By David Burrick, Chief Strategy Officer, Intersection Co.

There is perhaps no more of a staple category for out-of-home advertising than new movie releases. Take a walk down the Sunset Strip or through Times Square and you will see larger-than-life ads promoting Hollywood’s newest releases.

2023 was a challenging year for this advertising category, as the industry was shut down for an extended period of time due to labor disputes, causing studios to delay the release of their theatrical films. But the category has roared back in 2024. According to the OAAA, the two largest film studios – Disney and Universal – were amongst the top 10 advertisers in the entire out-of-home industry in Q1, with other studios like Warner Brothers among the advertisers with the largest annual OOH spend increase in 2024.

Film studios have often relied on OOH advertising to boost awareness of new releases, but it has long been challenging to answer a simple question: does spending ads in OOH to promote a new movie actually get people to go to the theaters?

At Intersection, we studied this question and the answer is overwhelmingly positive – people exposed to ads on our OOH screens went to the movies at a much higher rate. 

What we did

Working with our measurement partner, StreetMetrics, Intersection studied multiple ad campaigns for films on our LinkNYC screens. We created an exposed group of customers who saw the ads on our screens, as well as a control group of similar customers who were not exposed to these advertisers. We then geofenced every movie theater in New York City and measured the difference of visitation to these theaters between the exposed and control groups.

Due to privacy considerations, while we could not directly measure which film a customer ultimately purchased a ticket to, we were able to approximate this by limiting our study to the first 14 days of each film’s release. Moreover, the films we selected were all the top films at the box office the week they were released, so we can infer that most of the traffic in movie theaters for that period of time bought tickets to the films we studied.

What we found

• Across the board lift – Overall, we saw a massive lift in theater attendance from those exposed to ads vs. the control group. Those exposed to ads for the films on our screens were 74-83% more likely to visit theaters on the opening weekend for that film than those who did not see those ads.
• Weekends perform best – While we saw strong lift in theater attendance for those exposed to ads on every single day of the week, we saw the highest performance on ads that ran on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. This makes sense. Most people go to the movies on the weekend and do not buy movie tickets significantly in advance, so consumers are swayed by advertising for films in the narrow period of time leading up to them purchasing a ticket. Based on our data, advertisers should advertise all days of the week but heavy up their purchase on weekends.
• 4-week buys make sense – All of the campaigns we studied were 4-week buys and in every study, performance increases within each week. Consumers who saw the ad the week of the film’s release were much more likely to go to the theater than those whose last exposure to the ad was 4 weeks prior to the release. However, regardless of whether someone’s last exposure to the ad was 1, 2, 3 or 4 weeks prior to the release date, in each and every case, those exposed to the ad were more likely to walk into a theater than those who were not exposed.
• Reach vs. frequency – When it comes to films, our data shows that reach matters most. 70%+ of the visits to movie theaters we observed were from consumers who saw an ad for the film just 1 or 2 times. This leads us to conclude that marketing dollars for films are best spent reaching the widest possible audience rather than repeating the same marketing message to the same audience many times over.

Marketing a film is hard. Studios spend years developing a project and have only a few weeks to convince consumers to purchase a ticket. The good news is that, according to our data, out-of-home advertising is an extremely effective tool to drive box office results.

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