Holiday Movie Goers

The annual holiday season movie madness is in full swing as Hollywood places it’s last bets before the years end. Right now it’s a head to head race between Four Christmases, Twilight and the family favorite, Bolt.

This year more than just Hollywood is hoping for large movie goer turnout during the holidays. In November, Ad Age reported that retailers JCPenney, Gap, Macy’s and others were withdrawing a large portion of their ad spend from television to move their 30-second spots to, you guessed it, the big screen.

With the rise in consumers skipping ads with Tivo and DVR, or even watching their favorite programs on sites like Hulu, the retailers moved their messages to a place where they could actually get some decent “ad penetration” (I hate that term). Or more simply, “we’ll get them where they have little choice but to watch our ads.”

Compare that to this attempted idea that Philips had for the movies, and Tim Manners describes in his book, Relevance:

A grand total of one advertiser, Philips Electronics, seems to understand what really makes us happy. Philips wanted to buy all the available ad time at movie theaters in Minneapolis and Boston and take credit for not using it to advertise its products. They thought it would be cool to give us a little break and simply run a short message letting us know that they were sponsoring the cinema silence–a moment of Happiness, if you will. Unfortunately, Screenvision, the company that sold the screen time at theaters, thought that Philips was making a mockery of movie theater ads and nixed the idea.

Philips has succeeded elsewhere, however. At a cost of $2 million, it sponsored an entire episode of CBS’s 60 Minutes. But instead of using its media buy to run its ads, Philips donated the minutes back to the viewers so that they could enjoy longer news segments. More recently, Philips sponsored a cut in the commercial time on NBC’s Nightly News with Brian Williams, from seven minutes to just one minute. According to an article by Karlene Lukovitz in the New York Times, it paid off for them: The newscast “saw an eight percent ratings lift and generated 9,400 grateful e-mail messages over three days.”

The significance of this strategy by Philips Electronics, which the brand aptly called its “sense and simplicity” campaign, was all the more striking because Philips is in a category, consumer electronics, that is almost always marketed as cool, trendy, and “must have.” As Eric Plaskonos of Philips explained in the Times, the Philips strategy is instead premised on reducing the amount of clutter in people’s lives rather than just pitching their products.

  • The nexus of happiness and relevance is easily located by brands like Philips that realize their marketing strategy is about our lives and not just their products.