Commentary
After the Popcorn, Before the Show
- by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, June 18, 2010
According to The Cinema Advertising Council (CAC), total cinema advertising industry revenues of CAC members, accounting for more than 82% of 38,794 U.S. movie screens, grew by nearly 2% to $584,067,000 in 2009, as compared to a total of $571,421,000 in 2008, despite a year that saw spending in other traditional media decrease significantly.
For 2009 regional and national cinema advertising sales were up 5.4% compared with the previous year, accounting for 79.4% of the industry (regional and national sales accounted for 76.8% of total cinema advertising spending in 2008).
Meanwhile, local cinema advertising sales were down 9.6% year over year, accounting for 20.6% of the total cinema advertising market (compared with 23.3% in 2008), while other independent forecasts showed that the majority of non-cinema media categories were off 20% or more last year.
Michael Chico, president and chairman of the CAC, says "Cinema advertising, in one of the most challenging years for media sales during the last few decades, continued to grow... (the) sector's vitality remains very strong... and that growth is continuing in 2010, as cinema has already experienced double digit increases across the board..."
The CAC report includes revenue data for both on-screen cinema advertising - including commercials airing in advance of movie previews and the feature presentation - as well as off-screen revenues - including those delivered by digital video and audio programming, sampling, special events, concession-based promotions and lobby-based promotions. On-screen revenues, says the report, accounted for over 93% of total cinema advertising revenues and were up 2.1% year over year, while off-screen revenue was flat.
Top national cinema advertising categories in 2009 included Apparel, Auto, Entertainment, Retail, Consumer Packaged Goods, Travel and Wireless. Additionally, growth in 2009 was attributable to increasing activity across a broad spectrum of emerging categories, from Cable Television Networks, Cosmetics, Financial and the Military.
For additional information about The Cinema Advertising Council (CAC), please visit here.
Jack Loechner is the Editor of The Center for Media Research's daily Research Brief. You can reach him at jack@mediapost.com.
Ahhhhh... cinema advertising: there's nothing quite like paying $8 to see a movie and get a series of ads before you see what you're paying for.
Myself and most of the people who are sitting around me make negative comments about the ads that are running. The bottom line is we resent paying to see advertising in an environment that is supposed to be content or in the case of movie trailers, related content at that point.
The whole point of a movie is escapism generally speaking so when you don't let us escape but keep pounding us with ads, please don't always expect our impressions to be positive ones.
I need the 15 minutes of advertising so I can stand on line to buy the popcorn. Then I get to see the main attraction without missing the beginning, which is what happened when there was no advertising. ;-)
Americans might not know this but Europeans would see an ice cream ad before a film (for instance the famous Langnese "Like Ice in the Sunshine" ad) and then the lights would come on as ice cream vendors sold the stuff right there in the auditorium like at a baseball game.
All that said, Hollywood has to remember that licensed DVDs with too many unavoidable ads at the start are an *inferior* product to pirate copies that throw all that away. One should never put yourself in a position where the official product is worse than an unauthorized copy.