Alternative content: the cinema as entertainment hub

Mike Hope-Milne, enterprise director at Pearl & Dean, explains why the rise of alternative content offers cinema advertisers new and exciting ways to engage with an already-captive audience…

There has been something of a quiet revolution occurring on the UK’s cinema screens for a few years now, something which has been slowly building momentum and gaining in popularity, diversifying the audience base and attracting new people into the nation’s multiplexes.

I’m talking of the spread of alternative content – translating opera, ballet, comedy, music events and even theatre onto cinema screens around the UK. From humble beginnings and testbed screenings popping up here and there around the country’s cinemas, alternative content has now built towards a more regular occurrence, and looks set to become a permanent fixture in UK cinemas screens.

Cinema chains around the country have been heavily investing in digital projection technology now for the past few years, spurred on by UK Film Council funding for smaller regional cinemas and driven forward by Hollywood’s increased 3D release output. The spread of this technology into more and more screens around the country has allowed cinemas to become something more than a place to see the latest blockbuster. They are becoming entertainment hubs, places where local communities can gain access to arts programming which would usually be beyond their reach without high ticket prices and potentially a long journey into a major city.

This spread in digital technology has led to cinema’s capability to beam live events, as occurred recently with Simply Red’s last concert from the O2, or Giselle from the Royal Opera House, and can even add a new dimension to traditional arts forms, such as with the recent opera Carmen, which screened in 3D around the country. These opportunities to access different content are not limited to theatre and ‘highbrow’ entertainment either. Current alternative content airing around the nation includes Danny Boyle’s sold-out Frankenstein starring Jonny lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch, to a concert from the Prodigy. These events can even be interactive. Comedy screenings beamed live have allowed cinemagoers to heckle the comedian onstage from the safety of a location far away from the performer’s eyeline.

As alternative content opportunities spread around the nation’s screens and diversify from theatre to opera to ballet to live music, so audiences will diversify and take advantage of the change to view content they would not usually be able to access. This represents an incredible opportunity for brands to engage with a wide variety of different audience types in a place they already associate with advertising messages; in the cinema. From the foyer through to the screen, brands have an incredible opportunity to engage with cinemagoers, through posters, foyer branding activity, experiential, all the way through to the auditorium itself.

Not only can brands already present in cinemas capitalise on this opportunity to engage with new demographics, but there is also a tremendous potential here for new brands who have never considered advertising in the cinema space before. Alternative content provides an influx of new audiences in a venue where people are already expecting to see advertising messages and to be entertained, but with the twist of communicating around live, interactive events or themed content nights in a manner which the traditional format of this content would not permit. Beyond the programme, theatre and opera destinations do not typically offer equivalent scope for brands to engage with their captive audiences.

In many ways, the spread of alternative content onto the nation’s cinema screens offers advertisers the best of both worlds: branding in an environment where audiences are not only captive but fully expecting to see it, and the opportunity to associate with programming in a social environment that would typically be beyond their reach.