The Importance of Film Discovery
Growing Audiences for the Big Screen Experience - UKCA Conference 2024
The challenges presented by the 2024 film slate, with fewer ‘blockbuster’ titles than usual and lingering impacts on the supply of mid-market and smaller films still apparent, are well recognised. The need to understand audience preferences - even before they themselves may be aware of them – is therefore more important than ever.
In this session, Maria Sweeney from Showtime Analytics, in discussion with Sunil Suri from Reel Cinemas and Mark de Quervain from Showtime Analytics - explored ‘Film Discovery’, allowing customers to actively participate in shaping their cinema experience by creating awareness and getting their feedback on upcoming smaller film releases. Using historical data analysis they demonstrated how this can facilitate better-informed decisions about the upcoming film schedule and be used in the decision-making process for selecting movies, even to those with only a basic social media presence or communications solution for customer outreach.
Looking Back - Top 100 Releases in 2023 In UK & Ireland
Looking back at last year, 50% of the Box Office and more than half a billion pounds was generated from just 16 films
Add to that an additional 39 films that accounted for over £300 million and that made up 80% of the Box Office
It took 45 other films combined to account for just over £100 million, or 10% of the overall Box Office
This tells us that our buisness is very much reliant on the 80/20 rule, but with such a lack of these major tentpole releases in 2024, and with people on average only turning out twice a year to our screens* (most driven by the blockbusters for at least one of those visits), we have to get more creative in finding the content our audiences want to get out of their homes for. This means getting better at both how we programme, and how we communicate with our audiences
Latent Demand
If we look at the data from a previous survey Showtime Analytics ran across client sites Europe in 2022, encompassing 16k responses from cinema goers, we asked people about the films they had wanted to see at the cinema but didn’t, and gathered the following feedback on why people miss films they had wanted to see.
While many of these factors are out of our control, others can be influenced somewhat by both Marketing and Film teams, and more importantly how they work together, for example sending reminder emails that a film is leaving soon, or bringing back recently released films that performed well.
But if we drill in specifically to two of these reasons, it tells us that 12% overall relates to those people who know they missed a film they actually did want to see because it left the cinema before they even knew about it. This translates to a huge opportunity in itself to increase the conversion rate for this segment of people if they ended up going either because it played for longer or our communications were better. Bear in mind these are the people where a lot of the hard work has been done, because they’re already convinced of the film, and in many cases we’re showing it anyway in our screens or at least have the capacity to do so with the lack of blockbusters this year. We have to assume these people are not missing the major releases, but rather those mid-tier films that don’t have the Distributor marketing budgets against them, so in this case we just need more people to come. The question here is, IF we got better at letting them know about the lesser publicised films, could we reduce that 12%? With UK admissions last year tracking at circa 127m+ this would translate to over 15m+ additional admissions.
On this basis, we must therefore ask ourselves are we missing an even bigger trick by not promoting awareness of upcoming films enough, thereby not even scheduling them and not creating the opportunity for people to know they’ve missed them? After all, people don’t know what they don’t know, so if people who didn’t know about other films were to know about them, would they come more often than twice a year?
Traditional Marketing
First we need to look at how we traditionally execute a marketing campaign when dealing with a typical content slate, where we tend to market out to our audience with push messaging about the films we are playing. This can be as basic as a weekly newsletter and organic social media posts to our followers, or a more advanced data driven approach using segmentation based on comp titles and behaviours. For exhibitiors who have the investment in the enterprise level tools this can also be supported by a host of other digital marketing strategies like app push messaging, bounceback campaigns, social retargeting and Distributor sponsored campaigns.
Email Marketing Campaign Builder in Showtime Engage
The Challenge
Aside from the obvious budget limitations faced by many exhibitors, there are other challenges to consider in this approach. Showtime’s data based on a sample of 145m newsletter sends shows that the typical open rate hovers around 37%. Add to this the fact that organic social media post reach is declining, with engagement levels low at 3-5% per post, so without the budget to put behind paid targeted social media the content is not being seen by the majority of followers.
The bigger issue however is that even with the advanced Enterprise level activities we are still only pushing a message out one way, rather than giving our customers a say in the matter. So should we engage more with our audience, and instead of taking the approach of ‘Here’s What’s On,’ should we instead be asking ‘What Do You Want To See?’
Film Discovery
This brings us on to where film discovery comes in. It’s a way of giving your customers the opportunity to tell you what they want to see screened at your cinema, and is based on simple customer survey feedback that anyone can execute. The complexity in the process of how you serve it up to them will vary depending on what tools and budget you’re working with, as well as the number of sites and screens you have to programme, but essentially it’s about introducing a two-way conversation and giving our customers a choice, and a voice.
The Process
1. The first step is looking at the upcoming release calendar of mid-tier or Indie films and even Event cinema and repertory films and deciding which of this alternative content we think will do best at our sites. Exhibitors can use a combination of historical data analysis, i.e. what has performed well previously and what haven’t we tried, the experience of their schedulers, advanced predictive analysis tools, and even what your local competitors are doing so you can judge whether to compete or go in a different direction.
Showtime Benchmark
2. The next step is to create a survey that is both emailed and sent out through social media to get feedback from those not already on the database (if you are going to put spend behind a social campaign this is a good one to do it with) and a simple ticket give-away competition helps to incentivise participation.
We want to present options to our audience in an engaging way that asks them ‘How Interested Are You In Seeing This Film At The Cinema?,’ so you can give them for example a rating scale of 1-5 to choose from for a selection of different films,
You can get as creative as you like with this, YouTube Trailers being the most obvious and easily accessible choice but if there isn’t one available you can use imagery, film info, reviews from other territories or whatever assets you have available from the Distributor.
Sample Film Discovery Survey
The key benefits here are when emailing to an existing database we typically see results of a 50% open rate (higher than newsletters), while pushing out on social media gives you the opportunity to reach those who aren’t necessarily in your database and drives first party data capture. Just remember to give them an opt-in button for future comms on whatever platform you're using.
3. The third step is understanding and analysing the feedback to find which films our audience and our potential audience are most interested in seeing. Remember that you may have very different results from one site to the next, but if it’s a film you aren’t sure whether to screen or not, this helps you identify the risk factor of putting it on at certain locations.
4. Once you know which films you’re putting on, you now have your targets for who to email – for example it can be as simple as anyone who opted for 3 stars or higher gets a mail when it goes on sale.
Survey Results Analysis
In Summary
Notwithstanding the obvious lack of content from Hollywood in this year’s slate meaning we’re in a situation where we have to try new things, creating awareness and getting customers’ feedback on upcoming smaller film releases can help us in lots of ways:
Film Discovery provides valuable consumer intent data, often yielding very unexpected results
Builds relationships with our customers by opening a collaborative dialogue
Promotes awareness of otherwise unknown films
Drives new segment of marketable customers from people we either don’t have on the database or don’t know their content preferences
Aids scheduling decisions we may not have had the confidence to make without the data to back it up
As a Showtime customer the use of Showtime Sentiment for film discovery, quizzes, realtime exit polls, NPS tracking and a host of other audience engagement techniques is part of our Marketing as a Service offering, where we execute on the surveys for your circuit and provide a deep dive data analysis to gain valuable audience insights that help you grow your admissions. If you are not a Showtime customer however you can still experiement with surveys using a variety of free or low entry level priced tools like Google Forms or Survey Monkey.