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Topic: Boston Globe article on pre-movie ads

Scott Norwood
Film God

Posts: 8146
From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas)
Registered: Jun 99

posted 02-21-2005 07:20 AM

This was in yesterday's Boston Globe

Coming distractions

Commercials have been creeping into theaters, invading the once quiet preshow darkness, and it's going to get worse

By Sam Allis, Globe Staff | February 20, 2005

Let history record that, along with the advent of the atomic bomb and the Donald Trump talking doll, civilization took a big hit with the arrival of commercials in movie theaters.

I'm not talking about the slides for mattress outlets we've endured for years. Or fetching entertainment trivia, like "ER" star Noah Wyle has been collecting arks since he was a child. Those are silent affairs we can make go away simply by closing our eyes, much as we did as youngsters when confronting scary things.

I'm talking about the big, loud, expensive product ads that play before the trailers begin. The ones for cars and drinks and perfume and credit cards and TV shows that make me think, just for a second, maybe I'm still in my house watching the TV in the dark surrounded by a few hundred strangers.

These on-screen nightmares keep multiplying like the pod people: Advertisers spent $356 million on theater ads in 2003, up a whopping 37 percent from the year before.

Take the obnoxious commercial for Coca-Cola in which ecstatic young men and women laugh as they toss salad greens into the air at a supermarket. Why after paying $10.25 on Friday night at Loews Boston Common to see "Million Dollar Baby" are people subjected to this? Or promos for the prematurely gray CNN ancherboy Anderson Cooper, sinewy Jennifer Garner and her TV show "Alias"? Or for the Marines, Twizzlers, Barq's Root Beer, or Mazda?

Matthew Kearney, president of the Cinema Advertising Council, the trade group created in 2003 representing 25,000 of the 34,000-plus screens in the country, maintains thatcommercials are a minimal intrusion to viewers. "Time passes more quickly if there's something on the screen," he says. "Advertising helps contribute to an improved environment in the theater."

As a rule, he says, they begin at the stated starting time of a movie and eat up no more than four minutes. At first glance, this assertion appears insane because the commercials seem endless. My guess was they ran about 15 minutes, which would explain why a 6:15 movie actually starts at 6:35.

Wrong. I sat through two sets of commercials at two different theaters, timing everything as best I could in the dark. Each started less than 10 minutes before the designated starting time and finished close to it. But then came an unholy mix of in-house ads and trailers for another 15 or 20 minutes. (God love trailers, but the aggregate of all this is tiresome.) Which means that Kearney, more often than not, is right.

But the future of theater commercials is scary. It lies in digital satellite technology, pioneered in theaters by the Regal Entertainment Group, the largest theater owner in the country with about 6,300 screens. Using this technology, its advertising arm, the Regal CineMedia Corp., produces a slick package of overt ads and "behind the scenes" promos for movies or TV shows called "The 2wenty" that starts, surprise, 20 minutes before showtime.

If you sit through this and the ensuing trailers and house ads, you'll be in your chair for about 35 minutes before the feature you paid to see begins, as I did at the Regal Cinemas Westborough 12 complex.

Clifford Marks, president of sales and marketing for CineMedia, distinguishes between the 5Â½ minutes of national ads embedded in his "2wenty" and what he refers to as "content" -- behind-the-scene promos for movies like "Ray," with footage of Ray Charles and star Jamie Foxx. This is a distinction without a difference: From the viewer's seat, it's all advertising. (So, for that matter, are trailers.)

Brace yourselves because it's only going to get worse. Plan on more huge promotional productions by name Hollywood directors and movie stars. Consider what's already out there: Scorsese and De Niro for American Express, Baz Luhrmann and Nicole Kidman for Chanel No. 5, Julianne Moore and Halle Berry for Revlon. Think, says Marks, of ads that cost $1 million a minute -- on par with the price of a minute of high-end Hollywood fare.

And so, as sure as the sun comes up, there will be more of them. (I have a bet with Marks that there will be more than the current 5Â½minutes of national ads in "The 2wenty" one year from now. Easy money.)

We flock to a movie theater as an oasis from the stuff we're stuck watching on TV at home. What makes theater commercials particularly loathsome is our inability to elude them unless we bring ear plugs and airplane sleeping masks. There exists as yet no TiVo in the cineplex. Which is why advertisers crave them.

"There is no MIGA [Make It Go Away]," admits Marks, adding, "The recall in cinemas is great."

The difference of opinion over what audiences think of these ads is breathtaking. Everyone I have talked to abhors the things, while the industry claims that a solid majority of viewers think they're just dandy. But then pollsters can produce the numbers they want by sculpting the questions they ask.

To wit: Kearney says that, according to an Arbitron survey taken last year, 70 percent of movie viewers either like or tolerate the commercials. (Actually, 71 percent of those between the ages of 12 and 24 answered yes to the question: "I don't mind the advertisements they put on before the movie begins." The number drops to 62 percent for the 25 to 54 age bracket and 59 percent for 55 and above.)

Marks comes up with similar data, but then his top research guy, Douglas Pulick, concedes no one was asked directly if he or she would favor no ads at all. Would the numbers drop with such a question? "Absolutely," he says.

In a survey done last year by InsightExpress, a Connecticut-based online market-research firm, 53 percent of respondents wanted the commercials to stop, 27 percent said they attend movies less because of them, and 71 percent said theaters should charge less for tickets if they run ads. According to the survey, as reported in Variety, a mere 13 percent said they liked the ads. (Full disclosure: the Globe has used InsightExpress's services in the past.)

Marks hotly contests these findings on the grounds that, among other things, no one under 18 was surveyed. Maybe, but they mirror opinions common in this neck of the woods.

"They should make the movies free if we have to watch the commercials up front," says Dylan Callahan, a 20-something from Somerville who holds forth in the lobby of AMC's Fenway Theatre. And this from Adam Mell of Boston: "The price of a ticket is getting higher and higher, and we have to sit through these ads. There's nothing we can do unless we decide we're not going to go to the movies anymore."

Unless we decide we're not going to go to the movies anymore.

The mere thought must terrify theater owners. They dismiss the 1.7 percent drop in attendance in 2004 from the previous year -- the first in ages -- as a meaningless blip. They cling to this thinking because they have to. The alternative is too horrible. Most are clawing their way back to financial health after flirting with bankruptcy in the late '90s. Chalk that crisis up to their own dumb business decisions to overbuild their dreaded cineplexes. And, guess what, they're praying that the happy road to the black is paved with commercials at our expense.

The subject of theater commercials is so sensitive that Loews wouldn't talk about it. (Loews Cineplex outside PR lady Diane Blackman e-mailed me as follows: "I'm sorry sir, but as my associate explained to you, Loews will not comment on this.") Neither would AMC except to say through a voice-mail message from a spokeswoman that the ads "enhance the guest experience" and that "we see very little negative reaction."

Bring on the plasma TV.

It's too bad, because there was a time when the screen was blank before the trailers started and you could have a decent conversation with a spouse, child, or friend before the lights went down. We assumed, naively, that this weird little hole in our daily sound and light show would remain sacrosanct. Silly us.

Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com.

© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company