As a moviegoer, I often defy assumptions about my age and gender, and I’m sure you do, too. For example, Hidden Figures is my favorite movie this year but the average age of the audience is almost 10 years older than I am, with two out of three viewers being female (and some of the one in three male attendees were no doubt dragged along!). For this reason, targeting solely on demographics is imprecise. That’s why, at Movio, we’re fond of saying, “We don’t care if you’re an 80-year-old woman seeing Monster Trucks or a 15-year-old boy seeing Florence Foster Jenkins. How you spend your time and money is more relevant to building target groups”.

Transactional data plus demographic data creates a robust profile for better targeting and more relevant communications. But even this is not the complete picture. Demographics and transactional history don’t reveal a guest’s opinion, preferences or intentions. They also don’t reveal their lifestyle. An even richer profile is required for maximum targeting precision.

What data is available and how can it drive engagement and profits?

There are multiple ways to source data to enrich your guest and member records.  You could collect data yourself from your website or via a survey. You could also purchase data from third parties, including information relating to household size, marital status, presence and age of children and lifestyle segmentation. Let’s look at each, in turn, through the lens of Movio’s platforms.

Movio Cinema offers clients a Web API which allows them to monitor member behavior on their own websites. Depending on website functionality, exhibitors can see whether a member has viewed a trailer or movie information page, added movies to a watchlist of future releases or rated the movies they have seen. This allows cinema marketers to gauge interest pre-release, and to subsequently target accurately - not just based on what people have watched, but what they watched and liked.

Marketers can conduct online surveys of guests and members to get their feedback and motivation for behaviors. As one simple example, exhibitors could undertake a Net Promoter Score survey, and then develop a response strategy based on the value of a client, with High Value Detractors taking precedence.

Movio Cinema has a number of particularly sophisticated exhibitors using lifestyle scores to take their marketing up a notch. On top a member’s demographics and opinions, they can now uncover a fuller profile of these individuals based on their psychographics.

For example, you may have ‘Urban Cinefiles’ - young, male-skewed people who always want to see a movie first and be perceived as experts amongst their peers. You would treat this group different to young males who are ‘Escapists’, motivated principally by the social, out-of-home aspects of the cinema, and who choose the movie as just one element of a complete entertainment experience with friends.

The Movio Cinema console has the ability to easily import quantitative lifestyle, opinion-based and satisfaction metrics and create filters to allow users to segment their members using these parameters on their own or in combination with any other Movio filter. This further allows users to create unique programs and interactions with members.

It is commonplace in retail to enrich their own transactional data with purchased third party data points such as marital status, presence of children in the household, and ethnicity - and we are beginning to see it occurring in cinema, too. Aside from these examples, which can be too sensitive to ask people when signing up to a cinema loyalty program, exhibitors can buy age and gender data to backfill incomplete member records.They may also use social sign-on capabilities on their website, such as on Facebook or Twitter, to capture such missing data.

Enriching data is a two-way flow

So far in this article, we have discussed bringing externally-sourced data into your own environment. However, it is commonplace in other industries to export guest and member data to facilitate effective digital advertising. We do recognize that it is rare for cinema exhibitors to pay for mainstream media, such as TV or radio, social media channels are far less expensive and more targeted. Used judiciously, they can help sway a moviegoer’s ‘left versus right’ decision to visit your theater, or one of your competitor’s.

Social media advertising, like Facebook Custom Audiences, is relatively straightforward to execute. Movio Cinema clients can use the full targeting capabilities of the Movio Cinema platform to create a segment based on the platforms 120+ filter set. This segment is then uploaded as a list into the social platform, where it is matched and the records further refined by adding options such as personal interests. This refined segment can then be expanded by creating ‘lookalike audiences’, comprised of additional people very similar to those in the segment. Finally, cinema exhibitors set a budget and have their advertisement served to their audience.

Key takeaways

• Precise targeting is required to drive incremental revenue and it relies on a thorough, multi-faceted understanding of guests
• Demographic and transactional information is the foundation of meaningful analysis and targeting but it is not the end
• Enriching demographic and transactional data with behavioral and opinion-based data, and completing or augmenting records with purchased third-party data provides a more rounded understanding
• Consider exporting data from your own environment to facilitate advertising on third party social media channels