CASE STUDY NORDISK FILM KINO S MARKETING HITS HIGH NOTES

CASE STUDY NORDISK FILM KINO S MARKETING HITS HIGH NOTES

Objective Leverage Movio Cinema to effectively promote live event cinema screenings Challenges Getting started with Movio Cinema Finding niche audiences Solutions Movio Cinema Results Selling out two event cinema screenings of Kanye West s new album launch Understanding how to build relevant and engaging campaigns Establishing an email open rate benchmark (42.3%) Gauging campaign effectiveness Refining and developing their marketing strategy 2

Earlier this year, hip-hop music lovers in Oslo were abuzz: Kanye West was coming to town. West, one of the most commercially successful and acclaimed musicians of the 21st century, wasn t actually performing in Oslo per se, but his February 11th concert at New York s Madison Square Garden was screened live at the Ringen cinema in Oslo s trendy Grünerløkka district, after Norwegian rights were secured by Nordisk Film Kino (Nordisk). Nordisk Film Kino the Norwegian operations of Nordisk Film Cinemas, the leading cinema chain in Denmark and Norway owns 20 cinemas with more than 3 million visitors annually. Its loyalty programme, Kinopluss, currently has more than 200,000 members. To make the Kanye West concert a hugely successful event cinema-based marketing programme, Nordisk used Movio Cinema to tap into its loyalty programme as a means of reaching the right members at the right time. Movio is the global leader in marketing data analysis and campaign management for cinema exhibitors and film distributors. It maintains real-time, authoritative data on the loyalty activity and transactions of customers, and integrates with the leading cinema POS systems such as Vista Entertainment Solutions. 3

TO OUR SURPRISE AND DELIGHT, THE TARGETED MESSAGING HAD ACCELERATED SALES 4

BRINGING AND SELLING THE SHOW TO OSLO The event was booked for 10:15 p.m. in a 240-seat screen at the Ringen cinema. While Nordisk was confident of the audience, Kanye West has a significant fan base in Norway, it had little information from the promoters about exactly what was planned for the show. Everything about the show was secretive, as this would prove to be the first event to feature music from West s new album, Waves. Due to the secrecy, Nordisk couldn t promote any specific details about the show, and was limited to packaging it as an exclusive performance. No one, save Kanye himself, knew what would be showcased: a speech, a concert, a fashion show, or all of these? The question for Nordisk s marketing team: how to promote something without knowing the details? How to target the campaign with a loyalty member database consisting of film genre filters but not music interests? Nordisk started by rolling out a campaign using its normal marketing channels: front-page placement of the show on its website, a Facebook post, and an article in the regular weekly newsletter. Then they turned to Movio Cinema to really target the audience. We had started with Movio Cinema only a few months before this event, in December 2015, as fairly new users of the tool, we didn t have the operational skills or technical architecture in place to start doing a host of e-mail campaigns with promotional codes and rebates, says Erlend Bøksle, marketing director for Nordisk Film Kino. However, we knew we could leverage Movio Cinema to create a target audience that would perfectly suit the event. Prior to sending out targeted messaging, the session had sold only 37 seats. Nordisk had earlier experience marketing music events (i.e., Ed Sheehan and Roger Waters The Wall concerts), but that demographic wouldn t necessarily be interested in Kanye West. They needed to look elsewhere. On February 1, we had the idea to look at loyalty members that had already seen the movie Straight Outta Compton, Bøksle continues. It just made sense that the audience for a hip-hop music film would be similar to the fans of hip-hop artists. Using Movio Cinema, Nordisk found 822 likely customers from the 88,000 Oslo Kinopluss members that had seen the movie. They were sent a targeted e-mail with information about the Kanye West show. It was very easy to pull this together, and our team was very eager to see the results the following morning, says Lalita Skorstad, customer relationship manager at Nordisk Film Kino. To our surprise and delight, the targeted messaging had accelerated sales to fill three-quarters of the seats; by lunchtime, the whole session was fully booked, 10 days before the event! This was an extraordinary result, as Norwegians tend to be spontaneous in their ticket buying behaviour, usually booking on the same day or day before a screening. That was just the beginning; the cinema manager at Ringen called soon after, asking to set up a second screening due to the volume of requests received. So a second screen was reserved, this one with 407 seats. Again the slow pattern repeated itself, but Nordisk waited until three days before the show to send out another targeted e-mail to the same audience, removing loyalty members who had already bought tickets to the initial screening. The day after the campaign went out, the second screen was completely sold out. 5

RESULTS TO BANK ON The results of the two campaigns speak for themselves; 822 Kinopluss members were targeted which resulted in 32% visitation rate, compared to an average of 2.5 to 6 percent visitation rate for their usual weekly newsletter. OPEN RATE CLICK THROUGH RATE UNSUBSCRIBE RESPONSE KANYE WEST CAMPAIGNS 42.3% 15.5% 0% INDUSTRY BENCHMARK 20.0% 3.7% 0.039% EMEA BENCHMARK* 20.4% 3.8% 0.030% OUR CAMPAIGN ACHIEVED A 42.3% OPEN RATE *Statistics from IBM marketing cloud This was a great success for us in showing how targeted e-mail marketing campaigns can achieve sales, says Bøksle. We set out with the key objective of getting to know Movio Cinema inside out to better utilise the functionalities within the console. We also thought this campaign could establish solid benchmark metrics for future campaigns that will help us adjust messaging and refine tactics. 6

