• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, May 13, 2016

Screenvision Media made a persuasive case for consideration by advertisers in an upfront presentation. The company positioned movies as a unique form of premium video whose attributes surpass all other video sources available to consumers in today’s multiscreen universe.

Applying the tagline “Impact Like No Other,” company officials repeatedly inventoried the virtues of the moviegoing experience and their value for marketers. They emphasized the size of movie screens, the attractiveness of the environments in today’s state-of-the-art movie theaters, the quality of the current generation of blockbusters, and the engagement of young audiences who flock to them.

And they announced a number of new strategic partnerships that will make it possible for Screenvision to offer advertising and marketing opportunities both before and after a movie.

They encompasss what the company calls “the moviegoing journey.” Screenvision is calling this initiative “Connected Cinema.”

“We’re pretty unique,” said Screenvision CEO John Partilla at the presentation, which was held Thursday night in New York at the old Post Office building now called Moynihan Station.

“Our growing audience and our uniquely powerful screens — the mother of all screens — already create this extraordinary, unrivaled opportunity for impact like no other for the marketing of your brands and your business,” said Partilla (seen in the photo accompanying this story).

He told the audience of ad reps that over the past year, “we looked at the customer journey experience and we shifted the lens to the consumer perspective. The result of that is we retooled a lot of things. We re-engineered our suite of offerings and came to a place here tonight where it’s no longer just about going to the movies, although that’s pretty amazing. … This is now an unmatched screen and beyond-the-screen experience.”

Later in the presentation, Screenvision CRO Katy Loria took aim at digital. “Cinema really does create impact like no other, especially when you put it in the context of today’s media landscape,” she said.

“Fragmentation wreaks havoc: Eroding TV ratings, [digital] viewability is suspect, skippable content is rampant and there’s a growing lack of confidence in digital,” she said. “It’s reducing the effectiveness of marketing and threatening brand loyalty. …

"Everyone is searching for the most premium video out there because premium video is the most powerful component of a breakthrough media plan and there is no video more premium than the movies.”

Loria noted how attendance at the movies grew last year and is expected to grow this year, boosted by a number of big-budget movies that are due to be released in 2016. “We put your brands in front of the biggest blockbusters week after week after week,” she said.

Among the partnerships Screenvision announced as part of its “Connected Cinema” initiative were alliances with MovieTickets.com and EdisonX.

The alliance with MovieTickets “enables brands to begin engaging with consumers from the inception of their cinema experience, when they search for movies and purchase a ticket,” Screenvision said. “Consumer brand advertisers will be given the opportunity to extend the reach of on-screen campaigns to the digital plaforms of MovieTickets.com and Hollywood.com.”

The alliance with EdisonX will allow Screenvision to create a “virtual movie gift shop” that will encourage and enable moviegoers to purchase movie-related merchandise created to support the movie they just saw.

Screenvision also announced a new initiative with comScore that will give Screenvision the ability to “better [determine] targeted programming for advertisers [and] provide attribution regarding product purchases following consumers’ cinema experiences,” the company said.