UK/Irish cinema screen advertiser Carlton Screen Advertising (CSA) is officially in the chopping block with the most likely buyer being Pacific Equity Partners, which bought the exhibitor Australian cinema chain Hoyts last year. Having once been the biggest and most profitable screen advertiser in the world, CSA’s decline has been as steep and fast as it has been sad. Despite the OK-ish box office year 2007, CSA (2,900 screens in 500 sites) was not able to capitalize on the small growth as it was saddled with large up-front payments to some of the UK’s largest circuits. With one of these, Cineworld, being publicly quoted, CSA’s move to switch from 6-month up-front payment to month-by-month forced it to flag this to the stock market. This in turn forced CSA’s parent ITV to announce that the screen advertiser was indeed for sale – at a rock bottom price. As Sunday Times notes:
Once worth £80m, analysts now value CSA at nothing, despite healthy cinema attendances. ITV may even have to pay someone to take it off its hands.
The business is estimated to be liable for another £200m in upfront payments to customers, chiefly Odeon and Cineworld, to satisfy onerous advertising contracts that stretch to 2012.
Those agreements mean CSA has struggled to make money despite total cinema advertising income growing 10% to £170m last year, according to Nielsen figures.
Popularity: 35% [?]
Australian exhibitor Hoyts has been sold to Pacific Equity Partner in a defeat to India’s Pyramid Saimira Theatre, which had pursued the deal aggressively. James Packer’s 
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