Weischer.Cinema: 2019 Highly Successful Year for Cinema

More visitors, increased advertising revenues, and numerous new clients: The medium of cinema is booming, and Germany’s leading cinema marketer, Weischer.Cinema, can look back on an extremely successful year 2019.

Hamburg, January 17, 2020 – In 2018, visitor numbers fell short of expectations. Now, the latest Nielsen figures show: Last year, hundreds of thousands more visitors flocked to cinemas again. In total, around 110 million tickets were sold in 2019, representing a 14.4 percent increase compared to the previous year. The boom was driven by numerous blockbusters. The most successful film in 2019 was “Frozen” with 5.7 million visitors, followed by “The Lion King” (5.5 million) and “Avengers: Endgame” (5.1 million).

Cinema is once again among the preferred genres for advertisers. Gross advertising revenues amounted to €161.3 million in 2019. This represents an increase of 16 percent compared to the previous year. “Advertisers have realized that cinema guarantees the highest attention span for a brand and appeals to an extremely interesting and predominantly young target group,” says Stefan Kuhlow, CEO of Weischer.Cinema. “Moreover, we don’t face many of the problems that other media currently do, such as ad blockers, brand safety, or visibility. Many brand manufacturers appreciate this.”

In 2019, numerous new clients joined this group of companies. For example, the retail sector discovered the strengths of the cinema screen for itself. In the fourth quarter alone, Aldi, Edeka, and Kaufland were present with their commercials. The focus of Kaufland’s campaign was a 75-second cinema commercial in which Kaufland emotionally staged its partnership with “Star Wars”. “There was no question that we would be running the highly emotional Kaufland Christmas commercial in the appropriate cinema environment,” says Christian Jonas, Media Director Germany at Kaufland. Other new clients of Weischer.Cinema include Burger King, Glaxo SmithKline, Dr. Oetker, and ZDF. And on January 23, Rewe extends its campaign “Aware yet?” which deals with healthy eating, to cinemas.

The year 2019 received an additional boost through a paradigm shift in cinema advertising. Customers can now book their spots in cinemas with a completely new flexibility. They can start advertising campaigns on any day of the week and end them after just three days. The first customer to take advantage of this new freedom of spot booking was MediaMarkt. The electronics retailer promoted its Black Friday offers from November 28 to 30. The creative motifs were even changed between the individual days.

In addition to the flexible duration, Weischer.Cinema has enabled its customers to book according to different time slots since January 1. With “Flex Targeting,” it is even possible to accompany a specific film in exactly one location at a precisely defined time slot with advertising. This new flexibility in booking is complemented by a flexible pricing model (“Flex Pricing”). The campaign CPM is calculated based on the target group parameters chosen by the customer. “With this model, we are perfectly positioned for 2020,” says Stefan Kuhlow. “Because with this, we meet the wishes of our advertising customers optimally. We are confident that we have laid the foundation for another successful cinema year.”