We needed to tell Australians about the magic and scale of HOYTS Cinema screens. But we could only reach our audience on their tiny mobile screens. So, since we couldn’t change the media, we changed the way the content was presented on it.

Instead of shrinking down our enormous cinema-sized content, we showed our audience cinema-scale content on their mobile screens, which meant they only saw a fraction of the full picture.

The smaller the size of the screen, the more impactful and disruptive our content was for the audience. We turned the problem into an innovative solution.

HOYTS is one of Australia's leading cinema brands. But after a lengthy global pandemic, more Australians were opting to watch movies at home or on their mobile phones than ever before.

In order to reignite that passion and entice more people to visit a HOYTS cinema, we needed to remind people what they are missing when they are not choosing the HOYTS big screen experience.

As this was a consideration campaign, the objective was to get more Australians to choose the HOYTS when consuming movie content.

Usage data indicated that more movie content than ever before was being consumed on the smallest screen - mobile devices. Video on demand accounted for $1.24B of online content expenditure, an increase of 5.1% YOY. With 87.6% of consumers primarily watching their movie content on the small screen, and over 50% stating that ‘Watching and TV’ was their main reason for using mobile internet.

HOYTS is one of Australia's leading cinema brands. But after a lengthy global pandemic, more Australians were opting to watch movies at home or on their mobile phones than ever before.

HOYTS is Australia’s leading cinema brand, and we needed to remind people about the magic of the big screen. The problem is, we could only reach them on their tiny screens. But what if we could use these small screens to show just how much of the big screen they were missing out on?

Introducing HOYTS Cinema-Sized advertising; A campaign of cinema-sized content, on mobile-sized screens

Instead of shrinking down our content, we showed full-scale cinema pictures on their not-so-cinema-scale screens.

Our audience was presented with mere fractions of the full cinema picture.

The smaller the screen size, the more disruptive the content was for the audience.

Suddenly, every single small screen became a reminder of the sheer magic of the HOYTS big screen.

Turning our problem into our solution.

•We decided to target individuals who were consuming (movie) content on small screens in order to intentionally hijack this consumption behaviour.

Demographic: People 18-39, the highest consumers of small format online and social video

Behavioural: Medium/Heavy movie and long form video consumption online, IBA (interest based audience) for film and streaming services. Keyword targeting for movies and streaming.

Programmatic/Custom: Lookalike audiences based on Hoyts Rewards lapsed customer profiles, retargeting previous social and website visitors.

• Our channel and partner selection focused on moments where small-screen entertainment consumption occurred for our audience, finding clear moments to efficiently drive both reach and impact.

• We had two tiers of media partnership to guarantee greatest unduplicated reach potential across online video formats.

REACH: BVOD, SVOD and Youtube non-skippable video guaranteed high viewability of the campaign, with a strong focus on view completion metrics.

RESPONSE: Social video with direct CTAs included

We layered non-skippable, linear, and in-feed video solutions to maximise reach, while effectively managing frequency via our targeting and DSP solutions.

Our key partners included the largest online video platforms in Australia - YouTube, Meta and Tik Tok, along with behavioural targeting across key BVOD and SVOD networks - Foxtel, 7+, NineNow and 10Play.

Our Campaign ran over 3 months, from August - October 2023.

We drove well over 15m impressions across the course of the campaign. Most importantly, we reached 79% of 18-39 year old Australians at an average frequency of 3x - ensuring our message landed with impact for our most valuable audience.

• Time spent with brand

Our focus on view completion fate as a key video metric ensured we captured significant audience attention. Even on skippable inventory, we maintained an impressive minimum 70% VCR, with the majority of placements achieving 98%+ view rate.

• Proof of engagement: Number of interactions, downloads or comments

We doubled our organic engagement rate on social for the duration of the campaign assets going live in-feed and via Reels/Tik Tok - from 0.46% to 0.83%. Comments via social media were overwhelmingly positive, with many commenters wondering if they could actually watch the hypothetical movie presented!

• Earned media results

We garnered over 16 pieces of earned media coverage across consumer and trade outlets, with a reach of 1.97m across Australia. Our content was shared via social networks to deliver an incremental 47k reach.

We needed to tell Australians about the magic and scale of HOYTS Cinema screens. But we could only reach our audience on their tiny mobile screens. So, since we couldn’t change the media, we changed the way the content was presented on it.

Instead of shrinking down our enormous cinema-sized content, we showed our audience cinema-scale content on their mobile screens, which meant they only saw a fraction of the full picture.