CANNES — The cinema ad guys want moviegoers to use their phones more at the movies.
No, not during the main attraction — but during the run of ads that precede the feature presentation.
Interactive cinema ads are one of the next big advertising ideas coming to the big screen in 2015, attendees at the Cannes advertising confab here were told.
“We’ve been working with Twitter to try and make cinema ads more social,” said Cliff Marks, president of National CineMedia. Their idea is to get people to record Vine videos of themselves recreating classic movie scenes and post them with the hashtag #offthevine.
Marks said the firm is still in talks to find a marketing partner for the initiative.
The advertisers also showed a campaign from BMW, where the audience downloaded an app to select which path around a racetrack would complete the fastest circuit as a BMW wheeled around on the big screen in tandem.
The presentation was well attended thanks to the DeLorean car from Steven Spielberg’s “Back to the Future,” which was parked outside the main conference center. The movie will be 20 years old next year.
Cinema executives believe that 2015 is going to be a remarkable year in film history because of the return of so many classics such as “Star Wars” and “The Fantastic Four” and the final “Hunger Games” installment.
As part of the presentation, cinema advertising reps aired a show reel of technologies that had likely been inspired by movies. The pitch was aimed at underscoring that movies are the place to introduce new technology.
The show reel included the first GPS, seen in the James Bond movie “Goldfinger” back in 1964, and iRobot from 2002, which preceded the cleaning device Roomba by a decade.