Fandango Gets Help from Pointroll for “Direct Advertising”
It feels like its been a while since the movie theater industry gave us anything to talk about. Buying tickets online and picking them up at in-theatre kiosks or printing them out at home is pretty standard at this point; the model makes sense and doesn’t really leave that much room for improvement.
A recent partnership between Fandango and online advertising giant Pointroll, however, is an attempt to do just that. The goal of the partnership is to, by matching up Fandango’s ticket purchasing technology with Pointroll’s advertising wizardry, allow consumers to buy movie tickets directly through online adds in banners and animations (you know, the stuff that you let happen on your screen for the 2 seconds it takes to find the ’skip this ad’ or ‘close’ button, or the still pictures you simply ignore). Ultimately, this simply boils down to adding a Fandango link to adds. See the full story with comments from Pointroll CEO Chris Saridakis here.
I’m sure that this deal won’t really cost either company much money (again, all they’re doing is adding a link) and may even boost sales a bit. My reaction is…yawn. The only types of purchases for which I see this “direct advertising” model making much of a difference is with impulse-type buys. But movie tickets don’t really fall into this category. For starters, buying them commits you to being somewhere at a particular time and place, something no one really does on impulse (which is compounded by the fact that people don’t go to many movies alone–so you always got to check with someone else). I just can’t picure someone going “Wow…Big Momma’s House 3 is out! I better get tickets for Tuesday at precisely 7:35.”
What would be REALLY cool, however, is if you had the option of clicking on an add for a movie that just came out on DVD and getting it automatically put into your online movie rental queue. That is definitely more in line in with the impulsiveness that “direct advertising” is all about, although I don’t think it would ultimately be profitable for anyone by online rental companies.