DAISY WREN, MERLIN CINEMAS UK

Marketing Manager for Merlin Cinemas UK, Daisy Wren talks about her experience with Showtime Analytics product Engage

Merlin Cinemas are an independent cinema chain in the UK, doing quite a lot.

With 16 cinemas (and counting) and a live theatre, Group Marketing Manager, Daisy Wren has a lot on her plate. Coming up through the business since graduating, she is now involved in all aspects of the marketing activity including management of the website. 

After seeing the Showtime team speaking at a UKCA conference on big data over 2.5 years ago, Daisy “caught the bug” and jumped at the chance to join the pilot of our Engage product. She’s since become a “Super User”, actively using the software most days. We took the opportunity to catch up with Daisy about her experience to date.

UNCOVERING OUR CUSTOMERS

Daisy: We didn’t have much in place before Engage and that was something I was quite keen to look at. Specifically trying to segment our audience - we have a membership database that was not being utilised, so previous to having the Engage platform there was no way for us to identify customers at all. It was all hidden in a database within a database. Engage has enabled us to tap into that. Some of these members have been there for ten to fifteen years but their behaviour has never been used to offer them things that they want to hear about. 

We had been using MailChimp for many years previous to my time in this role but only for newsletter campaigns, never for anything specific. It was all just quite literally, a list and it didn’t offer very much scope to add anything extra. Part of what I have been working on over the past couple of years was trying to add content into that communication stream to try and increase sales in different areas but that is hard to do when there is no infrastructure in place to do that. 

It was a bit like guesswork and that’s something I try to hammer home with the team, our Director has a great track record of trusting his gut and really going with it and that has paid off. We will have been operating for 30 years, starting next year and he has done it largely on his own. We’re at the point now where we can pair that intuition with some analytical data in terms of who’s coming to the cinema, what they’re coming to see and how often, that’s really valuable for us.

CRAIG MAY, MERLIN CINEMAS UK

Craig May, Film Programmer & Co-Director, Merlin Cinemas UK talks about his experience with The Showtime Platform and Insights Product.

Craig May started his career with Merlin Cinemas down in the Savoy in Penzance when he was just 16 years old. In traditional Merlin fashion, Director Geoff recruited from within the company allowing Craig to rise up through the ranks over the years. For almost two years now, Craig has taken the reigns for film programming and booking, as well as more recently becoming a company Director to give his expertise to some of the bigger projects too.

With his new role, time is more precious than ever for Craig. He filled us in about his experience of working with Showtime, the products and how he and his team now save themselves a lot of time!

INITIATING AUTOMATION

Craig: Before Insights, we weren’t using any automated systems. The information existed within the POS reporting tool but it was incredibly time consuming trying to compare films or looking back through different times in the year. We are all extremely busy here so I only used it when absolutely necessary but it wasn’t user-friendly enough to become part of my daily routine. Since working with Showtime, the biggest thing for me is having instant access to all of that information. I can easily drill down into it, which was near impossible previously.

It was all very clunky, not seamless at all. It certainly didn’t help with the film programming like it currently does with Insights.

VERY, VERY USER-FRIENDLY

Craig: For anyone who is even slightly IT literate, the product is easy to navigate even without the helpful training. If you drop the guys a quick email or even use the in-product instant messenger, they come back almost instantly with an answer. There is never an issue. I find it very, very user-friendly.

The product designers have made it so it’s very difficult to break. I told Alex, who runs our weekly reports, to just jump in and have a play around with it when we first got our hands on the product. In a couple of hours, he had a range of reports and was so excited that he could include them immediately in our weekly breakdown for our sites. 

He now sends a really thorough report after every weekend with a complete overview - the admissions compared to last week, what the box office revenue is, what the kiosk spend per head was. It’s extremely useful to the sites, they can see how they’re comparing against other sites, where they’re doing well, what areas they need to work on, all laid out in one place.

WE KNOW WHERE WE’RE AT

Craig: We have seen an increase in our KPIs. The Showtime products have certainly helped the managers on a weekly basis, know exactly where they’re at and they can tweak their operation at site level to work on their variants. We also used to compare all our sites together despite some of them having one screen and another having six, which could be quite demoralising for the smaller ones. Working with Darren in Showtime, Alex came up with “leagues” so each site is now comparable to others with the same capabilities. That was something Alex identified and flagged with Showtime saying, “that would be really good if we could do that” and Darren came back pretty quickly saying “yep that won’t be a problem”. It’s the same with everything they’ve done for us, as soon as you give them something, they’ll go away and tell you if they can do it. It’s usually actioned very quickly which is great.