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pate with them like a typical business does,”<br />
says Noonan. “We can’t discount our tickets.<br />
They come and they buy our bulk tickets at<br />
typical retail price and they discount it on<br />
their own. Usually it’s an attempt to gather<br />
email addresses or get more users. It’s more<br />
of a marketing initiative on their side.”<br />
One of Groupon’s latest initiatives is<br />
Groupon Now. Through Groupon’s mobile<br />
app, users can see what short-term deals are<br />
around them at that very moment. These<br />
coupons, which can be purchased directly<br />
through a user’s smartphone, usually expire<br />
within a few hours or by the end of the<br />
day. The idea behind such a service is to<br />
give businesses a real-time method to attract<br />
nearby customers on a slow day.<br />
“The biggest dilemma you’ll have with<br />
Groupon or Living Social or any of these<br />
companies is the way that you can actually<br />
go through and redeem the bar codes and<br />
prove that people haven’t been copying<br />
them and how much that slows down your<br />
concession lines or your box office lines,”<br />
says Tearlach Hutcheson, director of marketing<br />
for Studio Movie Grill. “Groupon has an<br />
app for the iPhone where a merchant can<br />
type in the code to make sure it hasn’t been<br />
used before. That has a major impact on<br />
your business.”<br />
A final example of a marketing strategy<br />
that may at first seem a little unorthodox—<br />
even retro—is blogging. The job description<br />
of a theater owners is to exhibit content, not<br />
create it, but as AMC is proving, the concept<br />
has merit. As part of their MovieWatcher<br />
Network, AMC established a blog that<br />
features a group of journalists providing the<br />
latest movie news on a daily basis. There<br />
are celebrity interviews, announcements<br />
about future releases, trailers and just about<br />
everything a movie lover might want to<br />
read about. (Of course, you won’t find any<br />
film reviews on the blog—why risk panning<br />
the very films you’re trying to entice people<br />
to see in your theaters?)<br />
“When you think about it, our guest’s<br />
first experience with a movie isn’t when<br />
they walk in the theater,” explains AMC’s<br />
Newton. “It’s happened several days or<br />
weeks before when they’ve had a conversation<br />
with their friends about it with whatever<br />
social media channel they’re using. Our<br />
job is to help augment and engage that guest<br />
in an entertaining fun way before they ever<br />
set foot in the theater. To us, it feels like a<br />
real natural extension of what we’d offer.<br />
Our guests have told us that they’re really<br />
interested in that kind of thing. We want<br />
to make sure to have that kind of content<br />
where that guest is naturally living which<br />
is not only on our Facebook page but on our<br />
website page as well. We’re not just in the<br />
movie business, we’re in the entertainment<br />
and guest experience business. We think<br />
about it holistically and anything we can<br />
do to make that experience more enjoyable<br />
before they go to the theater and then after<br />
we feel it’s part of the purchase process and<br />
excitement about the movies.”<br />
From a technical perspective, adding<br />
a blog to its website was a brilliant move<br />
for AMC as it increases the chain’s search<br />
engine optimization (SEO), i.e., makes AMC<br />
even more present during Google searches.<br />
Each blog post is yet another page for<br />
a search engine to catalogue and for third<br />
party websites to link to. If moviegoers are<br />
searching for information on the latest Brad<br />
Pitt film, one of the results Google will spit<br />
out at them very well may be from AMC’s<br />
blog. And when visitors arrive at the blog,<br />
they are greeted not only by the news story<br />
they were seeking, but also links and advertisements<br />
for AMC’s theaters, showtimes<br />
and concessions.<br />
AMC is treading a fine line by marketing<br />
so overtly through its blog. Rick Calvert,<br />
CEO of BlogWorld, an annual conference<br />
for bloggers, podcasters and social media<br />
experts explains, “You can’t use a blog or<br />
Twitter or Facebook or any of those other<br />
social channels to broadcast a sales message.<br />
You can’t force somebody to come to your<br />
blog. They’ve made a conscious choice to<br />
come there. Unless you’ve tricked them with<br />
some bait-and-switch content and then when<br />
they come to your site they see a commercial<br />
and leave. Not only is that ineffective—it<br />
doesn’t have the positive effect you want—it<br />
has a negative effect. You’ve upset your<br />
customer. The right way to do it is to provide<br />
content your consumer is interested in.”<br />
Social media is often credited as the<br />
savior of modern marketing, but exhibitors<br />
should be wary of thinking of it as a silver<br />
bullet solution. Reminds Hutcheson of Studio<br />
Movie Grill, sometimes the best way to<br />
communicate with your patrons is through<br />
plain old email. “What is the lifespan of putting<br />
a comment up on Facebook?” he asks.<br />
“How many people are going to sit there on<br />
Facebook and keep scrolling through until<br />
they get to your message, versus if I send<br />
you an email that sits in your email in box<br />
until you’re ready to read it?”<br />
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NOVEMBER <strong>2011</strong> BOXOFFICE PRO 35
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