The Weekend Round-up
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 came roaring out of the traps this weekend, delivering comfortably the biggest opening weekend of the year. A Friday to Sunday gross of £10.3m easily knocks the year’s previous best, The Inbetweeners 2’s £8m debut, into second place. It’s also a series best for The Hunger Games, eclipsing Catching Fire’s £10.1m opening weekend exactly a year ago. Including Thursday, it has now earned £12.7m and is well on the way to matching Catching Fire’s final total of £34.2m. Read more
The latest research from Digital Cinema Media (DCM), the market leader in UK cinema advertising, has provided new evidence into the unique power of cinema advertising.
The findings of our Engagement Study, The Bigger Picture, revealed that advertising watched in the cinema is processed by the brain more consciously, proving a much more powerful and emotionally engaging medium for brands and offering a unique role for cinema in the contemporary communication mix. Read more
NEW TITLES ADDED TO SCHEDULE:
No Escape is released on 1 May 2015 Read more
As the holiday season draws closer, Nike has unveiled a new commercial as part of its "Choose Your Winter" campaign. Starring Irish actor and comedian Chris O'Dowd as a weatherman, the spot presents various winter sports and features athletes Aaron Rodgers, Jordy Nelson, Clint Dempsey, Brad Evans, Mary Cain, Gracie Gold, and Johnnie Paxson.
Wieden + Kennedy's new Nike campaign is all about how painful it can be for athletes dealing with the harshness of winter weather and at the centre of the entire campaign is the Nike Hyperwarm material, which can keep you warm, yet sweat-free, in the winter months. Nike’s latest cold weather campaign takes a playful approach to tackling the elements and “choosing your winter.” Read more
I hope you were lucky enough to get one of Phil Clapp’s golden tickets to this year's CEA Digital Conference. It is being held this Thursday at the Cineworld O2 and is now officially sold out! I’m really looking forward to the conference, which promises to be a great event.
Simon Rees, our esteemed leader, is participating in the first key panel session of the day ‘Managing the Digital Present’. As the UK is now a fully digitised sector, this session will look at the additional revenue opportunities presented by digital technology, in particular the ability to show a broader range of films, better matched to available audiences, as well as the way digitisation has brought about a step change in the attractiveness of the big screen advertisers. Read more
Dave Benady of Campaign reports from last weeks DCM Upfronts event. Brands need persuading that, in a world of proliferating, mostly hand-held screens, the oldest and biggest of them all is still a powerful platform for their ads. Cinema offers advertisers the benefits of a wrap-around, immersive experience, but some still see it as an expensive and clunky, slow-build medium, best left to high-end brands that can spend heavily on top-drawer creative. Digital Cinema Media, the sales house that handles 80 per cent of the medium’s UK advertising, has attempted to drag it into the modern age, spending £200 million on the introducion of digital technology across its estate. This has been a long time coming. Last week, DCM staged its first-ever "upfronts" event, inviting agencies and brands to Bafta in London’s Piccadilly to review the opportunities offered by the new technology and to showcase upcoming movie releases for 2014. The approach is more commonly associated with TV and is a purposeful repositioning, according to Simon Rees, the chief executive of DCM, who says that the digital revolution has transformed cinema advertising. Production costs and lead times have been slashed, and it now possible to book ads, which once required at least a month to turn around, in less than a week. Brands can also more accurately target audiences according to demographics and specific locations, it is claimed. So, for instance, retailers with outlets near a cinema can now run ads targeting key audiences, encouraging them to visit their stores after the film. "Cinema is the most dynamic way to express content, though the advertising has been formulaic and static over the past 50 years. But digital has changed that," Rees says. "This allows advertisers to engage in cinema in a modern way, which is as flexible as any other medium." Another DCM initiative has been the launch of the Cinime mobile app, which has been designed to enhance cinema visits with exclusive content, rewards and offers. After tests in 11 cinemas, it has been downloaded 60,000 times. The app creates opportunities for brands before and after the film is screened, and is part of a strategy to broaden the impact of a cinema tie-up. DCM is also looking to create sponsored content to run before films start. Rees says that 250 brands have begun booking through DCM since the digital changeover a year ago and insists there is much more the company can do to make cinema advertising attractive. Its upmarket audiences of families and hard-to-reach youth make it appealing to advertisers, he argues. Cinemas attracted 172.5 million admissions in 2012, reaching 70 per cent of the UK population with £1.1 billion