Since the beginning of motion pictures, cinema advertising has been part of the moviegoing experience, a brand building medium for marketers to reach audiences where they are (in this case at the movie theater).
Fast forward to today, options for advertisers have grown exponentially and at the same time, consumption has become fragmented with marketers laser focused on ROI. As the media landscape expanded, the options for marketers seeking new and varied KPI’s multiplied as did the platforms – social, digital, CTV, broadcast/cable and streaming – and the ability to measure the impact of media grew.
The evolving media landscape is fraught with challenges. As cord cutting continues to grow, streaming lacks scale, ad fraud, bots rampant and consumer privacy remains front and center. Meanwhile marketers and agencies are under tremendous pressure to prove out value and increasingly focused on ROI, looking to balance brand building with performance marketing needs.
Just ten years ago, 70% of all marketing dollars were dedicated brand building investments which greatly benefited the cinema advertising rationale. Today, however, only 30% of ad dollars go to these same type of brand building investments. That remaining 70% is now directed to performance based media buys.
So where did Cinema sit in this ecosystem? While marketers understood the movie audience was lean in, highly engaged and positively predisposed to receiving messages in an unskippable format, the ability to truly identify the audience and measure attribution across categories and KPIs was limited. And as cross platform video options with measurability increasingly became an attractive buy for marketers seeking tangible returns on their investments, cinema advertising remained bucketed as an upper funnel solution and part of the out-of-home landscape rather than part of the premium video marketing ecosystem.