Some Orange County advertisers are glad that movie theaters don’t come equipped with remote controls.
With movie ticket sales up 12% so far
this year from the same period in 2008, and attendance up 11.5%, many local ad-vertisers and their ad agencies are looking to moviegoers as a captive audience. Better yet, there’s no fast forwarding or channel surfing.
“We have a pretty aggressive outreach in movie theaters to help combat the fact there are so many countermeasures to watching commercials on TV,” said Moe Durand, manager of product communications at Cypress-based auto seller Mitsubishi Motors North America Inc.
There’s an added plus in that movie attendance actually is growing during the recession.
“In a down economy, people have been heading to the movies more often,” said Francine Harsini, director of advertising at Mitsubishi. “Coupled with the summer blockbusters, these ads get maximum coverage.”
Of course, ads before movies aren’t new. But they are for some advertisers.
Irvine-based Boost Mobile LLC, the prepaid division of Overland Park, Kan.-based Sprint Nextel Corp., started its first national cinema campaign last week with spots featuring IndyCar Series driver Danica Patrick that played before “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.”
“Coupled with Transformers, we felt it was the perfect outlet to reach an engaged crowd that can’t channel surf,” said Peiti Feng, manager of media and advertising at Boost.
Other advertisers like movie spots for the same reason.
“With TV being so fragmented, I can run a cinema spot and reach virtually everybody that goes to any kind of movie,” said Tim Chaney, marketing director at Irvine’s Kia Motors America Inc.
Kia, part of South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Co., ran what it called a successful ad before movies featuring its midsize sport utility vehicle Soul.
The Soul ad, which featured hamsters rocking out in a Soul auto, prompted 61% of people surveyed to say they would go online to find out more information about Kia and the Soul, according to the company’s Chaney.
“That is staggeringly high number for a car,” he said. The ad “outperformed in the automotive category in cinema advertising in general, but in other categories as well.”
Kia started dabbling in cinema advertising in 2005 with its Sportage midsize sports utility vehicle, followed by the Rondo wagon in 2007 and the Borrego SUV in 2008.
“We’ve done it five times now, primarily for vehicle launches over the last few years,” Chaney said.
Kia was able to track its ad’s effectiveness through the top cinema advertising agencies in the nation,New York-based Screenvision Cinema Network LLC and Centennial, Colo.-based National CineMedia Inc.
The two companies work with about 80% of the theaters in the U.S. including Orange County’s Edwards Theatres Circuit Inc., part of Regal Entertainment Group. Both have been working to persuade advertisers to move some of their TV budgets to cinema by trying to create reliable measurements of the effectiveness of movie theater spots.
“Cinema is one of the few that as an industry is trumpeting very strong data and results and being very aggressive to solicit this form of advertising,” Chaney said.
“I was guaranteed 60 million viewers and moviegoers for the Soul buy,” he said. “And if I hadn’t reached that for whatever reason, they gave me make goods.”
The cinema ad industry was up 5.8% to $571.4 million in 2008, marking a slight cooling from its fast-paced growth of 2007.
The growth stands out in a year when total advertising spending fell 2.6%, according to New York-based Cinema Advertising Council.
Cinema advertising still is a relatively small part of total ad dollars, representing just 0.5% of the total $136 billion spent in 2008, according to New York-based Nielsen Media Research Inc., part of Nielsen Co.
“The big selling points of cinema include a captive audience that is generally in a good frame of mind coming in to be entertained, a huge screen with great sound and a less cluttered ad environment,” Chaney said.
Both Boost and Kia launched their campaigns in conjunction with a national TV campaign with similar, albeit shorter, commercials.
“It’s all part of the overall media mix strategy,” Boost’s Feng said.
