• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, December 20, 2024

CJ 4DPLEX makes movie seats rock and forces cool and hot air through the theater to give moviegoers a unique experience.

Companies have done something similar for years for movies, but now CJ 4DPLEX is working with National CineMedia (NCM), the largest cinema advertising platform in the U.S., to tie its multi-sensory experience into ads running in theaters.

“You go into a theater with the mindset of being entertained,” said Mike Rosen, CRO of NCM. “We are not interrupting the movie experience with ads that are less compelling. The ad becomes part of the experience.”  

For the first time, NCM worked with CJ 4DPLEX’s sensory experience to tie it into an ad through a deal with Comcast’s Xfinity and Regal. The 4DX ad spot debuted last month in the U.S.

Universal Pictures worked with the companies to produce an ad-like short film about the making of "Wicked." The visual ad experience combined dynamic onscreen images with synchronized motion seats and environmental effects like bubbles, wind, and lightning.

CJ 4DPLEX took Comcast’s Xfinity ad and added pulses and changes in movement -- something that is done after the commercial is shot. It uses the same signals as when producing this type of effect with movies.

The seats in the theater read the audio signals that sync with the images on the screen. Some experiences can include mist, smoke, and scents.

Rosen called this a “magical” experience for moviegoers. I certainly think transitioning from an immersive ad to a movie experience could help to expand attention of those in the theater. 

The "Wicked" ad may be the first multisensory experience for NCM, but it won’t be the last.

“We are talking to other brands that will likely activate in 4DX,” he said, teasing some additional news to come soon in other formats to improve the ad experience.

Other enhancements that are already in movies, but not in ads, come from Dbox, he said. Dbox is a movie-theater technology that uses motion and sound to create an immersive cinematic experience. Their seats are customizable, and have a user-controllable response level with four levels of control. 

Rosen was not able to explain how CJ 4DPLEX could track the movement of the theatergoer, such as the shifts of a person’s body in their seat that might indicate restlessness or a complete focus on the content on the screen, but said “one initiative at NCM is to prove with data, research and analytics the lift an advertiser gets from its ads.”

When I caught up with Rosen, I had just returned to Wyoming after spending a weekend in Las Vegas, where I saw Postcards from Earth at the Sphere, a large spherical structure that cost about $2.3 billion to build. The 16K-resolution screen wraps around the seats, including the ceiling, and uses more than 160,000 speakers.  

Rosen touted advertising in cinemas as the highest of any attention ad platform. He pointed to a study MediaPost reported on in July, which infrared cameras in theaters owned by AMC and Cinemark to report pupil and upper-body movements and determine attention. All 364 participants, age 18 and older, opted in. Six screenings were fielded in October and conducted in New York and Los Angeles.

The test determined cinema leads in average seconds viewed, increasing for 30-second ads when measured with a broader sample as in this study compared with tests run in 2022.

For the average 30-second ad, cinema came in at 25.1 seconds viewed, compared with linear live sports at 17.7, premium AVOD at 15.5, 15.0 at Pluto/Tubi, Roku at 15.1, and YouTube at 14.6.

The point of the research and the test is that Rosen thinks he can get the same attention results from ads through 4DX -- where the seats move, bubbles float, and wind blows in theatergoers' faces, along with other environmental effects.