Marketers Lobby for Movie Customers

It's Saturday night, and you've gone to see "Tin Cup" on Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade. You stop at the concession stand; your popcorn bag is covered with a full-color ad for Paramount's "The Relic." The guy in front of you is buying his kid a "kid's pak" tied to the movie "Alaska" (Sony/Columbia), which includes a cup with the Coke polar bear on it. Before going to your seat, you enter to win a Nissan (as seen in "Tin Cup," a Warner Bros. picture), and pause to check out some Disney Interactive "Hunchback of Notre Dame" software on an AST computer in the lobby.

Marketers and theater owners have discovered that multiplex lobbies provide a captive and highly desirable audience for all kinds of products. No wonder: According to the National Assn. of Theater Owners, 25% of theater admissions are 6-to-24-year-olds, considered a prime, malleable target for marketers. And 44% of admissions are 25-to-49-year-olds, those active consumers with disposable income who are expensive to reach through television.

Although there are many experiments in "place-based advertising"--from airport and shopping mall TV channels to ads on supermarket floors--movie exhibitors say they can deliver a more quantifiable and focused captive audience.

New Line Cinema introduced decorated popcorn bags at Cineplex Odeon theaters in 1994 for "The Mask." For years, the studios have provided cash, trips and other incentives to theater chains to play up certain "project pictures" (hoped-for blockbusters such as "Mission: Impossible") via sometimes-elaborate lobby displays and sweepstakes. With "Mission," some theaters ran sweepstakes in conjunction with local retailers to give away computers from Apple, which had a placement and advertising tie-in with the movie reportedly valued at $15 million.

Products from or related to other entertainment media--TV shows, computers, software and personal electronics products--are the most common non-movie marketers in theaters.

"We want promotions that bring value to us and provide entertainment to the consumer," says Dick Westerling, AMC vice president of corporate marketing, who last year cut a deal with video game maker Sega to set up computers featuring their "Toy Story" game in 25 AMC theaters in conjunction with the Disney film. Moviegoers could also register to win the game.