"You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning."
Billy Wilder, cinematic genius
I'm thinking of going to see Watchmen tonight. Not because I'm dying to see the movie, though Anthony Lane's description of Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan in this week's New Yorker is chillingly alluring ("buff, buck naked and blue, like a porn star left overnight in a meat locker"). What more could a woman want?
I will cite, instead, the haunting call of the recession. Movies have been upgraded on the acquisition scale - an affordable luxury that offers as a bonus not prettier lips or a perfumed air, but escapism in a darkened room, keeping company with a 50-foot screen, a bucket of popped corn and noise big enough to drown out the voices in one's head.
These are good times for the movie business.
The other day I found myself in the 40th-floor aerie of the Royal Bank tower in downtown Toronto, where I observed walnut panelling, chandeliered wall sconces and a fellow named Jim Rutherfurd, executive vice-president of Veronis Suhler Stevenson, a private equity outfit based in New York. Each year for the past 22, VSS has produced a data-intensive tome (400-plus pages) on the media and the advertising that supports it (television, newspapers, online ... the whole drill).
Mr. Rutherfurd put on a slide show performance for a crowd of media and advertising types. Most of what he had to impart was not pretty. (He used the word "horrific.")
"One of the little surprises," he said in conversation prior to his presentation, "is that the box office is holding up as well as it's holding up."
Box office revenue in the U.S. is projected to ring in at $10-billion (U.S.) this year, he says, a nice pop from $9.7-billion in '08, particularly when you consider the economic slaughter out there.
But don't we know that movies are recession resistant? "I was a little bit suspicious going into this because of the sheer dollars involved. ... You walk out of the place and you've dropped 40, 50, 60 bucks or more for a family," Mr. Rutherfurd says. "My personal thought was that this time we might see the pattern break, but we didn't."
Elite moviegoers who decry the presence of ads prior to show time, close your eyes here: Healthy ticket sales present an opportunity for advertisers.
Mr. Rutherfurd cites the obvious marketing advantages. "You can't TiVo it," he says, adding that the advertiser's ability to segment and target an audience holds immense appeal. "And it's not as cluttered as a 30-minute show on TV where the ad clutter is just mind-boggling."
Advertisers, at least in the U.S., like the cinema pitch. PQ Media in Stamford, Conn., offers these numbers: Cinema advertising was $622-million in 2007, is estimated to have closed out last year at $650-million, and is projected to hit $680-million this year.
Advertisers in Canada have been more reticent. When Cineplex Galaxy Income Fund released its fourth-quarter results recently, the company noted that while box office is up, there has been a 1.1-per-cent decline in media revenue from the previous year. "Current economic conditions resulted in fewer advertisers committing to on-screen advertising," the company said.
There's no clear explanation. It may be that panicked advertisers, hunting for fast budget cuts, are cutting where they shouldn't. It may be, as Cineplex obviously hopes, this is short-term.
"Historically we would have guaranteed commitment contracts for six months and 12 months out," says Pat Marshall, the company's vice-president of investor relations. Today, some advertisers are holding back. "We don't see that as something that's longer term," she says.
Here's one reason she might be right: Cinema advertising is one of the very few opportunities left to capture the youth demographic. A 2007 study by Arbitron Inc. on cinema-going found that 81 per cent of teens had been to the movies in the previous 30 days.
The numbers say nothing about the audience experience. Richard Sandor, senior vice-president and managing director at DDB Vancouver, recalls his days working for DDB in Britain and his cinema-going experience there.
"I'd go a little bit early to make sure I would see all the ads," he says. "It was kind of a highlight. Unique. You wouldn't see them on TV or anywhere else. ... The challenge was to entertain [the audience] and do something quite remarkable."
He mentions Orange, the mobile brand from France Telecom Group. Orange likes to have a lock on the so-called "gold spot" - that is, the last spot before show time. For that space the cellphone company has produced a hilarious series of commercials featuring the likes of actors Rob Lowe and Dennis Hopper and, the Adonis of rap, Snoop Dogg. ("Mr. Dogg, if you could replace the line 'I'm giving mad love, I'm riding with the hunnies,' with 'Gonna pick up my mobile, gonna make some off-peak calls.' ")
These TYCPO - turn your cellphone off - commercials sell a double message that blends merchandising with public service: both "buy Orange" and "TYCPO before the flick." (Within the Cineplex chain, this prime spot, which commands a 15-per-cent premium, is taken by Telus, which is currently airing its Epic spot - the latest iteration in the meerkat oeuvre.)
DDB's Mr. Sandor posits that cinema advertising is more of a staple in the advertising mix in the U.K. "Here it's a bit more of a niche play."
This week, DDB's new spot for the BC Dairy Foundation's "Must Drink More Milk" campaign, which launched in June, started airing across cinemas in British Columbia. "It's kind of bizarre," says Mr. Sandor of the ad. Yes it is, but in a refreshing way: three arms engage in an arm wrestling match. No bodies. Just arms. The campaign targets 15- to 17-year-olds and is being credited with helping the volume of milk sales in the province rise by 3 per cent.
Still, there's much that runs in the lights-down, pre-show space that is indistinguishable from conventional TV fare - the meerkats, for example. Canadian advertisers have largely failed to rise to the creative level of their European counterparts in delivering a cinematic experience.
That's a shame. The cinema has delivered the medium. It's the advertiser who is too often not delivering the message.
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