Cinematic Activity - From 3D to Smell, Advertisers Reach out to Cinema-goers

SAWA Newsletter October 2008

 

Going to the movies is all about sharing: be it the love and the excitement, the laughter and the tears, the action and, yes, even the advertising. Much has been exclusively written in Film Journal International about how cinema advertisers are polishing the pre- show and massaging pre-feature messages around the world. For this report on how much activity and interaction are really going on, we have once again looked around theatre lobbies and invited leading cinema experts to share their experiences with our readers.

 

“Those activities are exciting to the consumers,” observes Stu Ballatt as president and chairman of the Cinema Advertising Council, “because they add a new and fun element to the pre- show experience, as well as for the advertisers, as this provides them with new ways to bring engagement and another good value proposition into their marketing plan.”

 

Please note that while certain (inter)activities are attributed to specif- ic cinema advertising vendors and described for certain markets, this does not mean they are the only ones working with the concept.We encourage potential advertisers and interested exhibitors who are reading this survey to contact their respective screen advertising vendors about availability and future plans.

 

Back in June, during the 55th Cannes Lions Festival, some 10,000 registrants comprising the advertising communities from 93 coun- tries gathered to watch no less than 28,000 work samples in com- petition and attended more than 75 seminars and workshops. In conjunction with its sponsors—Dolby, Barco, Bug Norway, Cineact Paris and The Brand Experience Lab New York—the Screen Advertising World Association (SAWA) presented a session entitled “Cinema: The Medium Where All Ideas Look Big.” “The seminar was a huge success and 400 people attended,” reports the trade body’s general manager, Cheryl Wannell. “Another 400 were turned away due to full capacity.” On the agenda were digital 3D commercials for Red Bull from the United Kingdom, Vodafone and Super Bock Beer from Portugal alongside an interactive game application from Brand Experience, and feature film selections that were also deliv- ered in the third dimension. SAWA further notes, “The audience rocked to this clip [of U2 3D], wearing Dolby 3D glasses and listen- ing to Dolby 5.1 Digital Sound and was then amazed by the techni- cal wonderment of Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3D.” The in-depth deal at the seminar was to highlight that “the cinema medium excites, engages and innovates.”

 

While this might be considered a mere preview of things to come to members of the industry, real movie audiences across Europe have already experienced yet another dimension in cinema adver- tising. After sight and sound (with touch to be addressed further below), Germany’s Werbe Weischer Group introduced The Smell of Summer on behalf of Nivea/Beiersdorf. “We started three to four years ago with our very first tests,” recalls Claus Runge, founder and managing director of Cinescent, the Hannover, Germany-based company that developed and markets the underlying molecular distribution system. “Initially we scented a ‘regular’ Nivea spot with a very low dosage that the audience could not smell. Although none of the people surveyed afterwards actually realized that they had been scented, the unaided recall was some 20% high- er in the scented auditorium than in any other.”When agency TBWA subse- quently created a special spot for Nivea Sun “that only works when scented,” the surveys indicated a 37% unaided recall with an advertising impact of +515%, Runge enthuses. After interna- tional advertisers got wind of the sys- tem during the previously mentioned 2008 Cannes event, Runge confirms to have received “much interest overall and requests from Belgium, Luxembourg, Portugal, the United States and Canada.” According to trade weekly Advertising Age, Pearl & Dean has definite plans to bring Cinescent to the United Kingdom as well. The screen ad com- pany’s enterprise director,Mike Hope-Milne, was quoted that olfac- tory interests there also evolve around bread, coffee, perfume, air fresheners and chocolate. The first spot lined up, however, comes from “a car manufacturer that wants to promote its Cabriolet ver- sion by evoking the smell of fresh country air and newly cut grass,” Ad Age wrote.

 

Meanwhile, across Germany and The Netherlands, Cinescent has perfumed 30 screens with the clean and hearty smell of Dove soap and Tabac men’s cologne, along with a flowery bouquet during the theatrical trailer for 20th Century Fox’s 27 Dresses. (Would any of our readers please e-mail the author if they too hauled in a disco fog machine into their theatres when John Carpenter’s The Fog first opened? Much cheaper than Sensurround… Speaking of such gimmicks, yes, there are people smelling success in bringing the likes of Smell-O-Vision and Odorama back, Runge attests.)

 

The Cinescent technology—as manufactured by Reuschetec GmbH, also from Germany, and scented by parfumeur K-H Bork— releases very fine fragrance molecules through the theatre’s air-condition- ing systems. So, in theory, any modern multiplex could eventually have a few of the smelly machines. “We are currently testing to scent a feature film with two or three different smells,” Runge says.

“On the technological front, it is working pretty well and there’s already a request from the U.S.”

 

Nonetheless, for now the consensus seems to be that cinematic scents work best when they are not too powerful. Highly fra- granced perfumes should probably continue to be promoted via in- theatre sampling instead. Not to mention to better leave a poten- tial re-release of John Water’s Polyester on the scratch ’n’ sniff card of ideas.

 

Either way, when it comes to handing out goodies to moviegoers,Werbe Weischer has had plenty of experience as well. “There is a lot of demand,” explains Nils Schilling, the company’s director of business development. “Most German theatres can hand out flyers, magazines and product samples along with the movie ticket, allowing for sampling during a specific movie, in a given location or by gender. The minimum number is a thousand items and the campaign affords the all- important channeling- back to the advertisers.” The latter have included H&M, Rexona/Unilever, Sony for Blu-ray, Yahoo and Nintendo. In addition to cost savings by eliminating a dedicated promotional team, “the main advantage is the personal and thereby highly effective interaction with the theatre employees,” Schilling opines.

