New Digital Age (NDA) in association with LiveRamp is spotlighting the men and women championing a data-led revolution in the marketing industry. ‘Meet the Revolutionaries’ focuses on the efforts of the industry executives helping to push digital marketing into a new era of data collaboration.
Here, Odeon Cinemas Group’s Head of Digital, Polly Jones, and Director of Group Partnerships, Chris Spelman, discuss the importance of innovation and the need for creativity and strategic use of data to stay relevant in the evolving digital marketing landscape…
Tell me about your current role.
Polly Jones (PJ): As the Group Head of Digital at Odeon Cinemas Group, I oversee the digital experience of our guests in our nine markets. The role covers our websites, apps, digital kiosks and our loyalty and CRM programmes.
Last year, the digital and IT teams at Odeon came together to create our first Group digital strategy. The overall goal is to deliver digital experiences that are so easy, relevant and personalised that they bring guests back time and time again.
Chris Spelman (CS): As Director of Group Partnerships, I focus on our marketing relationships with the Film Studios and other strategic partners. Previously to this role, I was Marketing Director at 20th Century Fox, so I’ve experienced both sides of the film industry spectrum.
Day-to-day, my team oversees the activation of Studio marketing campaigns across our nine markets, with a view to driving more people into our cinemas to watch the latest movie titles. This incorporates collaborating around data; how can we work more closely to increase the effectiveness of Studio marketing budgets in converting to ticket sales.
Can you give an example of a time when you personally helped to drive innovation?
PJ: We’re in the process of improving our digital experience in all of our key markets. Our brand purpose is “we make movies better”, so we want our guests to have a great time, seeing the film in the best possible way.
So a new thing at ODEON is we’re using behavioural science and persuasive design to help our guests find the best experience possible for that film. That means on the best screens with the best sound on the most comfortable seat, with delicious food and drink. Sometimes that also means how to get the best value from ODEON, for example joining our loyalty scheme to get lower prices.
CS: If you think about the cinema world, we as exhibitors are essentially the storefront where we have the direct relationship with cinemagoers and the data around their transactional behaviours.
Back when I was working at Fox, one of my focus areas was on developing our relationship with cinema exhibitors around data, to aid effectiveness in our digital advertising spend and to understand which platforms were helping to drive end of funnel conversion. At that point, I greenlit various test-and-learn campaigns around data collaboration that helped to demonstrate an uplift in ROI within A/B testing.
Fast forward to six years later and that background is helping me now that I’m working for ODEON. How do we deepen our relationships with the studios given our mutual ambition to deliver more bums on seats? That’s an important work-in-progress for us.
What are the most common challenges to innovation?
PJ: It’s much easier to leave things as they are. Innovation requires bravery. Trying new things means that, sometimes, you’ll fail and people don’t like to fail. To mitigate these failures, we always do extensive user testing before we launch new programmes or journeys.
We have galvanized and empowered our teams to run test-and-learn programmes across our digital estate. We run hundreds of A/B and multivariate tests every year, and we put monetary value against the things we might have done that would have been really bad mistakes. That means that when you run a test and it absolutely bombs, it’s not a failure. It’s a success, because we haven’t rolled it out!
CS: You need a culture of innovation within a business to make it work. You need buy-in, from the top down. If you don’t have that, it makes it difficult to drive things forward.
What tips can you offer others hoping to drive innovation?
PJ: We have an Innovation Council, which meets regularly to encourage ideas from all across the business to improve the guest experience. It’s really important to ask for ideas from all departments, because often our cinema colleagues have better ideas than our colleagues in the support office. They watch people using our apps and our digital kiosks; they see how our customers behave. We get together on a monthly basis, review the ideas that people have submitted and decide which ones we like to fast-track for testing.
CS: It’s always important to not stand still as a business and even more so in our industry given that cinemas have obviously gone through a period of significant disruption over recent times. I’m conscious of there always being a ‘shiny new thing’ in digital marketing, where it’s easy to become distracted. Strategy should drive innovation, not the other way around. What purpose does this innovation serve? How will it benefit our audiences and our business?
How do you think digital marketing might evolve over the next few years?
PJ: I’m guessing that a lot of people say ‘AI’ in answer to this question, but I think that in line with that there needs to be a renewed focus on creativity. The standard of creativity in digital marketing and CRM is often terrible, with very low production values. We all see so much terrible advertising in our online feeds. At ODEON we strive to produce quality content that has been thought about and crafted well, and helps our guests find the right film and experience for them.
I meet a lot of people in digital marketing who know a lot about tech, but I don’t see as many who understand how to get the best creative that persuades people to act. There’s so much noise out there that brands will need to produce quality creative to cut through. We believe that will require human intuition and thoughtful creativity, as well as exploring what AI tools have to offer.
CS: I attended an industry presentation a couple of months ago where they were discussing examples of programmatic advertising on cinema screens. We’re maybe the last class of traditional media to go programmatic. That, and the adoption of AI tools, just underscored that we’re moving more towards algorithmic planning as well buying. But, to echo Polly’s point, there is also a balance here and we can’t expect automation to necessarily replace the creativity that is required to connect brands with audiences. Whilst new technology that aids marketing effectiveness is always something that should be considered, it’s not a silver bullet. Film is a storytelling medium and there will always be a consideration around how best to position those stories to audiences, it’s why on-screen trailering in cinemas continues be a crucial marketing channel for upcoming films.
Do you think ‘data collaboration’ will become more important to marketers?
CS: The short answer is ‘yes’ and I think it will be particularly important in the film and entertainment industries. Earlier I mentioned the disruption to industry, as habits and behaviours change, such as consolidation within the studios, the rise of the streamers, the pandemic and so on. There have been a lot of headwinds, bringing both challenges and opportunities.
One of the opportunities is in reassessing the dynamic between cinemas and studios, fostering closer collaboration around data that works to our mutual benefit. Testing and learning, evaluating new products and tools, adapting to the changing digital landscape – these are all things that are valuable to work on in unison.
A number of the Studios of course have streaming services and therefore valuable customer data of their own. How can that data also help drive audiences to cinemas? What will make them upgrade to watching something at IMAX, for example? Collaborations that lead to a greater understanding of customer behaviours and habits are something we want to be part of.
PJ: Great answer. I agree with Chris!
