• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, July 15, 2024

Storytellers and brands have few platforms that can capture consumers' attention and bring them messaging similar to the way movie theaters do. At least that's what National CineMedia, the largest cinema advertising platform, would like advertisers to believe.

Rather than tout the media without numbers to back the rhetoric, it ran a study with research partner Lumen late last year to test the hypothesis. 

“For at-home screens, only 40% to 50% watch the screen and even fewer watch all the way through,” Manu Singh, senior vice president of insights and analytics at National CineMedia, told Data & Programmatic Insider.

National CineMedia worked with Lumen to build an “actual moviegoing experience” using technology to compare how much attention movies in theaters can capture compared with other types of digital media, Singh said.

The study analyzed content to determine whether demographics, category, creative, and ad placement actually mattered.

The idea was to determine whether cinema’s dominance holds steady whether ads are placed in a custom or live pre-show with access across key demographics, so the test measured the percentage of people looking at a movie screen when an ad appeared, and for how long they viewed the ad.

They referred to the test as Attention 2.0: Benchmarking Cinema Attention. This second-year study doubled the number of participants, but instead of well-known movies used two Indie titles -- “The Creator” and “Dumb Money” -- to run the study.

Participants selected the movie and were allowed to walk in and out of the theater to use the restroom or buy refreshments.

“On social, people skip the ads,” Singh said.

Cinema was compared with other ad-supported video options such as FAST networks, premium AVOD and linear live sports, as well as DEI data, attention, and deeper category insights.

For example, if a Coca-Cola ad ran in the study, the group would have compared the cinema-run ad to other media such as live sports, and premium placements such as Hulu and YouTube, building the comparison index.   

Infrared cameras were installed in theaters owned by AMC and Cinemark to report pupil and upper-body movements. All 364 participants age 18 and older opted in to the experiences. Six screenings were fielded in October and conducted in New York and Los Angeles, respectively.

The test determined that cinema leads in average seconds viewed, increasing for 30-second ads when measured with a broader sample as in this study compared with tests run in 2022.

For the average 30-second ad, cinema came in at 25.1 seconds viewed, compared with linear live sports at 17.7, premium AVOD at 15.5, 15.0 at Pluto/Tubi, Roku at 15.1, and YouTube at 14.6.

It also outperformed social and digital platforms with 6x to 16x greater attention, according to the study.

Ironically, the ad length increases cinema’s advantage to keep the viewer’s attention by 3x to 6x.

Cinema 30-second ads are 2x more likely to keep the viewer's attention when compared with linear live sports.

For 60-second ads, cinema is 3x more likely for linear live sports. Those percentages increased for premium AVOD, Pluto/Tubi, Roku, and YouTube.