in box-office receipts. DCM offers four million advertising playlists and will serve on average 2.2 billion 30-second impacts in 2013. Nonetheless, audience is dependent on quality of output and 2013 has not been vintage. Advertising revenues for cinema fluctuate wildly depending on releases. In the fourth quarter of 2012, UK ad revenues hit nearly £80 million, largely owing to the release of the James Bond movie Skyfall. In the same period this year, they are expected to reach a rather more modest £55 million, according to the Advertising Association and Warc’s Expenditure Report. Carat’s head of cinema, Dilshan Swaris, claims some brands worry their ads might not hold up on the big screen, particularly when compared with the spectacular visuals provided by many films. He believes it is up to creatives to ensure their ads are up to scratch and to leverage drops in production costs. Equally, it is up to DCM to do more to prove that the high cost of reaching cinema audiences, which are ageing in profile, is worth it in the first place. Read more
The Weekend Round-up
Interstellar stayed in orbit this weekend despite a strong challenge from Benedict Cumberbatch and The Imitation Game. Christopher Nolan’s jaw-dropping sci-fi epic fell 29% to £3.8m and after ten days in cinemas has earned £12.1m. At the same stage in its run, Gravity was on £14.7m, although that included one extra day, having opened on a Thursday. A chunky 17.3% of Interstellar’s total is from IMAX screenings, which highlights the draw of this film in the format. 13.5% of Gravity’s total gross was from IMAX screenings. Read more
The Times and the Sunday Times are to sponsor the Picturehouse Recommends magazine in Picturehouse cinemas across the UK for the next four months.
The scheme, developed and created by Digital Cinema Media (DCM) and brokered by m/SIX, will feature the Times and the Sunday Times’ Unquiet Film Series, showcasing the work of the newspapers’ journalists, editors, photographers and contributors in a collection of short films. Read more
Wish You Were Here? is a short film produced by Brazilian graphic design and animation studio Lobo, that offers an alternate, off-kilter tribute to D&AD, reinterpreting, reimagining and ‘mashing up’ highlights from over five decades of Pencil winners.
As well as being a retrospective of sorts, it’s also part of a broader Call for Entries campaign aimed at generating awareness and excitement around the 2015 D&AD Professional Awards. Wish You Were Here? is an invitation and a challenge for professionals to try and make their work a part of this history. Read more
The Imperial War Museum celebrated its 100th year since opening with a special centenary campaign that looked to attract new visitors to the museum, and that was pushed out through cinema. The animated film entitled “Flight of the Stories” shows speech marks floating over scenes of conflict in France, eventually arriving in London. Aardman, who are most famous for the Wallace and Gromit series, were responsible for the creative, which promotes the launch of the new First World War Galleries. The exhibition focuses on the stories of those who never left the fields of Northern France during the conflict, with the Imperial War Museum keen to ensure that these tales were not lost to the British public.
The desired audience for the campaign was a “middle youth” demographic who were early adopters, culturally curious and looking for social engagement with history. Upmarket cinema sites were subsequently selected over the London region. This incorporated seven Picturehouse sites and ten independent cinemas including the Mile End Genesis, Portobello Electric Cinema and the Olympic Cinema at Barnes. Running for two weeks in early August, the campaign is an example of how brands can use DCM’s portfolio effectively to reach upmarket cinemagoers in London. Read more
DCM's Fantasy Film League (FFL) has returned for its third and final season of 2014. As with last month, all you have to do is answer as many questions as possible in the quickest time.
The person who has consistently answered the most correct questions in the quickest time across all three quizzes (October, November and December) will win the ultimate FFL final prize, a fabulous red carpet premiere experience including a 5* dinner and overnight stay in London for two. Read more
The Weekend Round-up
Intelligent, big budget sci-fi returned to the top of the UK box office, almost exactly a year after Gravity scaled the heights. Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar kicked off with £5.4m, which is the sixth highest opening weekend of the year, behind The Lego Movie and ahead of Godzilla. As mentioned above, Gravity is the obvious comparison for Interstellar and Alfonso Cuaron’s space thrill-ride opened with £6.2m, which included £619k from previews, so its Friday to Sunday total of £5.6m is very similar to Interstellar’s and Gravity had the benefit of the 3D ticket premium. Nolan’s last original sci-fi title, Inception opened with £5.9m in 2010 and finished its run on £35.9m, while Gravity finished its run on £32.7m. There’s no guarantee that Interstellar with continue to perform in line with these titles but they are the two most obvious comparisons. Read more
