INTRODUCTION

The world of media and content consumption is moving at an incredible pace. We all know how successful major VOD platforms are at harnessing advanced audience behavioural data, algorithms and technology in order to promote and produce their content. Coupled with the Covid-19 pandemic making ‘at home’ not just a choice but a necessity, cinemas faced their biggest challenge to date in 2020.  In order to stay ahead of the proliferation of streaming services, movie theatres have been forced to find ways to reinvent the cinema experience in order to attract more and more of the public. But with outdated systems traditionally at the heart of everything surrounding the cinema industry, any attempt at effecting change has always meant long drawn out implementations and exorbitant costs to keep up with. 

However, with the evolution of innovation based SaaS solutions putting all the consumer information we need at our fingertips, the question is no longer CAN we embrace this change and stay ahead, rather HOW do we bring it all together to make sure we don’t get left behind?

One region who has long led the way in cinema innovation, with major players like HOYTS, Reading and Event setting the standards for how the cinema experience should look, is Australia & New Zealand.

“Showtime first entered the Australian market in 2017, when the Grand Cinemas chain of movie theatres came on board to our operations product Insights. When Event Cinemas, the largest circuit in Australia & New Zealand joined us, we began further developing both our operations and marketing solutions and then also welcomed Reading Cinemas to the Showtime customer family.

Earlier this year, HOYTS also chose us as their data analytics provider and with the most recent addition of Limelight Cinemas we are proud to now have over 63% of cinemas in the territory using our products. This cultural desire for data analytics really positions the region as a clear leader in innovation.”

- RICHIE POWER, CEO, SHOWTIME ANALYTICS

With some of Australia & New Zealand’s exhibitor attendance levels getting to near 100% capacity during their emergence from the pandemic earlier this year, before their more recent re-entry to lock-down in July 2021, there is a learning we can all glean from this region of trailblazers as to how cinema operations, marketing and customer analytics should look.

Our panel of interviewees from Down Under shared their insights with us on how their market is performing, what they are doing to continue to go above and beyond for their customers, and how working with the Showtime suite of products is helping them to do their jobs better.

THE MARKET

Frank Perikleous, Vice President Movies at Comscore APAC & AUS

Frank is a veteran of the theatrical business for more than 30 years. He works closely with many of the region’s exhibition clients to assist in their analysis of the industry, both from a local and international viewpoint. 

Frank: “I present at most territory level conferences to give an overview from a national perspective that allows exhibitors who may not have insights to the happenings outside of their market gain valuable information on where the business is heading and how it has been performing. This is even more crucial during the past 18 months where the future is clouded with some uncertainty, but having the global view that Comscore has allows perspectives from different areas who have moved through the different stages of this pandemic.”

ADAPTING TO COVID-19 CHALLENGES

Frank: “Every single market is struggling, but the struggle comes across a number of different factors; product, streaming, levels of restricted trade, COVID lockdowns and consumer confidence. Product is always going to be King. We saw spikes in attendance when tent pole films were released and drops thereafter, but in Australia & New Zealand, the market had been operating for over 6 months when most of the world was in lock down. In fact, it was the only English-speaking territory to trade for the majority of 2020. For the latter part of 2020 the APAC region out-grossed the rest of the world and we saw China become the highest grossing territory, even surpassing the US for the first time. This was hugely brought on by the fact that the APAC region had many locally produced titles that were released when the Hollywood Studio product was rested.”

Frank: “During the Covid era, cinemas have had to adapt to survive from selling popcorn to customers at home to providing home streaming services to their database. In Australia & New Zealand we are a very savvy nation who tend to pick up and take on new technologies and service very quickly - this also occurred with the streaming services. Over the past few years several streaming services have expanded into the country, especially the Studio owned services. Like most nations when the country was in lock-down these services were a beacon of hope to lift our sanities, especially for a nation that is cultured in entertaining and experiencing an outdoor lifestyle. Though that lifestyle factor meant many wanted to get out and return to experiencing that shared occurrence and involvement, this was evident when blockbusters like Godzilla v Kong, Peter Rabbit 2 and Fast & Furious 9: The Fast Saga opened on our screens, and we saw the box office during those opening weeks hit pre-Covid numbers. This does tell us that the introduction of a new technology in delivering the same medium will co-exist, it may cause some consolidation, but it will not destroy the exhibition business.”

MARKET INNOVATION

Frank: “Australia & New Zealand has always been a leading territory with innovation from the exhibition sector. We were a leading market to implement the premium cinema experience with the introduction of the Gold Class cinemas in 1997, an intimate cinema with luxury reclining seats and waiter service allowing customers to enjoy in-theatre food and drinks including alcohol.

