Gail Chiasson, North American Editor
Adspace Networks has entered a joint selling agreement with National CineMedia and Cinema Scene to create a new, larger digital place-based network that will now include screens in movie theater lobbies.
Combined with the Adspace Digital Mall Network, one of the nation’s largest Nielsen-measured digital place-based networks, the screens of NCM’s Lobby Entertainment Network (LEN) and Cinema Scenes’ cinema lobby Trailervision network — which together include a total of 1,700 theaters with 3,600 lobby video screens — will offer extensive reach against the elusive millennial demographic.
Under the agreement, Adspace will sell advertising on the movie lobby screens. If NCM or Cinema Scene sells national advertising on the big theatre screens, they can also include the lobby screens in the buy. Otherwise, the lobby screens are strictly the domain of Adspace.
“The nice thing about it is that if an advertiser only buys on the big screen once or twice a year, we can offer them continuity with buys for the lobby at anytime,” says Dominick Porco, CEO, Adspace Networks. “This way we can offer affordability and continuity to advertisers.”
Advertisers can buy the lobby screens or Adspace’s digital mall network screens or can even package both. “We’re flexible,” says Porco. “And this offers a huge national footprint, with measurement by Nielsen.”
“The combination of the two cinema lobby networks with Adspace’s existing mall network makes for a powerful new digital place-based advertising platform,” says Joe Ross, managing partner, Cinema Scene. “Adspace is now a one-stop digital place-based shop, providing meaningful scale and ad frequency against the younger audience.”
“It makes perfect sense to join forces with the digital place-based experts at Adspace to incorporate our cinema lobbies into a larger national digital place-based network, in addition to continuing to include the LEN in our own integrated on-screen, on-site, online and mobile cinema advertising offerings,” says Cliff Marks, NCM’s president of sales and marketing. “As NCM increasingly focuses on the video marketplace, the Adspace management team’s focus on selling the on-the-go consumer to the digital place-based media industry will now give brands an even easier way to reach our combined audiences nationwide.”
The cinema network will contain three types of screens in theater lobbies: 52” portrait screens, 42” landscape screens, and 138” video walls. All screens have full motion video and audio, and will showcase a new four-minute loop, allowing for greater advertising frequency and stronger ad recall. The content will remain consistent with current lobby network entertainment offerings, which include movie trailers and behind-the-scenes features.
As mentioned by Porco, for the first time, these movie theater lobby screens will also be included the Nielsen Place-Based Video Report, the quarterly industry standard for measuring audience exposures for video networks in place-based locations, beginning in the second quarter of 2014.
“This new larger digital place-based network provides advertisers an affordable means of achieving continuity against the coveted mall and movie-going audience,” says Susan Danaher, chief revenue officer, Adspace Networks. “This new larger network now delivers the younger mall and movie theater audience measured by Nielsen very efficiently with sufficient frequency to drive high consumer ad recall.”
When the cinema lobby video screens are sold in combination with the Adspace Digital Mall Network, it forms a new combined national digital place-based network that consists of nearly 2,000 venues and 6,500 screens, reaching 32% of both Adults 18-34 and Adults 18-49 every four weeks.
This new combined network provides an efficient way to reach light TV viewers who are affluent, busy, outgoing ‘Swayable Shopaholics’, and represent a desirable demographic. In fact, moviegoers (saw a movie in the past 90 days) and mall shoppers (visited a mall in the past 30 days) are 30% more likely to fall into the lightest TV viewing quintile. Malls and theaters are also particularly strong when TV is weak during summers and weekends.
“Adspace now provides clients with the opportunity to easily buy massive, place-based video reach with a national footprint and tremendous scale,” says Porco. “We know this audience very well. Heavy mall visitors and moviegoers are very similar in that they are young, upscale, thought leaders, style conscious and, perhaps most importantly, light TV viewers. We can deliver on-the-go consumers in a transactional frame of mind while in happy, entertainment-oriented environments. It is the epitome of video everywhere.”
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