The Audience Factor !

Image via Wikipedia

Cinema Advertising has become so effective for countless reasons but the Audience Factor has to be a huge consideration when designing your ad to be as effective as possible.  Most advertising catches people by themselves, either reading a print ad, listening to the radio in the car or watching TV alone.  With cinema advertising you ad an auditorium full of people who can participate in your ad if you are creative enough to involve them.  In my last post I shared BMW’s logo burning ad with you and you saw just a glimpse of the interactive possibilities with cinema ads.  While expensive technology plays a part in some of the interactive cinema ad strategies, simple creative ads can also do the same.  I will get into the simple ways to involve the audience shortly, but I wanted to show you another interactive ad that MSNBC used a few years ago that totally involved the audience.  Motion sensors were set up in a theater and the audience became the joysticks in an onscreen video game prior to the screening of Spiderman.  See the ad here: http://www.adverblog.com/archives/003118.htm

While involving your audience in a video game may seem like quite an undertaking you can get the same reaction from a crowd with an incredibly creative ad as well.  Whether you shock your audience with the unexpected or build in humor that fires the crowd up, blending your brand or something unique about your business will have the members of your audience buzzing long after they leave the theater.

If my clients are willing and up for it, my goal is to always create a cinema ad that is so memorable that audience members will leave the theater not just talking about the movie but also about that crazy ad they saw for the local restaurant or hair salon. If you are going to run an ad in one of my theaters we are going to make sure it is not only effective but memorable.  Sometimes clients have ads they have already produced for TV or other media that they would like to run, while I have no problems running whatever ad they would like, I think that doing something calm and contained is not doing their business much more than getting a little more recognition.

An outrageous and memorable ad will have the effect of a good workout at the gym, you want it your ad to keep working long after the audience has left the theater just like a good workout keeps burning calories after leaving the gym.  One of the few times that TV advertising actually works these days is Super Bow Ads and the reason they work is each advertiser is trying to outdo the other with a creative ad that will be talked about for weeks.  Cinema advertising allows you to reach your audience in a group setting and if you create the right ad, the crowd will respond and even those few audience members that aren’t paying attention are going to look at the screen to see what all the commotion is about.  I can’t guarantee the response the Human Joystick ad got from the audience in the attached You Tube video but I can surely work to create an ad that is going to get a great response that is focused on your business.

In the coming months I will be posting some of the outrageous and entertaining ads that I will be working with my clients to create.   The Audience factor will play big in all of them.  And while movies bomb and leave the theater for the next movie to come in, your ad will continue to play and if we play our cards right, people will becoming to the theater early just to see the ad that their neighbor, coworker or friend told them about.  Creating an event that promotes your business is what Cinema ads are all about !

Related Articles

• Movie Theater Advertising is Here to Stay (blogs.forbes.com)
• BMW Germany Makes Logo Appear Inside Cinema Audience’s Eyelids (adage.com)
• Creators of ‘Lost’ to Appear in Live Big Screen Event Featuring Special Fan Q&A in Select Theaters on May 20 (eon.businesswire.com)