Cinema & Placement Advertising
The screen your competitors forgot about.
Cinema is the only screen an audience cannot skip, mute or scroll past. A full-screen ad in a dark room with the phone away buys attention that no feed placement does — and in most markets it is bought by fewer advertisers than it should be.
It is also the channel where agencies are vaguest about numbers. We plan from actual screen lists, published rate cards and stated minimum spends, and we attach digital measurement to an offline buy rather than asserting that it worked.
What it covers
The work itself. Not a list of adjectives — the things that actually get done.
Screen and circuit planning
Which cinema circuits, which specific locations, which screens. Multiplex chains and independents have very different audience profiles and very different rates for the same nominal impression.
Audience and film matching
Placement against film certification, genre and release slate. The same screen delivers a completely different audience depending on what is playing that fortnight.
Rate and minimum-spend modelling
Real cost per screen per week, the minimum commitment each circuit requires, and what the effective cost per thousand actually is once you account for occupancy rather than capacity.
Slot and format selection
Pre-show versus trailer-adjacent positioning, spot length, and whether a lobby or foyer package is worth adding. Position in the reel matters more than most rate cards admit.
Creative for the format
Cinema is a 40-foot screen and a full-range sound system. Reformatting a social video for it wastes the entire advantage of the medium. We produce or direct creative built for the format.
Technical delivery and compliance
DCP delivery specifications, sound mastering, certification and clearance, and circuit-specific deadlines that are much earlier than people expect.
Out-of-home placement
Where it complements the cinema buy — transit, retail proximity, digital OOH — planned as one campaign rather than separate line items.
Offline-to-digital measurement
Geo-matched holdout regions, branded search lift, direct traffic lift and vanity URLs or QR codes. Cinema is measurable if you design the measurement before the campaign, and unmeasurable if you do not.
Post-campaign reconciliation
Verification that the spots ran where and when they were booked, and a reconciliation against what you were billed.
How we do it
Method, in the order it happens.
You can judge an agency on its process before you have any results to judge it on. That is the point of publishing this.
-
Check the audience is actually there
Cinema suits some categories and wastes money for others. If your buyer is not in that room we will say so before quoting, which is the main reason this page exists.
-
Design the measurement first
Holdout regions, baseline branded search, and tracking mechanisms agreed before a single spot is booked. Retrofitting measurement to an offline campaign does not work.
-
Plan against real inventory
Specific circuits, locations and release slate, with the actual rates and minimum commitments in front of you rather than an indicative estimate.
-
Build creative for the room
Sound design and framing for a large screen. The single biggest waste in cinema advertising is repurposed social creative playing to a captive audience.
-
Book and deliver on circuit deadlines
DCP mastering, clearance and delivery, all of which run on lead times measured in weeks rather than days.
-
Measure lift, not impressions
Branded search and direct traffic in exposed regions against the holdout. This is the number that tells you whether it worked.
-
Reconcile and decide
Verify delivery, compare against billing, and make an honest call about whether to repeat, resize or stop.
What you keep
Deliverables that remain yours whether or not we continue.
- A screen and circuit plan with real locations, rates and minimum spends
- The audience and release-slate rationale behind every placement
- Master creative files, including cinema-spec audio and DCP
- A measurement design with defined holdout regions and baselines
- Post-campaign delivery verification and billing reconciliation
- Branded search and direct traffic lift analysis against the holdout
- A clear recommendation on whether to run it again
When this is the wrong service
We would rather say this now than three months in.
- Your audience is a narrow B2B buying committee. Cinema is a broad-reach medium and the waste would be enormous.
- You need to attribute every sale to a specific impression. Offline measures lift, not clicks, and we will not fake a click model.
- The budget cannot clear a circuit minimum. We will tell you the threshold rather than sell you a token buy that reaches nobody.
- You want to run your existing social video unchanged. That wastes what you are paying for.
- The campaign has to launch in under three weeks. Clearance and DCP delivery deadlines make that unrealistic.
Before you commit to anything
We publish how we work, what we will not claim, and how an engagement runs, so you can judge us on method rather than on adjectives.
Questions
About Cinema & Placement Advertising.
Tell us what is actually stuck.
No proposal until we understand the problem. If this is not the right service for it, we will say so.