Characters from upcoming The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle: four family films made it into the top 20 at the box office last year.
Nearly 15 million cinema tickets were sold here in 2000 with admissions up 18 per cent on the previous year. It is the highest figure in 26 years and part of that growth has been attributed to the family film. Four family films made it into the top 20 at the box office: Toy Story 2 (second); Chicken Run (ninth); Stuart Little (12th);and The Grinch number 18). Yet, looking at the list of top 10 advertisers in cinema, it would seem advertisers haven't yet seen the potential of cinema as a means of communicating with both children and their parents.
The top 10 last year were Bulmers, Guinness Extra Cold, Guinness Stout, Budweiser, Eircom, Red Bull, Tayto, Nike, Tia Maria and Coors Light.
Given that line-up, it's clear that advertisers still see cinema primarily as a medium for alcoholic drink advertising.
Part of the problem has to be that current research on media consumption tends to look at audiences from the age of 15 upwards.
"We're currently increasing our investment into research so that we can get an accurate idea of who makes up our younger audiences," says Ms Eithne Ryan, sales controller of Carlton Screen Advertising. It subscribes to Caviar Film Monitor which is looking at the new young audience. It showed that, on average, 58 per cent of the audience for a family film are seven- to 14-year-olds. Some 53 per cent of the audience for Toy Story 2 were in that age group. These figures would seem to indicate that family films are truly that, with children usually accompanied by an adult. This category would seem to be better for advertisers than advertising during breaks between children's programmes on TV because children usually watch television alone.
"We put a Dairygold kid's product in cinemas last year and it worked very well," says Mr Ronan O'Loughlin of CDP, adding that cinema offers huge impact. The packages being offered to advertisers are becoming increasingly sophisticated. For example, advertisers can choose to advertise only in the first two weeks of a film's run. "By going in the first week of a film you're talking to opinion formers, people who are aware of what's on and make a point of seeing things first," he says.
Three advertisers who have seen the trend in the growth of family films are Kelloggs, Cadbury and L'Oreal Kids, who are booked into all the upcoming family films for this year. Disney's The Emperor's New Groove, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, Rugrats in Paris and the widely anticipated Harry Potter might push child-oriented brands into the top 10 cinema advertisers.
