In a world saturated with marketing campaigns of all shapes and sizes, cutting through to your target audience with the right message at the right time is essential. Introducing campaign automation for cinema marketers - an effortless way to automate personalized marketing communications based on cinema-specific triggers or actions.

What is campaign automation in Movio Cinema?

In Movio Cinema, campaign automation refers to sending pre-configured offers and relevant reminders in real-time, based on a moviegoer’s profile and historic behavior. Although the concept of campaign automation isn’t new, our approach to it has purely been with cinema marketers in mind. We are entirely focused on the unique outcomes that cinema exhibitors wish to achieve, such as concession upsell, post-session surveys, and on-brand dynamic operational emails. We can provide a cinema-centric solution because of our close integration with point of sale (POS) systems, online transactions, and keeping cinema concepts and showtime in mind when we build our products.

Our latest innovation allows cinema marketers to:

1. Expand the moviegoer experience before and after a cinema visit, with timely messages to build anticipation and kick-start their next visit.
2. Motivate concession and other spend by delivering targeted messages just as moviegoers begin to focus on their upcoming cinema visit.
3. Supplement transactional and demographic data with qualitative insights, such as NPS results, to further understand your moviegoers.

The initial focus

Our key focus for campaign automation in Movio Cinema is to solve the cinema-specific problem of connecting with moviegoers before and after any session - known as session-based campaigns. Campaigns that can be executed close to the cinema experience present a big opportunity to drive incremental concession spend, curate the moviegoer experience, gather valuable feedback and kick-start the next visit. For example, a moviegoer who is attending Avengers: Endgame could receive a campaign that promotes an Avengers-specific collectible popcorn tin just before their session time.

These emails can also be used to highlight basic logistics about directions, where to park, and parking validation to eliminate stress ahead of their visit. An exhibitor would likely choose a different timeframe before the showtime based on the cinema concept chosen: perhaps one day before for dine-in concepts so that alternate dinner plans aren’t made, but three hours before a general admission session. One hour after their session, they could receive a ‘How was your experience?’ email to gather their feedback and to promote the best movies for them to see next.

Campaign automation also allows exhibitors to automate business-as-usual, operational communications to both members and non-members, such as booking confirmations, account sign-up confirmation, and password reset, freeing up marketers to instead experiment with creative and strategic ways to connect with their moviegoers. It also allows users to control all of their digital communications from a single platform, creating a consistent look across all touch-points.

Our vision

At Movio, we challenge the status quo and seek innovative solutions with our products and services, even if it means changing established conventions. We summarize how we intend to extend this to our vision for Campaign Automation, which we have broken into four categories:

Moviegoers - operational emails are a key building block when it comes to communicating with non-members.
Audience - by utilizing Movio’s propensity-based algorithms to enrich content, timing, and preferred channel for each moviegoer, marketers will be able to effortlessly insert dynamic concessions and movie recommendations into pre- and post-session campaigns.
Connect - following on from session-based campaigns, we will investigate areas such as event-driven campaigns from websites and apps (e.g. abandoned carts and reservation reminders), and including automatically assigning points and recognitions. We will also be introducing Push Notifications as a communications channel for campaign automation.
Measure - we are aiming towards a future where exhibitors can measure how all their campaign activities impact their business goals over time and consequently use these results to optimize their campaigns.