Audiences are the most important piece of the puzzle for cinemas, so understanding their behaviours and wants is crucial. An ever-evolving-shrinking-growing entity, the audience and their needs must not be taken for granted.
Züleyha Azman, Marketing Director at KINO Rotterdam presented their slogan ‘Run by cinephiles for cinephiles’ and added that they strive to use their extensive knowledge of cinema to create tomorrow’s cinephiles. “My advice would be to stay true to yourself and who you are and what you do as a cinema, and from there plan your events and marketing,” she said.
She underlined the importance of using different marketing tools and strategies, translating the enthusiasm you have into the marketing, and being creative and setting yourself apart. As an example, she showed a video (shot on an iPhone) in the style of Wes Anderson, presenting the staff members of their cinema. It doesn’t have to be a big production, but using your creativity and passion for the art form can offer a shared language for communication.
Ioana Dragomirescu, from Times and Studio Romania, presented her two – soon to be three – cinemas, situated in a relatively small city that did not have an arthouse cinema before they opened theirs. Creating a different identity between the cinemas in order to distinguish them from each other but also from other cinemas proved a lucrative approach. One cinema is a community-oriented cinema, with screenings for young parents and monthly screening of films followed by discussions, while the other hosts a wider range of cultural events, including ballet and opera as well as eventide repertory film screenings.
Maddy Probst, Head of Film at Watershed in the UK, pointed to the rise in attendance for classic and repertory screenings, especially among young audiences. She introduced Watershed’s Sunday Brunch screening, which were so successful that the kitchen in the cafe/bar could not keep up with them. She said that, now, post-Covid, repertory cinema is doing well, representing 11% of their admissions and attracting young audiences. Probst credited the Cinema Rediscovered festival of archive, classic and repertory films, which is now in its 8th edition, as a major event for attracting new and younger audiences.
She underlined the importance of creating a community and getting a sense of community across, not just screening films, but also working collaboratively with co-curators and partners. One way of doing this is to create professional development programmes aimed at diversifying the sector by bringing new people to film exhibition and letting them create events around a film.
“It’s about creating experiences, about committing to this long-term, involving co-curators and partners to grow a community in a way that is mutually beneficial to us, and collaborating with other exhibitors and distributors. Recognizing that audiences are not fixed entities. You are not just young or old, you are on a life-long journey with film. When you are running a cinema you have the power to help share that journey,” she said.
Axel Scoffer, General Secretary for Unifrance, presented their programme, ‘My Meta Stories’. Born of the need to approach new audiences, ‘My Meta Stories’ found them in the virtual world. A programme created on MineCraft, where users from different countries collaborate, the MMS is interactive. The average age of users is 24. Unifrance created a virtual cinema in MineCraft and created events around films screenings. Users get the opportunity to dive into cinema history and meet characters that represent important figures from the cinema, before arriving at a screening where they watch a film. To reach the users, they work with their own avatars but also with cinephile gamers who are known in the community.
Sylvain Pichon, Head of Programming for Cinéma Le Méliès in France, presented their initiative ‘Méliès Battle’, an online game started during the pandemic where they reached out to their community via FaceBook. Each week, they suggested a theme (ranging from unsheltered people in cinema to Nordic films) and invited users to share film-related content around it. Their community reaches 2,700 members and, post-pandemic, has extended beyond the virtual worlds into real-life meetings organised by the cinema. These people are connected by cinema, but also engage in other activities such as bowling, visiting museums, and running.
Irene Musumeci concluded that the thread running through all of the presentations represented a shift from traditional cinema towards modern cinema, reinventing the cinema world through the virtual one. She emphasised that rewarding volunteer workers, showing the care staff put into the cinema but also using ‘ambassadors’ who will bring new audiences to the cinema is an effective model. She invited us to think of audiences as an ever-growing-shrinking-evolving audience and not just a steady block, and to think about how we might make new audiences come back and develop an appetite for something they did not know they wanted.
Photos courtesy of Gediminas Gražys.