Using on-demand movie reviews to increase box-office sales

Film reviews are highly popular and can convince movie goers to “see for themselves” – but buying regular radio or TV airtime is prohibitively expensive.

When we spoke with UK cinema chain Vue it was looking for a cost-effective way to reach out to its audience and increase box-office sales. Our solution was a weekly movie-review podcast, available from Vue’s website. To create our program we partnered with Time Out Online Film Editor Chris Tilley, who is based in London. Chis’s enviable job at Time Out requires him to go to the cinema a lot and interview the occasional movie star – making him the ideal person to talk about new films.

A truly multi-national production, we interview Chris by telephone from Sydney in a conversational chat style, and then edit in audio clips, trailers, and interviews that Chris has recorded.

A huge success, Vue is very happy with the number of downloads and considers the podcasts a more successful outreach than the competitions they run. Vue’s relationship with distributors has also benefited (distributors love the podcast of course). For Time Out it’s another way to leverage content they already have.

You can find this exciting movie experience here: http://myvue.com/podcasts/

“Podcasting has proved cost-effective, engaging and enduring: we’ve also found the podcasts have a longer lifespan than the actual run of the film.”

“There’s no doubt in my mind that podcasting is part of the way people are going to expect companies to communicate with them. There’s that pocket of time our audiences have when they’re in the car or on the train to work. We can’t reach them with our website then, but it’s a time at which we believe they’re looking to be entertained or informed.”