Cineplex’s recent foray into emotional advertising shows how bonding with customers can be a great sales pitch.
Why does a business with very little competition need to do advertising?
This is the question raised by Cineplex Inc.'s foray into emotional advertising in the past two years. Last week, the company released its second animated video for the holidays, which will run in its theatres and which Cineplex hopes will be passed around on Facebook and other social media. The treacly video tells the story of a father and son who struggle to find time to spend together. In this fantasy world, people watch movies thanks to magical balloons filled with images that start to play, glowing in the air, when the balloons are popped.
The story is a follow-up to another video, Lily & the Snowman, that the company released last year and that has since attracted more than 60 million views across YouTube, Facebook, and elsewhere on the Web.
The videos are designed to create an emotional bond with customers, Cineplex executives say. But among the audience members who sigh fondly at a tale of family togetherness, may be a few who reasonably wonder why Cineplex – with 165 theatres across Canada – has to produce such marketing in the first place. After all, since a dip in audience numbers in 2010 and 2011, attendance has surged back to a record 77 million visits last year, and $711-million in revenue. It holds a nearly 78-per-cent share of the movie theatre market in Canada.
In many places, if people are going out to a movie, they're going to a Cineplex theatre whether they like it or not. But when the company conducted consumer research last year, it found that brand building was still necessary.
"We found that we were not getting credit for a great experience: if visitors had a good time it was because the movie was great, but when they went to a movie and they didn't like it, we were at fault. We wanted to understand," said Maxine Chapman, executive director of brand and communications at Cineplex. "We've been very functional in our marketing: we've been talking about our screens, our seats, our sound. We've probably not created an emotional connection with consumers."
Cineplex's marketing team was inspired, however, by the emotional Christmas ads they saw coming out of the U.K., particularly from retailer John Lewis, whose seasonal ads are shared on social media worldwide.
Cineplex turned to its ad agency, Zulu Alpha Kilo, for the story – about a girl named Lily who builds a snowman that comes to life and tells her stories with shadow puppets. As Lily grows, her busy life crowds out time with the snowman, until she is reminded to revisit him and shares the experience with her young daughter. The tale was animated and produced by Hornet, a New York agency that was responsible for John Lewis's animated 2013 Christmas ad, The Bear & The Hare.
Cineplex's video campaigns cost less than $1-million each, but were still a significant investment for Cineplex in marketing – particularly since so much of its advertising has been driven by special offers, or by messages about new in-theatre experiences. The company has been responding to the rise of digital streaming entertainment by attempting to position its theatres as an experience that people can't get at home – and it has been able to charge premium prices on tickets for those experiences. That includes testing a "4DX" auditorium that uses wind effects and scents – yes, smell-o-vision – to enhance movies; D-Box seats that move to mimic what's happening on-screen; and VIP theatres with reserved seating and in-seat food-and-beverage service.
Research by Millward Brown, polling roughly 1,000 Canadians, showed that people's perceptions of Cineplex changed significantly from November, before Lily and the Snowman was launched, to February of this year, when it stopped running in theatres before movies. Measures of affinity – love for the brand, essentially – rose to 22 per cent from 16 per cent.
The shift was particularly pronounced among people aged 25 to 39, who are among Cineplex's core customers, but there was also a lift among people aged 14 to 24. That age group is important because in the coming years, Cineplex will be trying to compete with the changing media habits of younger people: those customers who are watching more and more short videos, and streaming TV and movies from services such as Netflix, on their mobile devices.
The emotional stories, then, are not just about a bit of holiday cheer. With their slogan "see the big picture" – a kind of rebuttal to "Netflix and chill" – they are also a push to reinforce movies as a social experience, and even as quality time.
"We wanted to insulate ourselves for the future," Ms. Chapman said. "We wanted to remind people to take that time to come to a movie."