• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, November 5, 2013

Cinema advertising companies are continuing their long-term campaign to woo advertising dollars away from TV with new research, which they claim shows a higher return on investment for cinema ads in the consumer packaged goods category.
 
The Marketing Mix Modeling analysis, performed for the Cinema Advertising Council by Prof. E. Craig Stacey, research director for the NYU Stern Center for Measurable Marketing, examined ROI for a major cereal brand, which ran a multi-platform ad campaign.

The eight-week-long campaign, which ran from July to September of this year, used cinema advertising, national broadcast and cable TV, and local TV and syndication. The cinema ad portion of the campaign included placements on both NCM MediaNetworks and Screenvision, the two dominant cinema ad networks.
 
Stacey’s analysis compared ad spending with incremental units of sales volume, as collected via IRI InfoScan, and showed cinema yielding an ROI 37% higher than equivalent ad placements on TV.
 
Stacey described the study methodology: “Our particular type of statistical modeling is time-series based in order to get a truer read in sales response over time. In addition, these models are well-suited for measuring the interdependencies and synergies among media channels in today’s complex marketing ecosystem.”  
 
The big cinema ad networks have been muscling up with new research aiming to prove the medium’s efficacy. Last month, Screenvision renewed a deal with Nielsen, giving the cinema ad network access to data that it uses to back up demo guarantees to big advertising clients.

The deal enables Screenvision to draw on data gathered by Nielsen’s Cinema Audience Measurement service to verify that various cinema ad clients are reaching their target audiences with post-campaign reports delivered on a weekly basis. Screenvision guaranteed audience demos to clients including Taco Bell, ConAgra and Magna Global as part of upfront commitments agreed earlier this year .