Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Pre-Show Advertising

This is topic Pre-Show Advertising in forum Ground Level at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Justin West (Member # 920) on 08-17-2018, 05:05 PM:

I am looking into pre-show advertising, and I am curious as to what third-party companies like Parrot, 1 Better, and Screenvision (e.g.) pay a theatre (ballpark-number) to run their reel of ads each week. If you use (or formerly used) such third-parties to add a few extra bucks into your coffers, how does it compare to doing it yourself (finding advertisers, creating the ads, billing, collecting and so on)? With digital cinema and computer programs that allow one with basic skills to create at least passable advertisements for on-screen use, I figure there are probably some on this list who have had experience in both routes to gaining advertisers' dollars off pre-show screen time. I think what I am asking about would generally apply to local accounts but I would also be curious as to what Screenvision might pay for national ads. Thank you for any input! [Smile]

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 08-17-2018, 06:55 PM:

How much they pay usually depends on a lot of factors like your location and the amount of traffic you receive. So you really need to contact them for what they have in offer for you.

Don't underestimate the amount of efforts it takes to do this yourselves. Besides marketing yourself to the right customers, you also often end up being the advertising agency yourself. Before you know, you're essentially editing their ads, because all they know is how to send you an ugly looking PowerPoint or maybe even just an e-mail with 3 lines of text (if you're "lucky", it will include some utterly ugly artwork and their logo in JPG format the size of a stamp. [Wink]

Also, billing and collecting from small businesses will take more efforts than you probably want to admit. You definitely need to follow up on them closely if you want to get your money...

I've done some work for some narrow casting companies in the past, where local advertisers were allowed to advertise on screens withing their local community. So I've seen and heard all those horror stories from pretty close.

I've seen some cinemas in a certain region bonding together and running their own advertisement programs shared among multiple cinemas. This has the added advantage of scale for both the exhibitors and the advertisers. Maybe that's an avenue you could try to discover.

Posted by Geoff Jones (Member # 3668) on 08-17-2018, 08:35 PM:

Have you thought about promoting your lack of pre-show ads to see if that might increase business?

"At Justin Cinemas we won't barrage you with commercials!

Find your seat and enjoy a conversation with your date before the film."

Do you play fun and appropriate music before each movie? Do you make a spectacle of opening the curtains when the show starts to reveal the screen? All other things being equal, I would seek out a cinema that worked this way.

(But you probably shouldn't listen to me.)

Posted by Stephan Shelley (Member # 8587) on 08-17-2018, 10:17 PM:

At the Grand Lake we don't do onscreen advertising either. Just 3 previews and that is it. With movies with overtures we don't even do that. At times we have listed "no commercials" in ads.

While we have some of the lowest ticket prices in the San Francisco Bay Area the Kabuki when it was run by Sundance had a surcharge because they did not run commercials. The amount would vary by time of day.

Posted by Justin Hamaker (Member # 2165) on 08-17-2018, 11:31 PM:

quote: Geoff Jones
Have you thought about promoting your lack of pre-show ads to see if that might increase business?

I suspect that even in a competitive situation the benefit from doing this would be far less than the revenue received from advertising. It's something my company resisted for a long time, but then it became obvious we were leaving too much money on the table.

Embellishments like a moving curtain and such would certainly be something I would use as a tie breaker when choosing between otherwise acceptable locations. But realistically I'm more likely to go for which has the lowest ticket prices, most convenient show times, easiest parking, and other similar factors.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 08-18-2018, 12:21 AM:

I was always against pre-show ads and for a long time I said we'd never do them, but the bottom line fact is, those ads are going to pay for our next digital projector. If you can afford to stay in business and spend however-many-thousand dollars every ten years or so for a new machine, more power to ya, but if you were on a VPF deal the last time, that won't be happening next time, so you have to be ready.

We could probably make it without the ads; but having the ads frees up those dollars every month and allows us to keep upgrading, repairing, and otherwise profiting from the theater.

That said, I thought for a while about trying to do ours myself; but after about ten minutes of thought, I figured it would be a huge job. So we teamed up with Focus Screen Media, which is a really small company, but they do a great job and they listen to my suggestions and requests.

We get a percentage of the ad sales every month, and I don't have to create the ads, do the legwork, shoot the video, edit the video, write the script, find narrators, get releases signed, do billing, chase overdue payments, and go after renewals every year.

I guess if I didn't have a day job, I "could" do all of that myself, but who wants to? I'd rather have the guys who are professionals do it -- and we wind up with better looking ads than I'd ever be able to do on my own, and I get to watch TV or work on a hobby in my spare time, rather than work on that stuff.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 08-18-2018, 02:20 PM:

When I first got involved professionally with movie theaters in 1990s Britain, there were two unwritten but universally obeyed rules around adverts.

1 - They had to have significantly better production values than TV ads: either funny, or spectacular (e.g. with VFX), or both.

2 - The ad and preview reel had a cast iron time limit of 15 minutes from the advertised program start time. This created an unwritten deal between theaters and customers: if you want to come late and miss the preshow stuff, you can time your arrival for the start of the feature, but if you choose to do that, you probably won't get a very good seat.

I was out of the business between 2001-14, but during that time as a customer, I saw both of those unwritten rules being torn up to varying degrees, especially 2. Today, digital streaming ad to theater setups such as Screenvision extend the preshow to over half an hour, and the ads themselves are the same ones you see on YouTube and Fox News.

Add to that the real terms increase in the cost of tickets over the last two decades, and I'm not surprised that a small but growing number of theaters are making no ads a selling point.

Posted by James Westbrook (Member # 3690) on 08-18-2018, 04:24 PM:

I read somewhere, maybe even here, that ad revenue on some of the major theater ad companies has declined because advertisers noticed the theaters with recliners and reserved seating that customers arrive later and miss their content completely because they already have dibs on the choice seats. A version of the "revenge effect" where something perceived as good has repercussions that were not realized until after it was done.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 08-18-2018, 05:21 PM:

Cinema definitively lost a lot of old-style advertisers, but digital also opened up a market that had only limited potential before, simply because of costs an lack of scalability. Now you can have more localized, more targeted advertisements that can be sold at a higher price per viewer, compensating for the lack of mass behind the viewership.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 08-18-2018, 08:34 PM:

quote: Leo Enticknap
Today, digital streaming ad to theater setups such as Screenvision extend the preshow to over half an hour, and the ads themselves are the same ones you see on YouTube and Fox News.

That's been an advantage of working with the small company that we do. They have nothing to do with "national" ads, so all our ads are local. I guess I wouldn't mind if they were funnier, had high-end spectacular movie-type production values and so on, but that kind of thing wouldn't really work for "local" content anyway.