North American moviegoing at $7.4B was up 65% over 2021 in 2022, but not yet back to its pre-pandemic annual North American level of $11.4B (Box Office Mojo). Much of this is driven by the fact that only 496 movies were released theatrically in 2022 versus 910 in 2019. The reason for fewer theatrical releases is due in part because more films that used to be released theatrically are now being released directly to PVOD or SVOD.
"My" tech company RMT and Friends Consulting Group, industry veteran Bruce Friend’s new company, have teamed up to see if we can help film producers, studios and their agencies be even more effective in reaching the right film audiences at the right time. We‘ve done this by using RMT’s third-party validated DriverTag technology. We started with the summer releases and did a complete DriverTag psychological analysis of each film based on its trailers. With RMT partner Semasio, a leading global ad targeting solutions provider of high performance custom audience segments, we’ve created a resonant programmatic audience of U.S. prospects for each summer movie based on the digital content these people consume, their dominant subconscious Motivations and their frequent visitation of movie-related sites, videogames and apps.
These are the same kinds of advanced audiences which Neustar found increased the incremental sales of a major retail chain +95%. According to Simmons, the RMT system ought to produce results in the entertainment vertical 2.6 times as powerful as in retail chain advertising. RMT Semasio Motivation audiences are fully integrated with all leading DSPs, SSPs and DMPs. The best way to find out more about the DriverTags product is to contact me bharvey@rmt.solutions.
We studied 21 theatrical features launching this summer. Heroism/Leadership is one of the 15 Motivations in the RMT system, and more of these 21 films had this as the highest scoring Motivation than any other Motivation.
The actual Motivation scores for Heroism/Leadership among the 13 films where this was the highest scoring Motivation varied from a high of 38.9% to a low of 16.7%. After the summer it will be interesting to compare these scores with the box-office results. A recent analysis by the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) Cognition Council found that RMT Motivations predict 48% of CPG sales results.
The advanced audiences we’ve created for each of these 21 movies does not just reflect the top Motivation conveyed by the film, but weights together the content’s outstanding highest-scoring Motivations. For example, Movie M hits 45.7% on Competency, and also ties several other movies that have their highest score on Heroism/Leadership of 38.9%, and scores over the benchmark 20% (which RMT has identified as the dividing line between hits and misses) for a total of 10 Motivations. If one calculates a Gross Motivation Points (GMP) metric by adding up the 15 scores, Movie M’s GMP equals 379.8, second highest in GMP to Movie R which achieves 433.3 GMP and is above a 20% Motivation score for 11 of the 15 Motivations. Conceivably these two movies are headed for success, although a lot depends on marketing, which is why we’ve created these advanced audiences targeted to people whose personal motivations as demonstrated by the content they consume are most likely to love that specific movie, and to recommend it most enthusiastically.
If you look up or contact me for the data for your movie, we will of course share the data for your movie by name not by the anonymized method we are using here to protect the innocent. Our objective is to collaborate with as many of you as possible to objectively test this method.
At the other end of the GMP distribution, Movie H achieves a GMP of 29.4, and does not exceed the 20% benchmark for any Motivation. This movie and Movies G, L, N and T all have GMPs of 100 or below, and no Motivation score above 20%. However, by exceptional marketing even these movies can return the investments made in them. Now is the time to maximize the Want To See of your summer movies, by reaching the people who resonate with the Motivations upon which your movie rests.
In offering to partner with collaborators on this test to see if the RMT Semasio method really does help Hollywood the way it has been proven to help other industries (by Nielsen NCS, 605, Simmons, Neustar and the ARF Cognition Council), we have already recruited the influencer agency SocialStandard, which suggests that it can determine the influencers within the RMT Semasio advanced audiences targeted to each specific summer movie. The agency can then work with the studio and agency of record (AOR) to recruit the influencers with the largest followings and maximum Motivational resonance with the specific movie.
We will track the non-confidential results of this grand experiment with you in these columns.
What if anything can we hypothesize based on these findings? Why so much emphasis on heroism and leadership? Could it have anything to do with the rampant fear dominating the environment? We do appear to need heroism and leadership at times like these.
Without repeating the same analysis on previous years of summer movies it’s hard to say. We know that action movies are usually the main fare of summer releases. Nothing is stopping us from extending the analysis backward in time except that -– like all of us -– RMT needs to carefully husband its resources for revenue generating activities. If a collaboration group arises around this investigation such extensions of the analysis will undoubtedly figure into it.
A final note about altruism. RMT’s work with the ARF Cognition Council over the years has placed some emphasis on altruism in advertising, which has been on the rise over the years, largely in response to the ideals of the younger generations not yet cynicized by the powerful culture of distrust of the motives of others which has been its own form of pandemic for most of this new century.
This new platter of summer motion pictures does not show signs of recognizing the need to reinstate altruism as a key partner of heroism/leadership in helping the human race bootstrap itself back up into a winning attitude. Only two of the 21 movies have Altruism scores above 20%. They are two of the films with the highest GMP scores: Movie M, ranked second in GMP, and Movie A, ranked 7th of the 21. Altruism definitely weighted into the advanced audience for those movies, as well as all of the motivators in which they scored above 20%.
Subjective takeaways: less reliance on formulas successful in the past, build more motivations into your new content produced, market directly to people who are most motivated by the things your movie subconsciously communicates.
Devil’s Advocate: Why care about motivations? Isn’t the industry focused on attention instead? Attention is not what changes people’s behavior, it is just what gets them to listen to and watch your ad. If the ad doesn’t in any way appeal to their motivations, there will be no change in predisposition toward the brand, nor in behavior related to the brand. That “change in predisposition to behavior” has another name that used to matter a lot more to wise advertising practitioners: persuasion. Persuasion has always been the best predictor of sales effects, not attention. That’s why David Ogilvy poo-pooed attention, and why the ARF Model places persuasion two levels higher than attention in the hierarchical ARF Model.
RMT has been recommending that attention be retained and other metrics (including RMT) added to it in order that Impression Quality be maximally validated to cause brand sales lifts as well as increases in long-term brand equity and brand love.
RMT has also recommended that the many advertisers that are inspired to help the world while they grow their brands profitably use the "goodness" motivations in their ads and brand content, without getting into backing known social causes that are polarizing.
Here are the list of RMT Motivations (on the right below). The "goodness" Motivations are those in blue plus Love. Self-Transcendence is also known as Altruism.
Here is the list of movies in our sample:
Asteroid City
Barbie
Blackening, The
Blue Beetle
Boogeyman, The
Equalizer 3, The
Elemental
Flash, The
Gran Turismo
Haunted Mansion
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Insidious: The Red Door
Joy Ride
Last Voyage of the Demeter, The
Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Part 1
No Hard Feelings
Oppenheimer
Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Strays
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
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