It’s been a long road to recovery for theater owners since reopening their screens following the Covid-19 pandemic. Shorter exclusivity windows and fewer theatrical releases have contributed to an overall box office decline, putting pressure on operators to find revenue from every possible area. Cinema advertising has been an invaluable partner in this effort, connecting brands with moviegoing audiences at a benefit for all parties involved. While annual box office returns remain billions of dollars away from prepandemic levels, cinema advertising’s value proposition in recent years has increased because of the structural changes across the media ecosystem.
According to Nielsen, “traditional” TV viewership, a metric comprised of broadcast and cable television providers, accounts for around half of television usage across all platforms in May 2024. Meanwhile, streaming represented nearly 40 percent of viewership during that same period. Advertising remains the sector most affected by this trend, with streaming unable to provide the attention, viewership, or recall brands used to rely upon. The decline of traditional TV advertising has helped emphasize cinema advertising as the ideal home for video advertising. In the streaming business, brands often have less than 15 seconds to capture viewers’ attention before they can skip an ad. At the cinema, brands can be reassured of a highly engaged captive audience they can target by title, genre, region, and even showtime, providing a unique and effective platform for their advertising needs.
“If you look at significant cultural moments driven by media, they don’t exist as they used to,” says Mike Rosen, CRO of National CineMedia (NCM). “You don’t see linear television delivering those moments outside a handful of live sporting events. We no longer have that Thursday night sitcom everyone talks about on Friday morning. Cinema is the only place where that exists today. Marketers know that when Deadpool & Wolverine comes out, tens of millions of people will share that experience over 72 hours in its opening weekend.”
Viewers’ emotional connection with a highly-anticipated new film has proven to be one of the most appealing factors for brands to buy into cinema advertising in recent years. According to Amy Tunick, CMO of NCM, her firm sold out its ad inventory for the first four weeks of the theatrical run of Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour within weeks of the film’s announcement. NCM “Taylor-ized” (Tunick’s pun, not ours) its own specialized preshow for The Eras Tour, recognizing the title’s central role in the brand’s decision to advertise. The entire preshow experience was designed to deliver specific marketing messages tied to that particular film, an increasingly common trend for major releases.
Commentaires