new brands jumped on the cinema bandwagon last year. Overall, national and regional brands make up 77% of cinema ad revenue. 

Advertisements on the Big Screen Verses the Small Screen

No one reading this blog would be surprised if I stated that people watch television shows on multiple devices. A statement that might intrigue you is that advertisements do not settle in with consumers in the same way across all devices.

Nielsen commissioned a study to be carried out by Hub Entertainment Research to measure how people watched the same five shows and their ability to recall advertisements. Viewers watched the shows: Bones, Family Guy, The Big Bang Theory, Survivor, and Family Feud across televisions, tablets, smartphones, and computers.

After the shows had been viewed, Hub Entertainment Research conducted 15-minute interviews and determined that those watching on televisions had the highest ad-recall percentage at 62, followed by tablets (47%), smartphones (46%) and computers (45%).

Hub also measured “attentiveness” using a scale of 1-10 where 29% of television viewers ranked advertisements in the 8-10 range.

Conclusions were drawn that the study had two primary factors: the size of the viewing screen and the role of multitasking when watching the shows. A mere 7-11% of multitasking was related to the brands featured in ads shown.

Peter Fondulas from Hub Entertainment Research puts it this way, “The more likely culprit for lower ad engagement on smaller screens is an ad delivery approach that doesn’t align well with the expectations, and viewing situations, of consumers watching on mobile devices.”

Simply put, viewers expect to see advertisements on television, that’s all we’ve ever known. Yet, when it comes to viewing video on alternative devices, viewers are less accommodating and accepting of these interruptions.

Where and When to Reach Your Customers

We all know that advertising is a way to reach customers and hopefully impact their opinions, actions, and decisions in a positive way. But what is the best way to impact customers before they make a purchase decision? Starcom Mediavest Group dove deep into researching customer activity prior to purchases to discover just that.

Through SMG’s research, they found that customers are highly impacted at all stages of the decision making process through audio and out of home.

From the above graph, you can see the correlation between purchase activity and media usage. Interestingly, each category affects consumers the most at the “consider” and “decide” levels except for television and digital video which highly affect consumers at the purchase point.

Taking a deeper look into the industry’s hot-topic generation, the Millennials (ages 18-34), SMG found that trends tend to be relatively similar. By analyzing the graph below, we can see that Millennials tend to react in a similar way when compared to non-millennial adults.

Surprisingly, television and digital video are the only media outlets where Millennials correlate at a higher level than adults 18+.  Search and social, while being incredibly popular with Millennials, have a correlation that fails to outperform that of the adult group.

For advertisers looking to influence their target audience in a way that will cause them to consider, decide, and purchase a product or service, this information is incredibly relevant and might require some re-strategizing to reach consumers in the most effective manner.