The Enduring Impact of Cinema Advertising in a Digital-Driven World
John Partilla, CEO of Screenvision Media, reflects on navigating the turbulent times of the pandemic and shares why movie theaters remain an unrivaled avenue for immersive advertising in a world dominated by digital and streaming.
John Partilla is the CEO of Screenvision Media, a leader in cinema and premier video advertising, where he grew organic revenue by 80% and tripled earnings from 2016-2019 before successfully navigating the company through the challenges of a global pandemic.
John’s 30-plus year career has spanned across digital, media, and advertising sectors and comprises increasingly senior leadership roles, including CEO of the Olson Group; COO of Dentsu Americas; President, Global Media Sales of Clear Channel Communications; and President, Global Media Group of Time Warner. Prior to his media sector experience, John spent 18 years on the agency side of the business, rising to Managing Partner and Executive Vice President of Young and Rubicam. He was also the founder and CEO of Y&R’s Brand Buzz, a digitally driven agency that helped pioneer digital practices and persuasion in its 10-year lifecycle.
The Continuum sat down with John to discuss his experience on both sides of our industry, from the early days of building digital buzz to the scary days of steering a theater-based business through a global pandemic.
Did you always know you wanted to go into marketing and advertising, and how did you get your start?
Yes, in fact, I did set out to have a career in advertising, and I think I've been fortuitously lucky in the way everything worked out. I grew up as an Army brat. My dad was active military for the first 13 years of my life. We moved all over. I was born on a base in Germany, we lived in other places throughout Europe, then we moved back to the States and lived in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama. When my dad left the military, we settled in Long Island, New York. I think all that moving around helped me develop a love for people, connection, and newness, and that fits really well with our industry.
I discovered this business through a marketing class in college, and I ended up getting an internship at a Philadelphia agency called Spiro and Partners. I don’t think I would have used these actual words at the time, but I loved the blend of creativity and commerce. When I graduated the following year, I sent a whole bunch of resumes to ad agencies in New York and was fortunate to land at the iconic Young and Rubicam.
I don’t think most people love their first job, but I really did. We were in the Account Management Training Program, which meant we rotated around to many departments—strategy, media, account service, traffic, and production—over the first two years. I was in this great cohort of peers who were all just excited to soak in what this business was about. This was the late 80s when advertising was in one version of its golden age. I'm sure others would say the 50s or 60s were the true golden age, but it still felt pretty golden in the late 80s. I was working with colorful creative on classic brands like Colgate, Kraft Food, Advil, and Kentucky Fried Chicken.
You had several roles at Y&R, but we want to talk about Brand Buzz, a spin-off focused on digital advertising in the very early days of that tactic. Can you tell us about that?
We started in 2000. TV was still very dominant, but digital was starting to grow explosively. This was right around the time the Blair Witch Project came out, and the way that movie had been launched and marketed was new and all about buzz. The concept at the time was that we would go to the agency’s existing clients as well as new clients with a digital-first mindset.
Our goal was to drop the seeds of dialogue and conversation into places people were already gathering and then push that conversation along. I guess you could describe it as guerilla marketing tactics designed to get our clients greater share of voice out there for far less spend. We would also supplement that with some traditional marketing and spending, but TV came second or third.
We didn’t have the media terms and language we have now. Social media barely existed. We didn’t have the term influencer. We didn’t differentiate between paid and unpaid media. We kept using the phrase “create buzz.” What we meant was that we were going to get people talking about your brand. In truth, that was a little like catching lightning in a bottle.
“It was about adding value with competitive pricing and an idea at the center, tying all of it together.”
You were on the advertising side at Y&R for 17 years and then jumped to the media side at Time Warner. What was that role?
This was 2004. Time Warner was comprised of Time Inc. Publishing, Turner Network, AOL, and the WB Network. They had just developed what they called their Marketing Solution Group. The idea was to help large advertising clients—which had a lot of different sub-brands and bought a lot of ad inventory across our properties—maximize their buying impact. Each brand could still buy inventory through their own media agencies, in what I would call a very spots and dots fashion. But if you’re the CMO of PepsiCo, General Motors, or AT&T, you might want to have a conversation with a single point of contact who could talk about the breadth and depth of the portfolio of Time Warner and offer a larger strategy.
It wasn’t about offering quantity discounts. The heads of sales at the various divisions always reminded me that they could discount their own inventory. It was about adding value with competitive pricing and an idea at the center, tying all of it together. I partnered with Mark D’Arcy, a great creative who had also just left Y&R.
As an example, we worked with Johnson and Johnson on their baby products. Their tagline at the time—which we didn’t come up with—was “Having a baby changes everything.” We helped them create messaging and media activations throughout the House of Time Warner that demonstrated how having a baby changes everything. On AOL, we had people send in their own stories. On TBS, we created branded content with some of the leading shows. And we had special inserts targeting families placed in the Time, Inc. magazines. We were able to offer efficient pricing that made J&J happy but not so efficient that any of our properties thought they were discounting their inventory.