Next came the introduction of Premium Large Format theatres offering massive screens in excess of 20 meters wide, and highest quality of sound system like THX and Dolby Atmos, through to having some of the most connected customers with extensive loyalty programs offering customers a unique experience to keep in touch with the offerings from their favourite cinemas chains, as well as keeping them up to date on what's on and when.

Australia & New Zealand was the first market to offer a green approach to the 3-D boom (back in 2008), when they introduced a marketing campaign (jointly promoted by exhibitors) that encouraged customers to hold onto their 3-D glasses and reuse them on their next visit. This saw a massive reduction in the plastic waste of glasses which were originally seen as a once use item.

Whilst unique offerings are available across the globe, Australia & New Zealand also maintains a strong refreshment offering with many chains updating their theatres with customer friendly self-service concession areas offering a lot more than just popcorn and candy, as well as the introduction of whole cinema reclining seats for the added level in customer comfort.”

“Australia & New Zealand has always been a leading territory with innovation from the exhibition sector…“

- FRANK PERIKLEOUS, VP MOVIES, COMSCORE APAC & AUS

“Because of the change in the industry everyone is focusing on increasing yield rather than admissions. We use Showtime to help us do this.”

- MATT DELLA VEDORA, GENERAL MANAGER FINANCE & ACCOUNTING AUS, EVENT ENTERTAINMENT

HAVING THE RIGHT TOOLS

Of course in order to continue this level of innovation the Exhibitor community need the right tools at their fingertips. HOYTS, Reading and Event are 3 of the major exhibitors who all employ a data driven approach to how they operate.

HOYTS Australia and New Zealand owns and operates over 50 cinemas with over 400 screens and more than 50,000 seats.

Reading Entertainment own and operate 25 cinemas in Australia and 9 in New Zealand, with their parent company Reading International operating an additional 27 locations across the United States.

Event Hospitality & Entertainment own the largest cinema circuit in Australia and New Zealand with over 70 sites in the region and over 140 worldwide.

As market leaders, they all share a data driven approach to how they operate using a combination of the Showtime suite of products to quickly and easily analyse their data, make informed decisions to improve their customer experience and ultimately grow their businesses.

WHY SHOWTIME

Brad: When we began evaluating the Showtime Analytics solutions we knew we wanted to achieve 3 main goals:

1. We wanted access to better customer analytics, better reporting, and to be more informed on customer behaviour, all with the view to ultimately servicing our customers as best we can. There are a number of loyalty and customer engagement platforms out there that offer basic insights, but being quite mature in how we run our loyalty and rewards programmes meant our new solution needed to offer us this at a comparable level.  We are heavily research driven and what that told us is that customers are all largely focused on how to get ticket-based loyalty rewards. But we wanted to look at other opportunities that could satisfy our customers outside of ticket based offers– reward features such as free or discounted food and beverage, bonus points, Qantas Frequent Flyer points, and other surprise and delight rewards.
   
   
   

2. We also wanted to look at how we communicate with our customers. Traditionally we had used just email – we wanted to expand on other mechanisms we could use – SMS, push notifications, social media – whatever we needed to be able to engage with our customers better, and on the platforms that they are on.
   
   
   

3. Understanding real-time customer analytics and behaviour was an area we felt we were still somewhat blind on. We needed real-time data on customer behaviour to allow us to make informed decisions on offers, responses, targeting metrics or campaigns we were running.”
   
   
   
   

Brad: When we were evaluating our new solution we had several submissions from providers that met a lot of our requirements, but the cost and capability variations from the different offerings was vast. What we saw with Showtime was a robust platform from a communication and email builder perspective in Engage, and good insight into customer data analytics and segmentation with Insights. But we also saw an opportunity for that to improve from a cinema and business insight opportunity that would align with our specific needs. We spotted some new opportunities to complement our own reporting tools that we could use further down the track with our front-line crew and we engaged with Showtime to understand how we could make that happen.

“What we saw with Showtime was a robust platform from a communication and email builder perspective in Engage, and good insight into customer data analytics and segmentation with Insights.”

- BRAD EATON, GENERAL MANAGER CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT, HOYTS

BRINGING THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE VISION TO LIFE

Stephanie: “Because we are an advanced organisation in terms of how we work with data we need certain additional functionalities that weren’t available out of the box with the Showtime platform. We have worked heavily and closely with the team on the product development road map since we launched the platform earlier this year, which they have been very responsive to. We meet weekly with the team for updates and a lot of those added capabilities we looked for have been delivered already.”

The advantages of what Showtime Insights allows us to do is pull all those data points together in a meaningful way without having to manually pull from a database, and then tie that information back into customer groups we can effectively communicate with via Showtime Engage.

Showtime Engage is a really visual, user-friendly way to interrogate the data and make decisions, be that around whether we need to send a tactical offer to stimulate admissions to a particular movie ,or whether it’s to allow us to plan more strategically for the longer term.

