Small family businesses, restaurants, spas, hotels, boutiques, decoration stores, among others, can now display their offer on the big screen through Cinepolis Lumierere, the first programmatic cinema platform in the world, which is already operating in Mexico.
According to data from the National Chamber of the Film Industry (Canacine), so far this year attendance and movie ticket offices in Mexico report a recovery of 85%, compared to the same period in 2021, totaling 165 million tickets in so far this year
This represents a universe of possibilities for small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) to find a new channel to advertise their offer, after Cinépolis forecasts an estimated audience of 178 million visitors for 2023 and reports 75% of the market share after the pandemic.
“Many years went by without the cinema doing anything, Cinépolis has a great responsibility to do for the film industry, advertising-speaking, today it is taking on this responsibility,” Manuel Mier y Concha, director of Cinépolis Media, explained in an interview.
What is Cinépolis Lumiere?
Cinépolis Lumiére is a project that took three years to come to fruition. It is a new way of connecting brands with the audience through a larger screen and, according to the manager, it is accessible to small advertisers, who would pay a price similar to what they do with local media.
“Cinépolis Lumiére is a platform inspired a lot by its look at Facebook ads and that’s how it works. It is extremely intuitive; any natural person can create an account, charge a credit or debit card and from there you can start buying advertising at the cinema”, explains Mier y Concha.
“What we did was connect this digital platform with the projectors of the more than 4,000 Cinepolis theaters in Mexico.”
The advertisements are projected in the commercial reel of the cinema, prior to the function. The advertiser can decide in which region he wants to advertise. An algorithm searches for available inventory that the entire direct sales team has not been able to sell and finds the best option among the more than 4,000 theaters that Cinépolis has in Mexico, based on geographic, demographic, socioeconomic level, or content segmentation.
For example, explains the manager, this tool allows a small business or restaurant in Veracruz to find available spaces at a very good price in Cinépolis throughout the state and offers them at a fairly affordable cost per impact, “as accessible as advertising on radio or local newspaper of medium or small cities”.
In this way, you have the possibility of being at the cinema locally or regionally and as you charge your credit or debit card, you can be buying a weekly, monthly or quarterly schedule in the period the advertiser decides. The cost is per thousand and depends on the hours and rooms in which the ad is displayed.
The advertising revolution
The client will have to embed their video in MP4 format in the same system. “Today anyone can create a reel on Instagram, save it and mount it on the platform and it is the content that is transmitted,” says Mier and Concha.
“Before, what was sold was the fixed plate, a slide… today we went from the fixed plate to start producing movie spots,” says Ramón Ramírez, director of Public Relations at Cinépolis.
The issue of digitization came to revolutionize absolutely everything and that is what is interesting that Cinépolis Lumiére proposes: the possibility of local advertising that now makes production easier. Before it was filming and copying. Today anyone can produce an MP4 and then edit it to be broadcast in the cinema.
Manuel Mier y Concha, director of Cinépolis Media.
The platform is very intuitive, however, there is a human filter that will verify that the materials meet the quality, that the technical characteristics are up to the mark and that the content that is going to be shown in the selection of films that the client chose is the appropriate.
There are governmental restrictions that do not allow showing material from certain types of products in open content for the whole family, so this type of content, both technical and legal review, is done by one person.
Once that happens, an email or alert is sent indicating that the material is ready to be advertised. “If there are changes in the geographic segmentation that the client made, it is indicated: your material will not be able to run in these contents, but in these others,” explains Mier and Concha.
Tell your brand story on the big screen
These are the steps to follow to use the Cinépolis Lumiére platform:
1. set up your campaign.
- After logging in, go to the campaigns tab.
- set dates
- Specify the region
- Choose the cinemas that best suit your services and/or products.
- Set the amount you want to invest. Cinépolis Lumiére allows you to segment in various ways, try additional fields and optimize your investment.
2. Upload your video or visual material
3. Start monitoring your campaign performance in real time in the campaign manager.
Cinepolis Lumiere began operating as a pilot program with 20 clients in Monterrey. The medium-term plans, advances the manager, are to take this alternative to theaters in India, South America and Spain.
Marisol Garcia Fuentes Editorial Director Emprende and Emprendedor.com. I am motivated by stories of tenacity and innovation.