Cinema advertising company, Digital Cinema Media (DCM), held its annual Upfronts showcase at the flagship Odeon Luxe Leicester Square, London, playing to a full house of agencies and brand representatives. Brought forward from its usual July slot to 27th March, the event was hosted as usual by CEO Karen Stacey. The event included illuminating new research that showed just how cinema advertising is a key factor in impacting brand pricing. 

The opening showreel – driven by the message “this is where brands become blockbusters” – felt like a rallying cry, featuring clips from “Anora” director Sean Baker’s Oscar speech as he spoke about the power of movie theatres to bring people together for a “communal experience you simply don’t get at home.” It’s a sentiment that will no doubt not be lost on all attendees at the Upfronts showcase.

Chiming with DCM’s mantra of “Start With Cinema”, Stacey noted that more and more brands were using cinemas as their launch spots. “Cinema is taking centre stage [in] those campaigns,” she said. Despite competition from streaming sites, UK cinema audiences are up 10% in the first quarter (Q1) of 2025, revealed Stacey, who added: “More and more people are going back to the movies.” DCM revenues were also up 33% in the same period. 

This upswing in Q1 can partly be attributed to the success of “Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy”, which took GBP £11.8 million over its four-day opening in the UK on 13th February. But the positives didn’t stop there, with DCM’s Tom Linay and Jeremy Kolesar taking to the stage later in the morning to map out what cultural cinematic events we can expect in 2025. Highlighting the slate for the forthcoming months, this included what they believe will be the key date of 23rd May, when “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning”, “Lilo & Stitch” and Wes Anderson’s “The Phoenician Scheme” are all scheduled for release. 

With global economic uncertainty looming, however, the morning’s speakers were at pains to recognise the tough realities of the moment, for both consumers and brands. Fortunately, help is at hand. As Stacey revealed, DCM has launched a new tool on its website, the KPI Maximiser. With over GBP £1 million invested and over 100 campaigns measured, the tool draws from DCM and research and insight firm Differentology’s extensive databank to help users maximise key brand and campaign metrics and evaluate where cinema can work for them.

Still, there’s nothing like a bit of research to back this up. Joining Upfronts for the second year in a row was Andrew Tenzer, co-founder of research and thought leadership consultancy, everyday people. Last year, Tenzer spoke on the cultural impact of cinema and its unique role in satisfying people’s need for community. This year, he concentrated on the economic and commercial edge that cinema offers to advertisers. 

His talk, titled ‘Maximising Price: The Role of Media’, set out to explore the challenges brands are facing in trying to maintain price and maximise value in this economic climate. “The state of the economy leaves brands facing a great conundrum,” Tenzer warned. “Costs are rising and businesses need to raise their prices, but consumer confidence remains very fragile.” 

The Pain of Price
As Tenzer said, “In the boardroom, price is a number. In the real world, price is largely a negative psychological experience. So behavioural research shows that price is framed as a loss. And neuro research shows that when people think about price, it activates what’s called the insular cortex, the part of the brain that deals with emotional processing, empathy and the processing of pain.”

In other words, there is a huge gap between the profit-driven motivations of the boardroom and the basic motivations of consumers, like pleasure and loss aversion. 

With this in mind, the everyday people team looked to explore how media might impact price, tying in with DCM’s own evidence of cinema driving perceptions of quality and good value for advertising brands. Their new research dug deep into the link between brand quality perceptions and people’s willingness to pay. 

TIXE
For research purposes, everyday people created a fictional brand, TIXE, and gave it two very distinct and different product descriptions: a mobile phone and a laundry detergent. 

2700 UK adults were interviewed and split across 18 demographically-matched media cells (various media channels), with nine looking at the mobile phone brand, nine the laundry detergent. Each cell was given a synopsis of the product and told it was launching exclusively in their specific media cell – cinema, TV, podcasts, social media and so on. 

Four simple questions were asked:

1) At what price would you consider TIXE to be a reasonable price?
2) At what price would TIXE be too cheap, and therefore you would think the quality wasn’t very good?
3) At what price would you consider TIXE is starting to get expensive, so that it is not out of the question, but you would have to give some thought to buying it?
4) At what price would you consider TIXE too expensive to buy? 

The results were encouraging for those in the cinema exhibition business. As Tenzer revealed, there was a strong correlation between the media channel and willingness to pay. For both the fictional TIXE mobile phone and the laundry detergent, cinema came out on top. “People are willing to pay substantially more for TIXE if they see it in the cinema,” he revealed.

When it came to the mobile phone, the advertising medium of cinema delivered a 10% higher price premium than the all-channel average.

As for the laundry detergent, despite the fictional product being at a lower price point, again cinema delivered the highest optimal price of any media channel, a 14% price premium versus the all-channel average.

Two Main Takeaways
Tenzer concluded his talk by suggesting that “cinema has a really, really key role to play in maximising business success”. 

The two key points were as follows: 

1) In tough economic times, quality, value, reliability are the primary things for people when buying brands and products. As the research showed, cinema signals those attributes very strongly for advertising brands. 

2) Not all channels are created equally. “The media mix has a really clear role to play in influencing price perceptions, and therefore long term and short term profitability,” said Tenzer. “So we think it’s time for marketeers to better understand the role media plays in a more holistic approach to driving business outcomes.”