Movies Still Come to Our Emotional Rescue

By NCM Archives
Cover image for  article: Movies Still Come to Our Emotional Rescue

Cinema remains our one chief cultural export to the world, demonstrated by a record setting $13.5 billion in international ticket sales, an increase of 7% over the previous year's box office sales. While we all saw the year-end headlines decrying the decline of movie attendance in 2011, I wanted to weigh in on the untrue notion that the demise of the American movie industry is imminent.

With the Oscars coming up this weekend and the 2012 U.S. Box Office already up 18% over last year, this is the perfect time to remember why we "go" to the movies. Maybe better than any other medium, movies can transport an audience in a way that is so totally immersive that it can brand us with an emotional memory that we carry with us a lifetime. Every time we quote, "You talkin' to me??" or "You had me at hello…" we illustrate the profound emotional impact of the movies; from the psychosis of Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle to the happy ending romance of "Jerry Maguire."

If you look at two of this year's nominees for Best Picture, "Hugo" and "The Artist", you'll see that the two together garnered 21 nominations! The former is a beautifully realized homage to the early days of filmmaking and the magical wonderment that movies, both then and now, still provide to audiences around the world. Most impressive was the way Scorsese utilized 3-D to recreate Paris of the 1920s. Film reviewer Donald Brown called "Hugo," "…a delightful holiday gift to lovers of movies. If you care about Cinema, go see it on the big screen in 3D, and be prepared to enter a child's world of wonder." His words made me hearken back to when I was a child of 6 years old. My brother took me to the Loews State Theatre in Times Square, an adventure unto itself for a kid from Queens. There we saw the film that was the winner of an unprecedented 11 academy awards, "Ben Hur" in CinemaScope. For me, it was the most exotic depiction of time and place I had ever seen. The movie was so enormous it even had an intermission!

Of course now whenever this movie pops up on AMC or TBS during the holidays I see just how over-the-top the acting was, or how cheesy some of the special effects were. But, one scene in that film still manages to stop me dead in my tracks, compelling me to sit and watch… the chariot race! And even though the build up to that climactic conflict between good and evil is pure melodrama, the excitement of that race is unrivalled in Hollywood history for evoking edge of the seat thrills. Every time I manage to see "Ben-Hur," for those fleeting moments, I am 6 years old again sitting in the largest auditorium I'd ever seen, in the middle of the busiest city in the world. So when I saw "Hugo," I had that same feeling of being transported back to my youth of wonder and excitement that only the movies could elicit from me.

And last night I experienced what is probably the closest thing to a throwback that recreates American movie going of a bygone era; I saw the near silent film "The Artist." Unlike "Hugo" it was in 2D, black and white with no spoken dialogue. And yet it was just like "Hugo" in its ability to take me to another time and place that captured my imagination and convinced me that what I was seeing on-screen was magical and transformational.

Why do I wax poetic about my movie going experiences, both past and present? Because the emotional journey provided in the Cinema may be unparalleled by any other media. At NCM Media Networks we put this theory to the test by endeavoring to measure that level of audience anticipation. We conducted a study with Innerscope, the leader in using neuroscience informed biometrics, to prove how the movie theater environment actually enhances an audience's response to a brand regardless of the consumer's previous exposure to that related advertising. The results of our study "Measuring the Magic of the Movies: The Emotional Impact of Moviegoing on In-Cinema Advertising" showed that Cinema respondents generated a 42% higher level of Brand Resonance (the unconscious emotional connection to a brand) than their TV audience counterparts. And even though TV may have the ability to garner strong Brand Resonance in certain instances, its evolution as a solitary viewing medium impedes it from having the same audience involvement and impact that Cinema provides as a collective social activity.

So while we all watch television, we all go to the movies. And to me, that is an important distinction because the emotional anticipation of going to the movies is what prepares our respective imaginations to be transported into a realm of emotional engagement and memory making. To my way of thinking, that's a tough marketing environment to beat.

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