 

Holding the promoted product leads us to another and equally touchy subject. As telecommunications ad expenditure in cinemas is on the rise, audiences are actually encouraged to use their cell- phones in the auditorium—other than being politely reminded to turn the ringers off, that is. After the likes of Martin Scorsese and Po the Panda, Spike Lee recently joined the pre-show too, not by cautioning anyone to be quiet, but by turning up the volume on the V CAST Street for music artists Chris Cornell and Timbaland.Together with another short,What’s That Song?, both clips were part of the preshow with “a groundbreaking text mes- sage polling program for moviegoers.” In what was further described by the companies as “an industry first,” Verizon Wireless and Screenvision asked audiences at 3,500 mid-June shows in ten U.S. markets about their music preferences. Thanks to networked digital technology, results of the text-message-submitted responses were displayed on screen shortly thereafter.

 

Do we really want to encourage cell-phone use? FJI asked Ballatt in his position as Screenvision’s senior VP of marketing. His short answer is yes. “None of these activities are done in such a way as to create a problem for the moviegoing experience or to create dis- tractions that would be annoying other consumers.” Instead, “all of them are wrapped in what we would call policy messaging that also asks people to turn their cell-phones off,” he explains. “The reality is phones, PDAs and other portable technologies are what consumers use today. Their ability to use them and integrate into the movie experience has to be…a positive. But it also should be viewed with the overall expectation of maintaining respect for the environment. If we deploy something like an interactive poll, we also remind consumers now that it’s done, please turn your cell- phones off.”

 

Over at National CineMedia, the wireless competition sprints onto one of 14,300 screens near you in October to “champion courtesy” in over 1,100 movie theatres “through a series of public-service announcements reminding moviegoers to silence their cell-phones and refrain from texting during feature films.” The late Stan Durwood of NCM-member circuit AMC would have been proud that his longago “Silence Is Golden” program has reached such epic proportions—even if it is now fighting what has surely become an epidemic. This multi-year agreement makes Sprint Nextel “our exclusive courtesy partner to help us preserve the moviegoing experience,” announced Cliff Marks,NCM’s president of sales and chief marketing officer. “Cell-phone courtesy continues to be a key priority for our movie theatre circuits and audiences alike, and people are very receptive to these types of messages.”

 

Returning to Weischer and Germany, the mere concept description of essentially the same activity shows the cultural gap between the two continents. Schilling reports, “Our ‘CineQuizzer’ campaign received much attention since ‘Handy’-use is generally not permit- ted inside the auditorium.” (Deriving from the word “Hand,” which denotes the same body part as in the English language, “Handy” is German for cell-phone. He did not say, however, that its use is nor- mally “verboten.”) Patrons at leading circuit CinemaxX “were invit- ed to turn on their Handy” in order to participate in an SMS game that awarded a year’s worth of free movies. “Afterwards, moviego- ers had to turn them off again,” Schilling assures. The next morn- ing, a follow-up message was sent to the phones, further extending the reach of the CinemaxX promotion.

 

With Swiss partner kooaba,Werbe Weischer has begun to introduce another handy way to use that technology. The two companies hope to put consumers into a “Movie Zone,” as the initiative has been named, by having them take pictures of film print ads or movie posters with their camera phones. Those wonderful standees that exhibitor-relations departments have created for theatre lob- bies—The Simpsons Movie couch, Don’t Mess with the Zohan’s styling chair and blow dryer, the High School Musical 3 and Made of Honor cutouts, or the life-sized Kung Fu Panda, to name but a few recent examples—would certainly qualify as well. Multi-media- messaging the photographed images to a specific short code results in receiving additional information about the film (cast, release date, links to trailer) and the closest theatre where it will be show- ing. “The ability to reserve tickets and, in a later version, their actu- al purchase will be added as well,” Schilling envisions. “The adver- tisers can target to connect with the film’s environment and will appear on the user’s phone to boot.”

 

For their client Nokia,Weischer booted up the infrared motion recognition system known as “Human Joystick” with André Bernhardt of Germany’s reactiveshop GmbH. Stateside, Brand Experience Lab introduced the motionactivated game with msnbc.com’s NewsBreaker Live at select National Amusements Showcase Cinemas de Lux. The set-up and activity were already introduced and documented in our feature about “Games on the Big Screen and Off ” in last year’s cinema advertising edition (October 2007). As for the anticipated further U.S. rollout, National CineMedia’s PR and communications director, Amy Jane Finnerty, advises that “unfortunately, we have jointly decided [with Brand Experience Lab] not to move forward due to select technical limita- tions revealed during our testing of the AudienceGames program. However, we continue to actively explore new cinema advertising innovations and are investigating a number of other options to further entertain our audiences.”

 

Installations for some of the latter are already “ongoing, and we expect it to be ready in late 2008/early 2009,” Finnerty says. Back in March, NCM became the exclusive theatre lobby partner of Reactrix Systems Inc., a selfproclaimed “leading interactive out-of- home media company” that provides the proprietary and trade- marked STEPscape interactive floor and WAVEscape flat-panel advertising technologies. Computer-coordinated, sensorequipped and digital projection/video-enabled, consumers can activate numerous variations of the message that seem in direct response to waving their arms and hands