Movie research comes as advertisers place a growing emphasis on how much attention people pay to ads.
Those ads in movie theaters are certainly hard to avoid. Now the nation’s largest seller of cinema advertising has proof they do, in fact, get movie-goers attention.
A study commissioned by National CineMedia from attention measurement firm Lumen Research, in collaboration with Dentsu, shows attention scores for ads that run before movies beat TV, connected TV, social and digital ads by as much as four to seven times.
The study included follow-up research on how seeing cinema ads affected people’s brand recall and preference, finding a clear correlation between duration of attention and those measures, said Mike Follett, managing director of Lumen. This is the first study of attention on cinema advertising in the U.S., but results are similar to studies Lumen has conducted in the U.K. and others have done in Australia, he said.
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For 15-second ads, for example, cinema ads had an attention score of 72, based on the percentage of the audience viewing them and how long they are viewed. This compares with an attention score between 15 and 17 for linear and connected TV and 11 and 12 social platforms from prior testing by Lumen and its partner TVision.
It’s important to look not just at whether people see ads but how long they watch, Follett said. “How long you look at them is a really important factor in changing people’s opinions about a brand,” he said. “We found that relationship is fairly consistent across media. More attention delivers better results.”
The research comes as advertisers place a growing emphasis on how much attention people pay to ads, and groups such as the IAB and Advertising Research Foundation launch initiatives to develop standards and study the role of attention in advertising.
It also comes at a time when cinema advertising could use a boost. Movie ticket sales rebounded last year from the pandemic (up 60% to $314 million for the two leading chains, AMC and Cinemark), but are still well below 2019 levels. NCM, which sells advertising for about three-quarters of U.S. theaters, expects to report fiscal year 2022 revenue of $242.5 million to $252.5 million. That’s more than double its revenue from the year prior, but still well below the $445 million reported in 2019.
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To do the study, Lumen set up infrared webcams inside a cinema late last year, which watched people watching the movie “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” (with their signed consent), Follett said. Then, as they came out, participants received a short survey about the film and the trailers as well as the brands advertised. That method is consistent with previous work done with desktop, mobile and social media advertising (using tracking cameras in people’s phones or computers), combined with post-exposure surveys about brands advertised, Follett said.
The research isn’t likely to be part of currency in deals, but it could affect how much cinema advertising clients buy and its role in meeting aggregate attention goals in their plans, said Joanne Leong, global head of planning for Dentsu.
“With our Attention Economy initiative over the past five years, we’ve been trying to build a database of attention benchmarks, metrics and norms we can both use for planning and activation,” Leong said. “This is really exciting for us, because this is the first time we’ve been able to incorporate cinema as part of that database.”
The addition of ad recall and brand choice data related to attention data is important, too, Leong said, because Dentsu already incorporates those impacts into its planning database for other media.
Mike Rosen, NCM’s chief revenue officer, would be eager to write deals based on attention-adjusted CPMs and believes the industry ultimately will move in that direction. “We think there’s an opportunity to potentially change the currency in the marketplace,” he said. “Some of that’s already taking place in the digital world. So we believe we’re moving in the right direction, but not fast enough.”
Realistically, it’s not easy to get up to avoid the pre-movie commercials. People can look away, and the infrared cameras tracking them for this study showed some did. But people are more likely to be looking at their phones or getting up from their seats at home, even for unskippable CTV commercials, said Manu Singh, senior VP of insights, analytics and sales data strategy at NCM.
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