You’ve held several C-Suite roles, including your current role. First as Chief Operating Officer at Dentsu Americas, then as Chief Executive Officer at the Olson Group, and now as CEO of Screenvision. What is different about being in the C-Suite?
It requires a very different set of muscles. If there was a common thread in my career before I became a C-suite exec, it was client relationships, new business development, and selling skills. A COO or CEO role has many of these aspects, but it is also about finding ways to operate in a more efficient, effective, unified, and inspiring fashion. This has been a great developmental stage in my career, and I think all these roles have helped me grow significantly.
“In movie theaters, you have a highly engaged, captive audience. They chose to go out to a movie to create some degree of escapism from their life for a few hours.”
You’ve been CEO at Screenvision since 2016, which means you’re back on the media side selling screen time before a movie starts. What does the company do, and what are the challenges for this kind of out-of-home platform?
We are predominantly a cinema advertising platform. Our company rolls up the pre-show inventory for roughly half of the movie theaters in the U.S., which means we reach about 400 million consumers a year through our portfolio. We run 30-second and 60-second ads for all kinds of leading national brands in automotive, travel, QSR (fast food), and healthcare. We also run ads for regional and local brands. Movie theaters provide a great opportunity for local businesses to connect with their community as people are filing into their seats. Then, closer to showtime, when the bulk of the audience is sitting, you’ll see the national blue-chip ads.
In movie theaters, you have a highly engaged, captive audience. They chose to go out to a movie to create some degree of escapism from their life for a few hours. They may still have an eye on their phone at the beginning, but even then, they’re mostly surrendered to that 40-foot screen. This isn’t true when they’re home watching TV while surfing the web, checking emails, and skipping ads.
As for the challenges, I think we’re all facing similar ones right now. CMOs and the people they work for think they can and need to measure every dollar spent and tie it directly to an outcome. We’re a top-of-funnel contributor, meaning we drive brand awareness, relationships, and connections. We all know it can be hard to tie top-of-funnel brand awareness to a purchase, but we also know the whole funnel influences that purchase decision. We are working to prove our case and adding new methods like QR codes on the screen that can show how our cinema ad was responsible for traffic and, hopefully, a purchase. Still, precise measurement can sometimes be a challenge for our industry platform.
Speaking of challenges, you were the CEO of a company that sells ads in movie theaters during the pandemic when nobody could go to movie theaters. What did you do?
As you would expect, it was a complete cataclysm. I've never had a professional challenge as great as this in my entire career. We were coming off another record year of growth, and almost overnight, the lights turned off. Like everyone else, we had no idea how long it would last. We survived the hardest way of all; we said goodbye to about half of the company's staff, and those who stayed took significant salary cuts. The only silver lining is that we made the decision very early in the pandemic, and many of the people we let go were able to get jobs in other businesses—like streaming services—that were picking up sales volume during lockdown.
We were able to pivot our skills a little bit and start working with companies that were still reaching consumers like channels at doctors’ offices and electric car charging stations. It helped give us some revenue, but most of our time was spent making and remaking contingency plans, so we had advertisers ready to go as soon as the theaters opened back up.
“We’re a top-of-funnel contributor, meaning we drive brand awareness, relationships, and connections. We all know it can be hard to tie top-of-funnel brand awareness to a purchase, but we also know the whole funnel influences that purchase decision.”
Were you worried that movie theaters wouldn’t make a comeback? Are you worried now? Even after the pandemic, there’s been a lot of talk about how streaming is just going to take over.
I think that in 2020 and 2021, no one knew what the new world would look like, and that was certainly scary. Now that everything has settled, and we’re on the other side of the pandemic and the Hollywood strikes, we have real confidence that moviegoing is back to at least 90% of what it was pre-pandemic, and it should stay there.
The impending death of movies has been greatly exaggerated since we all got VCRs in the 1980s. Most everyone has a kitchen, but restaurant going is still very vital. I think people have realized that even though you can watch pretty much everything on your own TV, streaming won’t supplant the movie-going experience.
You said at the start of the interview that you went into this career because it blended creativity and commerce. Do you still feel that way?
Definitely, I've been on the ad agency side, on the media platform owner side, and now I’ve had some private equity experience. I actually got my MBA at Columbia a while ago as well which helped broaden my thinking. I still love that combination of business and creative.
After 35-plus years, I might add to that, though, to say that, at its heart, this is a people business. I’ve loved all of the people—clients, agency teams, salespeople, and now movie theater owners—that I’ve met along the way. I feel very fortunate to still love my job.
October 15, 2024
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