Film attendance plummeted through the pandemic.

However in-cinema promoting firm Nationwide CineMedia wasn’t idle whereas it waited for foot visitors to bounce again, mentioned Manu Singh, SVP of strategic perception and analytics. As a substitute, the corporate invested closely in its knowledge expertise infrastructure.

Now, with moviegoers returning to theaters, NCM’s pandemic undertaking is prepared for its big-screen second. The brand new knowledge and analytics platform, NCMx, was launched ultimately week’s upfronts.

NCMx serves as a back-end knowledge service for theater chains. It aggregates and packages knowledge into analytics reporting, which might be sliced by geographical, behavioral and publicity knowledge – together with affinities based mostly on films individuals watch.

The shiny new knowledge choices depend upon a broader return to pre-pandemic moviegoing.

Singh made the case for film theaters as a approach to attain twine cutters and twine nevers. A Samba TV report mentioned 45% of linear advert spend in This autumn 2021 reached solely 3% of “gentle” TV viewers, or audiences that lean towards over-the-top (OTT) streaming video. These “unreachables” might be discovered sitting in theaters, she mentioned.

Demographically, the thought is smart – youthful generations haven’t ditched conventional TV, as a result of they by no means knew it to start with. However younger audiences nonetheless flock to theaters, Singh mentioned.

Attribution

It’s arduous sufficient to trace client conduct pushed by the massive display in the lounge. Now think about measuring the impact of an advert on dozens or lots of of individuals – who is aware of? – sitting in a theater.

NCM has used panel-based matching prior to now, Singh mentioned, for attribution.

However NCMx marks the primary time the corporate can tie deterministic publicity knowledge into viewers segments. With a first-party knowledge asset – together with knowledge from proprietary cell apps, loyalty card memberships and anonymized geographical knowledge and machine IDs – NCM can observe alerts down the acquisition funnel, she mentioned, from foot visitors and web page visits to app downloads and transactions. Then, NCM can share the mixture knowledge with third-party attribution companions (similar to Catalina) to attach exposures to real-life conversions.

The attribution capabilities had been additionally a part of NCM’s progress plan previous to the pandemic and shift to first-party knowledge providers.

Take two

NCM’s media enterprise started as pre-roll advertisements on theater screens. And that’s nonetheless the enterprise.

NCM examined extra differentiated pre-roll placements in theaters, however didn’t attain a full rollout earlier than the pandemic hit, Singh mentioned. Now, the corporate is refocused on implementing “lights-down” segments in addition to the coveted advert slot between trailers and showtime.

Attribution can also be interwoven with the NCMx retargeting answer.

Retargeting is a boon for NCMx as a result of campaigns are not sure to the “must-see window” in theaters, Singh mentioned.

Advertisers can join the theater audiences to website visitors or gross sales. As a substitute of patching collectively methods to retarget moviegoers “out within the wild,” she mentioned, manufacturers can now retarget their audiences extra effectively in the actual world whereas they’re “within the mindset of creating a purchase order.”