• by Paul Gough , April 10, 2003

Companies that sell spots in the three or four minutes before the beginning of a movie at the theater are seeing double-digit increases in their small but growing part of the ad market.

Cinemedia, as it's called in the industry, brings in about $200 million annually. It encompasses not only the spots and slides that run before movies begin but also points of contact at the box office, concession stand, inside the lobby and sampling on the way out the door. No one says it's a lot of money yet but the companies pitch cinemedia as a way to reach a captive audience and a highly desirable demographic that may not watch a lot of TV.

It's that link to television - the sight, sound and motion that cinemedia shares with your everyday 30-second TV spot - that is one of the medium's biggest selling points.

"It's clearly positioned and designed as a complement to network television prime," said Todd Siegel, SVP of ad sales at Screenvision. In a landscape of fragmentaton, reality programming and the threat of TiVo-type technology, those concerns weigh heavily on advertisers. "Cinema can deliver massive reach in a day where it's harder and harder to do," Siegel said.

"Cinema dollars are growing double-digit, with more clients and categories than ever before," said Cliff Marks, president of Regal Cinemedia. But unlike that other moving-picture ad medium, cinema advertising doesn't have much of an upfront. Only Screenvision has a dedicated upfront period, which ended last month. Cinemedia and another big screen-advertising company, National Cinema Network, do presentations but don't call it an upfront. Marks said it's because cinema media isn't bought the same way as television.

Strong categories are automotive, broadcast and cable TV, the U.S. armed forces, video games, and a broad range of retail. NCN President Chuck Battey said the industry itself is delivering a higher-quality product and selling it effectively.

"This growth isn't coming because we're bombarding moviegoers with ads. It's really using the inventory that's been available in the past and being able to increase our pricing because of supply and demand," Battey said. The CPMs are often higher but the industry says advertisers get more bang for the buck in impact and captivity.

Armed with the strength of Nielsen data that shows cinema-ad recall five times higher than broadcast and the newly formed Cinema Advertising Council, the cinema advertising companies think they've been able to get on advertisers' and agencies' radar screens. Battey said he's discovered lately that NCN ad execs have had to do a lot less educating and more selling than in the past.

The one challenge, however, is figuring out where that money's going to come from. "Marketers, agencies and planning groups are still trying to find the appropriate slot as to where these budgets are coming from ... Cinema is still a derivative of some other part of the marketing mix," Marks said.

What he and others want is to have cinema considered its own line item, just like the other mediums, in the planning and buying.

"The goal of cinema is to have marketers and clients and think of us on the planning stage," Marks said.