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Rather than ads for financial products and the odd local apparel brand, patrons at PVR cinemas will now be greeted with commercials for glossy pouts, mysterious eyes and a soft mane when they settle down to watch a movie billed as a blockbuster. The flurry of ads for a variety of beauty products from the house of Hindustan Unilever (HUL) is because PVR has a mission to secure a set number of audience for the FMCG company.
The largest multiplex chain has now started executing the bulk deals it had struck with some advertisers at the beginning of the year. The deals marked the start of the pay-per-eyeball scheme that the chain started formulating last year. The multiplex brand is working around the lack of third-party validation of return on media spends in theatre advertising with the help of the entertainment tax that gets logged into the system. While the percentage of e-tax differs from state to state, every ticket entails it and 45 minutes into a screening, the collections for the government get recorded. PVR shares this data to give a measure of the people who were present for a show.
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Bulk pays
Gautam Dutta, COO, PVR Cinemas, says, "Advertisers are divided in three camps: The cinema loyalists, the churners and the ones who have never tried it. The churners are ones who might not have returned following a bad execution and the ones who have never tried it are the ones who harbour traditional concerns about the medium. The last two are the ones to convince with the plan." Among problems, clients have been known to be wary about the absence of a third-party audit, distractions during intermission airing andthe ways to activate a campaign in a cinema.
However, the access to an eyeball count will be available to clients who buy in bulk. They can assess the frequency and reach of their ads screened in a PVR theatre. "It is useful when talking to the Unilevers and the P&Gs of the world. Clients that big were used to spending Rs 2-3 crore earlier, when they have the potential to allocate Rs 20 crore to the same media," says Dutta.
Rate cards vs eyeballs
The bulk deals that are now materialising (PVR has signed on Kotak Mahindra Bank apart from HUL) are usually pegged on the number of eyeballs captured. Earlier, rate cards would fix the amount that a client would have to pay without much visibility on the reach and frequency of an ad placement. "Now if someone pays for reaching 10 people, then they need pay for just 10 rather than an arbitrary amount because they can cross-check if those 10 have walked in or not," says Dutta.
While brands can still opt for a timeline-bound campaign play, Dutta says that the bulk deals are about promising 50 million views (or tickets since the data accounts for the tickets sold and e-tax paid on them), for example. But Dutta also adds that it can get granular as well - advertisers can choose specific cities, localities to reach their target audience. "They could select the kind of audience, whether they want to target kids or not etc.," says Dutta. The focus on eyeballs, rather than play for a certain duration, insulates the bulk buyers from the fortunes of a movie at the box office.
Harshavardhan Gangurde, vice-president, marketing, Inox Leisure says that his chain of mulitplexes (the second-largest), which is integrating Fame that it had acquired a few years ago, sees 25 per cent of revenue from ads. Lesser in scale, Inox is organising its ad revenue measurements as well, fine-tuning the ways of measuring cost per contact for potential advertisers. "Digitisation, which is a huge step-up from even a couple of years ago, will play a key role in regularising the cost per person that an advertiser pays," Gangurde says.
Wooing the media frat
Dutta says that the biggest challenge is to convert media planners to loyalists of the medium. "So far, cinema has always been the recipient of residual money, more to the tune of Rs 10-15 lakh," he says. PVR has been holding road-shows for media planners to project the potential.
CEO at Group M (South Asia), CVL Srinivas says, "Cinema has seen an upswing of late in advertising. It has definitely moved on from being an afterthought. The string of Bollywood successes have played a role; we have only to look at the count of movies which have breached the Rs 100-crore mark in the past fewmonths. As media outside television get more regularised, they will get leveraged more. We have seen spends go up in cinema across our client base."
Dutta says, "Under the pay-per-eyeball plan, we could meet the quota in a week, a few months or even a year. However, given the latest movies, we have been able to get 19 million people to view HUL's ads, for example, in a quarter." The success run of Bollywood movies, then, has ensured PVR meets the targets faster.
