A person's attention span while watching an advertisement on an average video platform is 2.5 seconds, according to attention technology research conducted by Lumen.

What can your customers recall in those few seconds? Post-Covid, marketers are under pressure to win back the hearts and minds of their customers, and that job requires more than 2.5 seconds — especially with longer duration assets.

The challenge now for marketers is how to rebuild brand love and customer engagement in an increasingly competitive landscape. Advertising on the big screen is the perfect medium for doing just that.

The research further shows that the second-highest-attention media is YouTube's 'unskippable' ads. However, attention drops as the ad starts and after 2.5 seconds, the ad has lost 42% of the viewer's attention. In comparison, after 15 seconds, cinema advertising has lost only seven percent.

The Lumen research provides compelling evidence regarding audience retention of adverts viewed on the big screen. As such, we are more than happy to share the findings with any of our current advertisers or prospective clients.

Further to this, Kantar research shows that, compared to other channels, cinema ads are considered:
  • trustworthy
  • more relevant
  • useful
  • fun
  • entertaining
  • innovative, and
  • better quality (despite cinema hardly ever receiving its own asset).

So, while cinema reach may be overshadowed by other media types, it outperforms other media, including all video platforms, when it comes to cutting through the noise.

Ster-Kinekor represents 60% of the cinema market in South Africa and is the single biggest cinema chain on the continent. Cinema delivers on environment, impact and attention because the audience displays a high affinity for the medium, as Kantar recently revealed in its Media Reactions report.

As such, cinema is a critical channel for growing brand affinity and maintaining brand perceptions while building incremental reach.

Despite the current tough economic outlook, people still have a propensity to be entertained, and going out to watch a movie on the big screen delivers a great entertainment experience. 

As a medium, cinema is resilient; it has been around for 128 years, has survived a number of technology disruptions and is still going strong, showing a steady recovery post-Covid. It remains unique in its fresh content slate and delivery and offers a lucrative, economically active audience who wants to be there.

Globally, cinema audiences are returning to cinemas in big numbers. This is a trend that has been improving since the end of the pandemic lockdowns. In 2023, the release of Barbie and Oppenheimer contributed to making the week of Friday, 21 July the biggest trading week to date in 2023. Barbie also recorded the third biggest opening week in the past 12 months, after Black Panther in November and Avatar in December.

Advertiser confidence has followed a similar pattern to attendance. In the past fiscal to June 2023, SK sales enjoyed a 67% increase in the number of booked campaigns, with 41% of total campaigns screened coming from new advertisers predominantly in the alcohol, retail, tech and financial categories.

What has been most encouraging for us is the loyalty shown to our media platform by our advertisers. Even when attendance was down coming out of the hard Covid lockdowns, they kept their ads on our screens. For us, this speaks volumes to the power of cinema advertising and the results that these advertisers have come to achieve from the medium.

We have also addressed the requirement from advertisers for clear-cut cinema ROI by developing audience guarantee packages and forecasting models. If we overlay this with the attention research, cinema delivers a unique and extremely compelling advertising channel.

Tasneem Lorgat, senior manager of advertising at Toyota South Africa, says, "Adverts scripted to tell stories that resonate with South Africans is very much part of Toyota's DNA. And cinema has stood the test of time in delivering an immersive audience experience. It therefore remains an integral part of our media strategy."

Jeannette Saayman, buying manager at The Media Shop, says, "The advantage of big screen advertising is that cinema allows us to showcase our clients' longer duration creatives in an environment where audiences are conducive to receiving commercial messages."

Cinema advertising leads the media pack in attention and brand safety attributes. It delivers audited audience numbers and a limited number of ads in a controlled environment. Marketers make their ads to be seen, whether it's a big brand campaign or a retail promotion and the big screen delivers on this premise in every department.

For more information, visit www.sterkinekor.com. You can also follow Ster-Kinekor on Facebook, X or on Instagram.