APPLYING LESSONS LEARNED While this targeted event cinema campaign raised the bar for Nordisk marketing, it also inspired them to further leverage the tactic and gain new expertise in applying analytics in e-mail marketing. Before this event, we didn t know what to expect as we d only sent out e-mails based on cinema preference, membership tiers, and geographic location, notes Skorstad. Gaining experience with Movio Cinema encouraged us to set up new audiences to correlate with our services, such as baby cinema (i.e., for parents with small children), senior cinema (i.e., for people over 67 years old who are retired), and alternative events such as concerts, opera, and ballet. Shortly after the Kanye West event, Nordisk promoted a special event in conjunction with the movie 45 Years. The film had already been running at cinemas for eight weeks, but the special event was to feature a conversation between a family therapist and a Norwegian author after the screening. We d only sold 28 tickets and the event was booked on a screen that holds 125 guests, so we needed a push, explains Bøksle. We defined an audience who were regulars at the cinema where the event was to be held, who had a preference for drama (i.e., top 10 percent), and who had previously attended a matinee showing. They might even have seen the film before, but we thought this was something special that might capture their interest. They identified 480 Kinopluss members and sent them a personalised e-mail message with details about the event. Though the response wasn t as immediate or dramatic as the Kanye West mailing, after a few days the event was fully booked. This was for a much older audience, so we didn t expect overnight online success like the earlier campaign; but it was on track and to the right group, so we were delighted that the event sold out, remarks Skorstad. 7

MOVING FORWARD WITH MOVIO CINEMA Skorstad says that adding Movio Cinema to its marketing arsenal hasn t changed Kinopluss, but rather has dramatically changed Nordisk s communications with its Kinopluss members. We are heading towards a customer experience management strategy where we are focused on giving our members the right message on the right channel at the right time, she explains. We now prioritise targeted communications, triggered e-mails, and A/B testing; in the future we hope to start full-scale marketing automation based on a member s lifecycle. We are looking to improve continuously, and Movio Cinema is helping us as we go down this road. We re looking forward to utilising the tool to its full extent and reaping the benefits that centralised loyalty membership management can provide. One of the many attributes that Nordisk likes is the way Movio Cinema works with the Vista Cinema point-of-sale system. The seamless integration with Vista Cinema is key for finding the right audience for our marketing by targeting the behaviour of Kinopluss members instead of relying on online profiles, notes Bøksle. Since Kinopluss is a points-based loyalty programme, it s also convenient that Nordisk can allocate points in Movio Cinema that are then transferred back into Vista s Loyalty. Moreover, from a user standpoint, the Nordisk team has found the Movio Cinema software intuitive and user-friendly. We like the way it looks; it is well designed with really good visuals, says Skorstad. We also like that the analytics provide both detailed and overview metrics to give us fast, accurate information on our members and campaign performance. The speed of search results is great, as are the look and feel of the dashboard. WE ARE FOCUSED ON GIVING OUR MEMBERS THE RIGHT MESSAGE ON THE RIGHT CHANNEL AT THE RIGHT TIME 8

COMING ATTRACTIONS Today Nordisk is using Movio Cinema to increase its member database and engage directly with new and existing members. But that s just scratching the surface of what they hope to do. The marketing team wants to dig deeper into the analytics, using data to anticipate customer needs and behaviours, optimise newsletters and campaigns, adjust communications, and leverage data for better strategic decisions. One of our immediate tasks is retention analysis: using Movio Cinema data to find temporary and permanently lapsed members to re-engage and hopefully re-activate, concludes Bøksle. It ll definitely be a valuable and essential tool when we decide to redesign or make changes to Kinopluss. 9

ABOUT MOVIO Movio is the global leader in marketing data analytics and campaign management software for cinema exhibitors, film distributors and studios. A company of Vista Group International Ltd (NZX/ASX:VGL), Movio s mission is to revolutionise the way the film industry interacts with moviegoers. Movio maintains real-time, authoritative data on the loyalty activity and transactions for many of the world s biggest cinema chains and captures the behaviour of over 34 million active cinema loyalty members worldwide. Movio Cinema, our flagship product, holds comprehensive marketing data covering 53 percent of cinema screens of the Large Cinema Circuit in North America (17,000 screens) and 25 percent globally (25,000 screens). Movio Media aggregates data to provide film distributors and studios comprehensive market data on the behaviour of typical moviegoers, crucial audience insights and innovative campaign solutions. The Movio Media technology offers the most powerful and most accurate real-time film market research platform in the United States. Movio operates in North America, Latin America, Europe, Middle East, Australia, New Zealand, China, and South East Asia. www.movio.co @MovioHQ www.linkedin.com/company/movio 10

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