So while I was at the movie theater a couple days ago, I had an idea on how you can maximize ad revenue in the theaters and also build brand loyalty. If you're from Southern California, or other parts of the country, no doubt you've seen AMC's MovieWatcher club - you get 2 points for each ticket you buy to a movie and for every ten points, you get a free coke or something and at every twenty points, you get a free movie ticket to a movie that has been out for three weeks or more. At every hundred points, you get a free package of two tickets, coke & popcorn. It's a pretty good deal and between my two cards (one for Orange County and one for San Diego county) I have over 500 points (yeah...it's kinda sad when you think about it). Edwards/Regal Cinemas just recently unveiled their own program like AMC and they also feature "The 2wenty" before movies that are little ads cleverly disguised as featurettes - "Go behind NBC's latest show..." And now Century is following somewhat with a card that gets you 10% off all snack bar purchases - you also can get a coupon for a free snack bar item with a purchase every week with their e-mail newsletter.
What you need to do here is combine all three technologies. You have people register for a card and give them points for each movie ticket they purchase. You then give them points and a percentage off each snack bar item they purchase. Finally, you get them to the theater early by featuring NTN trivia before the movie starts. You can have two ten minute games before each movie where the winner would score bonus points on top of just giving away points for playing the game. The genius here is you get people there early, get them involved in the trivia game and you get them to watch ads that are shown during the results after each question, or even on the side of each question as you have a lot of space to work with.
So now we've got these people hooked into their points with great prizes available via the website or at the customer service desk as such.
For each movie ticket you buy, you get 10 points (maybe more for adult prices or fewer points for matinees). You then can give them one points per dollar spent at the snack bar AND 5% off your total purchase there. Once they get into the theater, you have a gamepad built into the armrest with a slot where you can enter your card similar to the slots available on slot machines for frequent players. They earn 2 points per game played and a bonus of 3 points for the top 10% of the players (so one person gets the bonus for every 10 players in the theater).
So let's say you've got a family of four going to the theater during prime time (full adult price tickets). So you get somewhere from 30 to 40 points for buying the tickets (maybe only 5 points per child ticket - or even better, give them one point per dollar spent as many theaters are going towards the $10 ticket). They then go to the snack bar and buy two large drinks at $4 each, 2 large popcorns at $5 each and a pretzel at $3.50. Here again they get one point per dollar - so 21.5 points and then they save 5% and end up paying $20.25 (maybe even give 2 points per dollar spent or give a 10% discount as the highest profit margins are at the snack bar). They then get into the theater ten minutes early and play the trivia game in their seats (you'd have to figure out how to use one card for multiple seats or see if you can have everyone have their own card, though that might not be practical for families). Both parents play and one scores in the top 10%, so they earn 7 more points there (2+2+3). At the end of the day, they've spent over $50, watched your ads while playing trivia and racked up 50-70 points on their card. I think if you can get a family of four to spend $50+ for one movie, they should earn a free drink or popcorn or whatever, so they could go home, redeem their points for a free snack bar item (any snack bar item - it sucks when you're required to get one item you don't want) which could be mailed to them (expensive) or, at the register the next time through, they could just subtract points from their card for a free item. Alternatively, they could save the points for free movie tickets (unrestricted - I hate the AMC "free" tickets) or you could have even bigger prizes on the website - give away movie posters, lobby paraphanalia (how cool would it be to have one of those 20 foot high posters you see?) or even larger prizes - trips to film sets, whatever.
That's about the bulk of my idea, but I'll expound on the trivia presentation as well. All you'd need is a customized NTN installation that would read usernames from the card that stores your points and you'd just have it entered into your gamepad on the armrest. You wouldn't be able to register, check news stories, or do any of the other extraneous things offered on the NTN "playmaker." You'd enter the card and you'd be ready to go - or, perhaps, in the case of families, you'd enter the card, choose the username you want to play as (up to six names per card, or something like that) and then you could remove the card and enter it into another armrest. The card would have to be in an armrest to register points (any armrest will do in the case of families) and then, before the movie starts, along with the "Turn Off Your Cellphones" reminder, you could remind people to remove their frequent moviegoer cards. Each game would be confined to one theater during most of the showings, as you'd have to synchronize the games across theaters to have rankings, plus, you don't want too many people playing as a leaderboard with 100 people would discourage those at the bottom of the list from paying attention. During the slower times of the day though, you could combine theater rankings to get people who like competition involved as they wouldn't want to play alone. Each round would consist of 10 to 15 questions (a standard NTN Wipeout game includes 15 questions in 15 minutes, but that includes commercials). So you get 15 questions in 10 minutes (or perhaps even 15 minutes if you wanted to run commercials alongside the in-game commercials to give people one break during the game for food or the bathroom. If you decided to change seats, you could take your score with you via the moviegoer card, or, if you just removed the card but then didn't re-insert it somewhere else, the armrest would stay logged in, as any "sign off" buttons would be confusing - you'd just need arrows (which would double as answer keys and an Enter key. So you could have 2 rows of three (standard NTN layout) with the Up arrow on the top row (#2) and the down arrow on the second row (#5). You could then use the #6 key as the ENTER key as NTN games only have five possible answers.
As I was writing the above in-depth trivia post, another thought occurred to me. To have even more fun, you could have a short trivia game after the movie about the movie itself. You could minimize the credits (not sure if the MPAA would allow that though) and have part of the screen used for a trivia game that would be something like 5-7 questions in increasing difficulty. You've already got a captive audience, you could give them some parting ads (as you forget most of the ads you saw before the movie) and give them a chance to earn more points, or, if you could make the trivia questions hard enough, give away prizes right then and there to the top scorer if enough people play (or during the "primetime" shows on Friday and Saturday nights that are full price). So if you had a packed house on a Friday night and got a minimum of 30 people playing the final game for a movie, you could give away a T-shirt on the spot to the highest scorer that the studio would love to furnish.
God, how I'd love to open my own theatre(s) - I mean, I already own a great domain name - TheCineplex.com.
URL:
THE Cineplex (nothing there yet)
