MULTIPLEX CINEMA CHAIN LEVERAGES BEHAVIOURAL DATA TO DOUBLE IMAX TICKET SALES FOR TOP GUN: MAVERICK

Gruvi worked with a multinational cinema chain to help them maximise the value of Top Gun: Maverick theatrical releases in their IMAX screen. By retargeting audiences that have previously purchased, or shown an interest in purchasing IMAX tickets, we achieved $21.28 return for every $1 spent on advertising. We were then able to use these audiences to prospect for new audiences to the experience at similar fantastic rates. Read on to find out how we did that.

Our team implemented advanced website tracking on the cinema’s site to differentiate audience behaviours by collecting their website interactions including: views, session interactions, adds to cart and purchases based on ticket type. We also made sure to separate audiences based on their spend habits, including whether they bought food & beverages in advance of the trip. This allowed the film campaign to leverage specific audience groups based on their previous film consumption patterns such as ‘levels of expenditure’ so we could effectively retarget them with tailored IMAX creatives.

Audience Behavioural Targeting Increases Sales

The process of media planning, visualising, performance benchmarking and campaign tracking were streamlined through an intelligent system Gruvi created called TAP (The Audience Project). One of the biggest benefits of TAP is that audiences can be harvested and organised from their very first engagement across a wide variety of films and purchase behaviours i.e. from their first attempt to investigate the film on the cinema’s site through to the timing, selected cinema and method of payment. These nuances allow our ad-operation team to retarget contextually over the course of the campaign to ensure these audiences purchase at a higher rate (3 to 6X higher) than the control groups.

Audience Behavioural Targeting Locates New Audiences

Another benefit of using audience data based on purchase behaviour is that, this allowed us to prospect for new audiences by creating look-alikes. Look-Alike audiences are audiences who have similar buying habits online and are a fantastic strategy for widening the ‘effective reach’ of the campaign to people who may have not tried the IMAX experience yet but are more likely to engage and purchase than the control group (2 to 4X).

A word of warning on targeting

Don’t limit yourself to 1st Party Data collection routines that narrowly focus on the outputs of your Customer Data Platform or email news letter systems. Audience Behavioural Data from your campaigns and your website and apps are excellent prospecting pools for growing your campaign's effective reach and attracting new users. Leveraging on behavioural data automates the prospecting process to generate sales before the film is out of the theatrical window. In our experiment look-alike audiences based on IMAX purchasing data outperformed cinemas' existing customer datasets as well as interest based/affinity audiences provided by advertising channels. This data is gold, and if you are not using it, come talk to our data science team today.

Interested in maximising the value of YOUR theatrical release? Learn how to double your ticket sales with us by booking a consultation here.