• by Aaron Baar , October 2, 2012

Who says cell phones and movies don’t mix?

According to a new study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence and mobile advertising company InMobi, the mobile channel is particularly effective when it comes to reaching moviegoers -- particularly the highly coveted male contingent of them.

According to the study, men were much more likely to view trailers on their phones than women (41% vs. 27%), were slightly more likely to use their mobile device to helping them pick a movie (71% vs. 69%), and were slightly more likely to check social media to see what friends thought of a movie (38% vs. 33%). 

Overall, nearly a third of all consumers surveyed said they’d watched a movie trailer on their mobile device during the past six months, and 83% of them said they had watched an ad than ran before the trailer. Of those who watched an ad, 61% said they watched the ad all the way through. In keeping with much of the rest of the results, men were more likely to watch the ads than women (67% vs. 58%). 

“The study demonstrates that moviegoers are actively using mobile as a tool to learn more about movies, consume entertainment content, and plan trips to theaters,” Shrikant Latkar, vice president of global marketing for InMobi, tells Marketing Daily. “Mobile is an essential part of the learning, decision making, and movie-going process for consumers, which makes mobile an important channel to reach them.”

Also of note to brand marketers: one-fifth of consumers (21%) feel it’s appropriate to use the mobile Internet during the pre-trailer ads in the movie theaters. A quarter (25%) said they felt texting was appropriate during that time, while only 9% of respondents felt talking on the phone during that time was appropriate.

(During the actual film is a different story. Only 3% felt it was appropriate to surf the Web during the film, while 8% said texting was fine, and only 2% said making or receiving calls was acceptable.) Such findings suggested that marketers could use pre-trailer advertising as a cross-screen marketing opportunity, “waiting to be tapped,” according to the study’s authors. 

“Consumers are using mobile and interacting with a variety of different types of content,” Latkar says. “Marketers should target moviegoers on mobile through a variety of calls to action including apps, mobile advertising, and social media.”