Showtime Analytics Nominated For Two Awards With The Analytics Institute Of Ireland
The Showtime team have been shortlisted for Analytics SME Of The Year Award and the Customer Insights Award, by the Professional Membership Organisation for the Data Science and Analytics Sector, The Analytics Institute of Ireland.
This is basically the equivalent of the Oscars for us data nerds, and we couldn’t be more excited. When our Chief Communications Officer Maria Sweeney saw the entry application on LinkedIn she immediately sent it to two of our co-founders Jolyon Spurling, Chief Product Officer, and Richie Power, Chief Executive Officer, with a very short pitch: “We are entering this.”
After some back and forth with the couple of bashful Irish lads, Joe and Richie agreed to throwing Showtime’s hat in the ring. They were very much agreed that the wider team were entitled to a shot at the proper recognition we knew they deserved (even if our ship’s captains are too modest for their own good).
The Analytics SME Of The Year Award ‘recognises a Small to Medium Enterprise that has demonstrated both technological innovation and business acumen to succeed in a competitive marketplace.’
Showtime have developed a number of unique technology innovations:
Our reporting platform is an AWS SaaS offering built in conjunction with Deloitte and Amazon, using a unique combination of S3, EMR and Spark to create a real-time collection, storage and data visualisation solution.
Having previously sold and deployed typical business intelligence software such as Tableau, Qlikview and Microsoft in our consultancy careers prior to founding Showtime, we understood the major challenges of using typical off the shelf BI tools,
such as expensive per user licence models, thereby hindering the adoption culturally within the organisation.
Showtime created our own Component Design System to build Front End Data visualisations using REACT as our coding language. This enabled Showtime to create what we refer to as our “Mass User Licensing Model” whereby our SaaS pricing is a single fee for the client organisation with unlimited user access to the end products. This has been a huge selling point in winning major client contracts and achieving true customer adoption.Our Marketing Engage Product has 3 key technology innovations:
Firstly we created our customer data platform a real-time single customer view / behavioural data model to identify and segment movie goers based on their transaction history with the cinema chains we service. Realtime SCV data modelling has been a revolution within the industry.
Secondly, instead of licencing expensive marketing engagement platforms such as Mailchimp, we have built our own proprietary email marketing software, enabling us to send campaigns to segments created from our SCV and track typical marketing success KPIs.
Thirdly, as we are linked to the source systems, we can also provide cinema chains with a true return on investment analytics capability whereby we know exactly which customers in a marketing campaign convert against the targeted outcome and what uplift is being generated on each and every campaign.
Showtime have become the industry standard in the Cinema Industry, with over 2000 cinema chains worldwide using our products, managing over 39m customer records on our data platform and sending close to half a billion emails a year through our marketing engine.
The Customer Insights Award category ‘recognises organisations that have successfully developed customer insight in an innovative way thereby delivering a clear business impact . This includes projects that use analytics and data-driven approaches to gain insight into customer behaviour and/or preferences.’
Most of the customers Showtime began working with were using traditional email marketing tools - newsletter sign-ups or loyalty programme members uploaded to Mailchimp or another disconnected email marketing tool. Without the integration to their POS they were limited to demographic segmentation for campaigns, or in many cases no segmentation and just a one size fits all approach, and no analysis of how their campaigns were performing in terms of ROI.
We wanted to build an easy to use marketing tool with an intuitive front end design that pulled in all of a cinema’s customer POS transactional data and merged it with loyalty members and web bookers to track their behaviour, and provide it to marketers as a single customer view they could act from.
Showtime Engage was developed and launched in 2017 and finally gave cinema marketers the power to segment groups of customers based on shared behaviours, so they could target specific audiences to buy tickets for a certain movie at a certain time of the day, that had the actors or directors that they most liked going to see, or retail items based on past behaviour. With the easy to use campaign builder and dynamic content capabilities marketers can make sure that customers are receiving only the available showtimes that apply to their preferred cinema site, with the movie poster images within the email being based on the films they are most likely to watch. They can also save time by scheduling automated recurring campaigns for customers across email, SMS, push app notifications or social re-targeting based on pre-set behaviour criteria.
Based on discussions with customers we then developed a deeper Customer Analytics solution that took the concept of a single customer view, and applied it to the entire customer base - to understand from the top down the behaviours around who is visiting more or less, who they are losing and who they are gaining, and created a simple way they could analyse their entire customer base dynamically in real time.
Some of them had performed a one off loyalty programme analysis through data consultants using Tableau dashboards, Power BI or even Powerpoint visualisations to try and understand if these programmes were working or not, but because it was a manual process it was based on historical data, and by the time the project had been completed the data was no longer relevant. They were looking for a way to do it in realtime to have an immediate view of the consequences of their marketing actions and how to adapt their strategies.
Recency Frequency Monetary (RFM) is a proven marketing model for many ecommerce businesses, but without a dedicated software solution outside of this industry there was no way for cinemas to perform this analysis. Using our Customer Analytics solution cinema circuits can now record each customer’s Recency Frequency Monetary (RFM) score and other attributes’ movements on a daily basis - to see how the model is changing over time, how customers move and whether their scores improve or worsen. This then allows them to gauge how their strategies are working, how many new customers they need each month to compensate for the increased customer churn as a result of closures and capacity restrictions during Covid, how to maximise who is in their base, or how they might need to change how they target customers. They can then seamlessly tie in the data to use with either Showtime Engage or any other digital marketing tools they are using.
Winners will be announced at the Analytics Institute of Ireland Gala Dinner on Thursday June 16th. We’re up against some stiff competition so wish us luck!
