The first Movio Cinema insights-driven module launching is the much-anticipated Movie Insights. It promises to be a game-changer in the world of cinema analytics, bringing Movio Media’s innovative technology to our Movio Cinema customers. We sat down with Movio’s Chief Product Officer, Peter Beguely, and Chief Data Scientist, Dr Bryan Smith, to find out what to expect from this release.

What is Movie Insights?

Peter: Movie Insights is our latest Movio Cinema extension module, allowing customers to choose comp titles scientifically and accurately. We figured that’s what people start with when deciding what audience to target for a pre-release movie, and chose to address the query with science. By identifying a similar movie or movies to the one you’re looking to promote, you can determine what the audience of your movie will look like based on actual data - rather than simply relying on assumptions.

How does it work?

Bryan: The similarity algorithm looks at audience overlap between a pair of films, and assigns a measure of similarity between the movies. This is based on the size of that overlap along with the size of the audience for the two movies in question.

The idea is that if you had a group of people who had watched two different movies, and half of that group had seen ‘Movie A’ and half had seen ‘Movie B’ you would expect that, if there was no relationship between the two movies, a quarter of that group would have seen both. Those movies wouldn't be similar because it was just a random correlation between them. Whereas, if the same half of the group saw both movies, then they're perfectly correlated. If the opposite halves of people saw them, then they're perfectly anti-correlated, and obviously not similar.

Of course, there aren't any movies that are seen by half of the total audience. The Force Awakens was seen by approximately 20% of moviegoers, and everything else is smaller than that. What the algorithm does is it takes this measure of the likelihood of the size of the audience overlap between a pair or movies, and scales it in a way that’s easy and useful for people to look at.

What was the reason for creating Movie Insights, and why now?

Peter: It's been our core tool over the past two years for finding targeted audiences for Movio Media campaigns for studios. It is perfectly applicable with Movio Cinema, arguably a better application. Once we had bedded down the technology in Movio Media, it was basically just time to pick it up and cross-benefit our efforts. Movio made a conscious decision to invest heavily into data science and insights, and that's going to be the foundation of all of our Movio Cinema and Movio Media products going forward.

How is this different to what I can already do in group builder?

Peter: Movie Insights is a clever tool, and doesn’t rely on manual input like Group Builder does. As Bryan explained, it uses an algorithm to accurately match and suggest audiences to films based on next best audience, and it does this automatically. You can essentially start with a film that is a known fit and then the algorithm automatically tells you the next best audiences to include. This allows the user to expand the audience size by simply selecting from the suggestions. It’s very efficient. In addition, Movio Cinema maps your many versions of each film together into a single entry, meaning there is no tagging or using numerous filters for each distinct movie format. Plus, for even further refinement, the audience identified can be combined with any of the 120+ filters in Group Builder.

How do you think it will help with the difficult task of finding audiences for movies pre-release?

Peter: It’s going to make that process much more streamlined and accurate. Until now, the industry has been using expertise and experience to determine these audiences. Movie Insights allows you to validate and prove your assumptions scientifically, which results in marketing efficiency, higher engagement and increased accuracy.

What does it help exhibitors achieve?

Peter: Movie Insights provides exhibitors two distinct advantages. Firstly, it’s a tool to discover the true audience composition of a current or upcoming film which allows for fast and accurate marketing segmentation. Secondly, it doubles as a research platform allowing exhibitors to gain insight into the nuances of audiences - i.e. demographics, recency, frequency and monetary - that can inform a more holistic marketing strategy across the entire business. Our customers can discuss this in detail with their account manager, as it’s all ready to be implemented.

What are the most exciting elements of this release?

Peter: The main achievement of this new extension module, which is the first of our Movio Insights suite of modules, is its ability to filter out blockbuster noise to see true audience overlap, and it really excels in determining best-fit audiences for those non-tentpole movies.

We’ve spent a lot of time making our tools more intelligent and insightful, so that anyone using them can have a greater degree of success. This is where we’re headed; insights-driven, automated, augmented intelligence. This is the future of Movio’s products.

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