Updating and upgrading marketing strategies might involve adopting new technologies and workflows, but it taking risks and experimenting doesn’t need to come at the cost of your independent identity. Understanding your internal values and resources is every bit as important communicating them externally with your audience.

Daniel Sibbers, Director of Communications for Yorck Kinogruppe opened the session by demonstrating the stark difference between the marketing and the reality of life: from car advertisements showing open roads to the traffic jams of the daily commute and from the glossy photos of lit up cinemas against a twilight sky to the graffiti’d empty frontage during the cold light of day. The difference a good photographer can make in capturing the essence of cinemas to improve the digital experience was clear. Sibbers talked about the importance of really developing, knowing and understanding your cinema/group personality before building the wider brand. Everything you say and do needs to be aligned with the brand once developed because it is the values of your organisation that you are promoting through storytelling and across your various marketing platforms. He also talked about taking calculated risks. For example, Yorck Kinogruppe bought huge quantities of physical advertising spaces, which they re-sold in bits and pieces to distributors, resulting in greater and wider visibility for arthouse films on a large scale.

Javier Pachón, Executive Director and Head Programmer at CineCiutat in Spain focused on the importance of constant and consistent communication – both internally within the cinema team and externally with customers. First, in knowing what can be done with the resources that you have is key: if you want to try new things, you need first to analyse and decide together what feels achievable with the skills and time that you have. The philosophy at CineCiutat flows from access and key to that is open collaboration and effective self-management. A lot of time and effort has been put into streamlining processes, workflow, onboarding, information accessibility, templates, manuals and support materials so that, longer-term, time and energy is saved.

Jens Lanestrand from Biografcentralen in Sweden demonstrated how important the Europa Cinemas conferences are in inspiring ideas by accrediting much of his own inspiration to fellow panellist Ian Wild’s presentation in Bucharest in 2017. Supported through the Collaborate to Innovate project fund, Biografcentralen integrates online ticketing for 120 cinemas across Sweden. Their aims are to collect and share data, giving box office and demographic insights to cinemas. “Growth marketing,” he said, “is all about testing, learning and trying out.”

For Ian Wild, from the Showroom cinema in the UK, numbers are still down since the pandemic, with smaller films, especially, performing poorly. Looking forward, Wild is contemplating how AI can be part of a solution to the various business issues Showroom are experiencing. There are three major areas that Showroom need to boost: 1) Connecting with audiences, something their 15-year-old website isn’t helping with, “It’s not telling us about our audience and what our customers want,” he said. Developing a digital pipeline that spans website, ticketing, bar and membership profiles should help with data analysis in building audience profiles and understanding audience behaviours. 2) Fundraising, a significant income stream for the not-for-profit organisation, helps speed up the process of writing funding applications, finding affiliations or potential donors and even ideas generation. 3) Operating efficiencies from scheduling films to ordering stock and providing a chatbot are also options Wild and his team are looking into.

For Elise Mignot, Director & Programmer for Café des Images in France, a cinema is not only a place to screen films. A place that also produces ideas and debates, and cultural content itself, Mignot’s team built upon their previous risk-taking strategy of working with new media and embarked upon a Twitch streaming programme that gathered young communities of streamers. They broadcast live from the cinemas, into cinemas, and experimented with format and communication to reach and engage new audiences. Though the project received support from the Collaborate to Innovate fund, it was expensive to operate and involved a lot of staff time and internal resource. Not necessarily something the cinema will continue with, it did open their offer to new cinema-goers and engage the cinema in another way of working to communicate with new and diverse audiences.

The overall messaging from the session was, as one might expect from a panel of marketeers, clear and concise: clear and authentic communication is key, with clarity internally within the team being just as important as the external comms. Resources are limited – especially time, so let’s not waste it: putting systems and processes into place to streamline will save time and energy the long run, which is incredibly valuable. And finally, that a new listening mode is required: “we are facing huge challenges,” Irene Musumeci said, “but we also have vast amounts of opportunities and we are exposed to data and learning. We must embrace it with a spirit of testing and evaluating and not be afraid to fail.”

Photos courtesy of Gediminas Gražys