“Showtime Insights allows us to pull all our data points together in a meaningful way without having to manually pull from a database, and then tie that information back into customer groups we can effectively communicate with via Showtime Engage. It’s a really visual, user-friendly way to interrogate the data and make decisions.”

- STEPHANIE MILLS, DIRECTOR SALES, MARKETING & CONTENT, HOYTS

Ben: “We have always tried to be fluid in our approach so as to bring the customer what they want. We’ve used data driven solutions for nearly 12 years. We listen to what our customers are asking for and proactively seek out solutions that allow us to deliver. That’s how our relationship with Showtime came about and the system works so well because it gives us the data we need to be able to make decisions. This is the first time we’ve had a fully integrated system that ties everything together. Instead of using 4 different solutions we can easily see a snapshot of everything in one place.”

“We listen to what our customers are asking for and proactively seek out solutions that allow us to deliver. That’s how our relationship with Showtime came about and the system works so well because it gives us the data we need to be able to make decisions. It’s very simple and intuitive to use.”

- BEN DEIGHTON, GENERAL MANAGER - MARKETING AUS & NZ, READING CINEMAS

Ben: “For anyone starting out they can rest assured that Showtime will hold their hand and guide them through from top level right down to the detail. We actually worked very closely with Showtime to determine what we need out of the box and they built that into the product for us, so it was exciting to be able to actually help shape the future of the product. We had used similar platforms to Showtime Engage to do email marketing in the past so we were very quick to pick it up but for anyone who is new to this the system is very simple and intuitive to use.”

BY CINEMA PEOPLE, FOR CINEMA PEOPLE

Matt: “Our IT dept brought it to us originally which was a big tick - it was easy for them to install. Because Showtime is a cinema based product, if you were to bring in a a generic BI product you then have to pay alot to consolidate and get the data you want, slice and dice it through development etc, but Showtime already had that knowledge, they had the feed from IBOE, they knew the key metrics across the cinema industry - avg ticket price, spend per head etc, so it just made it so much easier than starting from scratch with a 3rd party that didn’t have similar experience of the industry.”

Ben: “It’s important to move with the times as customers expect a more curated approach these days. For anyone starting out they can rest assured that Showtime will hold their hand and guide them through from top level right down to the detail. We actually worked very closely with Showtime to determine what we need out of the box and they built that into the product for us, so it was exciting to be able to actually help shape the future of the product. We had used similar platforms to Showtime Engage to do email marketing in the past so we were very quick to pick it up but for anyone who is new to this the system is very simple and intuitive to use.”

“Showtime had the data knowledge, they knew the key metrics across the cinema industry…it just made it so much easier than starting from scratch.”

- MATT DELLA VEDORA, GENERAL MANAGER FINANCE & ACCOUNTING AUS, EVENT ENTERTAINMENT

GETTING STARTED WITH DATA

As HOYTS, Reading and Event are all advanced in their data and innovation journeys, we asked them what the smaller circuits could do to begin leveraging the tools that are now available to them.

STARTING SMALL

Ben: “For the indie cinemas I think the ability to instantly see the actual dollar value against their campaigns, which they would never have been able to do before, would be particularly beneficial. There has historically been a reluctance to spend on marketing because they can’t see their return but with Showtime Engage they can see straight away that ‘ok you’re going to sell 200 tickets if you do this, or that.’ '“

Stephanie: “To see meaningful results you don’t need to boil the ocean. If you have insights that validate what you’re doing, or challenge what you’re doing, suddenly you have a lot more freedom to better control your business. If you see an offer that you’ve put out that no one is taking up, that’s insight you didn’t have before. Or starting to see different customer types: some are motivated by price, others aren’t and just want information on upcoming content, so getting insights into how those customer groups behave allows you to understand your base better and determine what it is you want to focus on. Be it increasing frequency or increasing spend at the candy bar, having that information at hand at least lets you start to measure the impact of what it is you’re doing, rather than putting several offers in market and not knowing what’s actually driving your results.”

“To see meaningful results you don’t need to boil the ocean. If you have insights that validate what you’re doing, or challenge what you’re doing, suddenly you have a lot more freedom to better control your business. “

- STEPHANIE MILLS, DIRECTOR SALES, MARKETING & CONTENT, HOYTS

FOCUS ON WHAT YOU CAN CONTROL

Matt: “We’re always looking at ways we can continue to use Showtime to improve and we’ve done that recently with our payroll data. The big focus, the key cost for us that we can control is our payroll and the cinema managers can now get real live data to see who they’ve got rostered against what admissions look like, whether they need to pull it up or down, and having this capability is getting them really excited.”

AND… SCENE

For more information about our platform and the Showtime Analytics products, get in touch with us today.