Performance Advertisers See Revenue Gains From Cinema Ads

An uptick in website visitors

Monster.com first tested NCM’s in-cinema ads in the third quarter of last year and sporadically ran ads across all three quarters this year whenever its media budgets allowed spend.  

However, being a legacy brand established in 1999 means that most of its current consumers are over 40 years old. To tap into a wider audience, the job site targeted job seekers below the age of 35 years.

To assess campaign success, Monster.com, focused on its business-to-consumer (B2C) operations, looking at success metrics such as website visitors, job application initiations, completion rates, new account registrations, and the influx of new resumes.

These metrics were tied to the company’s business-to-business (B2B) operations, which serve as its revenue source.

“Most of those actions, you can associate a revenue from a sales perspective because you can sell a resume [to a company seeking new hires],” said Farrar.

Meanwhile, Burger King’s cinema ads ran across the U.S. and targeted what it calls Zennials (people on the cusp of Gen Z and Millennials) and Zennials parents.

The fast food brand compared the people who viewed the ad to a control group who did not, using a measurement tool to gauge Burger King’s foot traffic. The results indicated a significant increase in foot traffic and led to incremental sales, leading to revenue increases of over seven figures, the company told Adweek.

Winning old and new business

This summer’s blockbuster films Barbie and Oppenheimer surpassed already-stratospheric expectations, signaling a high point since the start of the pandemic.

In parallel, NCM’s data-driven audience platform, NCMx, launched last year, has grown the company’s understanding of its moviegoer audience. This includes more detail about demographics, post-cinema activities, spending patterns, preferred engagement periods, and the optimal attribution windows across a wide range of categories.

This lets new brand categories, such as pharmaceuticals, bolster upper-funnel messaging as well as target diagnosed audiences with highly relevant messages, according to Manu Singh, svp insights, analytics, and data sales strategy, NCM.

“We used those insights to build data products around it such as QR codes,” she said.

These strategic investments, combined with an audience scale exceeding 10 million moviegoers, have let NCM score repeat business with clients and win new accounts, but it wouldn’t share specifics.

“We are not your legacy media anymore,” said Singh. “We are doing everything that any other data-driven entity would do.”