A new audience-tracking system is giving Madison Avenue its clearest picture yet of the demographics of movie house audiences.
And while the determined key demographic — young adults — is not surprising, advertisers, armed with more concrete data, are expected to pour additional millions of dollars of ad money into the $600 million cinema advertising sector.
The new system, from the TV ratings folks at Nielsen, is delivering precise demographic information about who’s in the cinema for the first time, allowing the cinema ad guys to sell Madison Avenue on its youthful demographics.
For example, Jim Tricarico, the chief revenue officer of Screenvision, which runs adds in thousands of movie houses, said the average age of customers in his theaters is 30.5 years — compared to the mid-50s for broadcast TV.
Behind the ground-breaking system, Nielsen is moving away from landline-based polls to online polls.
The landline-based polls have been a problem because youngsters rely on cell phones.
“We’re producing estimates of the number of people, their profile and that they were at the movie,” Nielsen’s senior vice president, Paul Lindstrom, said. “It’s pretty precise. We’re doing it to say what percentage was young men versus young women.”
Todd Gordon, executive vice president at Magna Global, told The Post that he supports cinema ads because they have “the most uncluttered, captive, TV-like audience. Usage is heavy toward the weekend when shopping occurs.”
Added Gordon: “They’ve done a good job because you can count ticket sales, now that they’re applying demos. There’s greater accountability so they can compete with primetime TV.”
Big-name advertisers are starting to discover the younger cinema audiences.
Apple kicked off its first in-cinema ad campaign in recent memory this month, according to the two major ad sales organizations, National CineMedia and Screenvision.
The Apple ads promoted the company’s new Apple Macbook Pros.
The Cupertino, Calif., company is not the only tech company selling to movie audiences.
Microsoft created a long-form piece of entertainment — for its Surface tablets — that wasn’t an obvious ad.
While Microsoft has been an advertiser for some time, the long-form branded entertainment spot, which ran this month, was another first, says Cliff Marks, sales president at National CineMedia.
A broad swathe of categories are advertising at the movies, with Mars and Geico the latest to follow the likes of Taco Bell and ConAgra into movie theaters.
National CineMedia, part owned by the big cinema chains — AMC, Cinemark and Regal — has seen a 43 percent increase in its stock price this year. It stock closed Friday at $18.78.