The SCREENS.tv Blog

Silver screen? More like gold (14)

 

To intermittently-sunny Brixton in south London today, wearing my other hat as an independent film exhibitor, for a conference with the inevitably punning title Independents' Day.

The news for Britain's cinema-exhibition sector is...well, let's put it this way: it's not as gloomy as it is for many of our mainstream media. Audiences are way way up on the grim days of the 1970s and 1980s, and ad revenue, while not exactly soaring Internet-style, is at least showing growth in good years. This year the annual growth rate should be more or less on a par with outdoor's, in fact.

And as well as the familiar pre-show reel, there's another aspect of cinema advertising that's attracting much interest: place-based promotions, including foyer screens. The digital side of this is not a huge market yet, but it can only be expected to grow as the move to digital projection leads cinemas to install more infrastructure, and as acceptance of screen media in general grows.

But the really nice thing about these ad opportunities is the audience. Not only is it younger and more affluent than the population as a whole, but it's in a great mood: the top five traits of cinema identified by audiences surveyed for the 2008 Film Audience Measurement and Evaluation survey were "glamorous", "clever", "trendy", "upmarket" and "sexy". Many marketers would kill for brand associations like those.

What's more, the same survey showed that not only do 85 percent of cinema visitors usually watch the (big-screen) advertisements, and a full half discuss them afterwards, they also spend an average of 18 minutes in the building but not in the auditorium itself - primarily, of course, in the foyer, refreshment, or cafe/bar areas.

The audience loves the environment, is in the mood to watch ads (very likely encouraged in this by the extremely high creative values and often intriguingly wacky concepts of British cinema advertising)....and hangs around for nearly 20 minutes. What better recipe for a screen-media location? 

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