I’ve spent the morning reflecting on all of incredible speakers and people I met at the UKCA conference this week. It’s hard to put into words just how valuable a conference like this is for smaller independent cinemas who often don’t have the time or resources to take a step back to think about the bigger picture or consider new ways of working. Here are some of the things I’ve been thinking about this morning… What needs to happen to get older audiences back into cinemas and what role can independent cinemas play? Across a number of the sessions speakers spoke about how this audience segment is lagging behind in attendance in terms of frequency as well as simply not having returned at all after the pandemic. I found it interesting that one speaker observed that there has been a trend towards awards titles skewing younger — which im included to agree with. I’m left wondering whether there is a content problem as there - anecdotally - seems to be fewer quality titles that appeal to this age group (stop it, you know very well what I mean!) released throughout the year. Surely this must impact on those habit-forming, frequency numbers. But also I was left thinking about the slate awareness problem that was frequently alluded too and the impact of highly segmented and often digital marketing focused spend from distributors. Is there a correlation between this and older audiences not returning / being aware of what’s coming out? One thing I think cinemas can do to combat this is longer run times as I feel that this audience in particular responds to word of mouth - I’d love to know if there is any data on this. Another hot topic was people’s decreasing lack of slate awareness and how cinemas should respond to this challenge. I loved Sunil Suri Reel Cinema’s approach to this which involved engaging their customers in a dialogue of what they would be interested in seeing through quizzes and surveys — which I’ve already shared with my team. But I’ve also kept thinking about Anthony Andrews approach at We Are Parable of curatorial trust and authentic community engagement and dialogue could be used in response to the problem of slate awareness. Is it a pipe dream for cinemas to build an audience that so trusts a programmer or season that awareness of the film diminishes in importance? This was also highlighted by Paul Vickery of Prince Charles Cinema whose words “‘make people part of your cinema” rang true to me. As a community owened cinema the Ultimate Picture Palace team are always speaking about how to best involve people in our cinema and it was great to hear from other cinemas about different approaches. Basically, I’m resuming the work week refreshed, inspired and a little more than ‘cautiously optimistic’. Brilliant work Phil Clapp and the team at UKCA.
Julia Brown
7mo
Totally agree with your point re targeted digital marketing reducing range of films visible to older audience. If you only show people comedies how are they ever going to feel inspired to try a drama? Word of mouth and longer run times essential too. Great post and great conference as you say.
Phil Clapp
7mo
Micaela Tuckwell - that's the perfect response to our event. Lots of stuff to think about and no expectation that every question will have an answer!
Director at Reel Cinemas || Non-Exec at greenworkx || Trustee at Social Tech Trust
7moThanks for shout out. Let us know how it goes - sure Mark de Quervain will be interested as well!