I love the movies. One of my favorite things is chilling out watching a black and white flick from aeons ago, and when I see a film I like I want others to see it too.

Prior to Movio I worked with Nick MacAvoy (now Vice President of Operations EMEA at Movio) at Movie Shack, which was essentially a NZ version of Netflix. It was all about introducing people to the right content at the right time and with little funding we used technology to create our competitive edge.

Light Bulb Moment

Shortly after exiting Movie Shack I went to my local cinema and it was almost empty. I thought to myself ‘It’s opening week. Where is everyone? There’s nothing wrong with this movie, what’s the deal?' It wasn’t that they didn’t want to come, it’s that they didn’t know when or where. Somehow all the marketing for this movie had just missed its mark. I realized that we could replicate the Movie Shack ideas for the cinema industry.

A chance introduction to Will Palmer, now Movio CEO, was a defining moment that would eventually see Movio founded on a fusion of our collective experiences and ideas.

Over the last few years the team at Movio has been on a journey getting our software out there, empowering exhibitors to understand and engage with moviegoers, promoting our ideas, establishing great relationships, friendships and listening to the film industry.

This year we’ve found ourselves at the point where there is a recognized need for a platform the likes of Movio Media. Seeing is believing and we’ve only scratched the surface of what this product could do; the potential is incredible.

What is Movio Media?

In terms of the Movio Media product itself, we didn’t want to just deliver another data visualization tool. We want to provide insight. We want to tell you whether or not there’s anything interesting in the data, or if it’s just as you’d expect.

It’s about providing the market with an accurate view of what moviegoers look and behave like on a scale never seen before. You can have analysts and market research go out there sampling and tell you it’s 20-25 year old females who will see your film, but when opening weekend hits and it’s actually 30-35 year olds, what do you do?

What we’re achieving with this product is improving the decision making process. Taking out the guesswork and ambiguity. What’s actually going on? We’re talking about shrinking that broad margin of error by a significant amount. Marketing spend is going to be more targeted and more effective. Audiences are going to be more fully understood and engaged. Real-time insights into audiences are going to allow marketing strategies to pivot almost instantly maximizing a movie’s full potential. The list goes on.

It’s a new concept. It’s about understanding people and getting to the heart of moviegoers.

Game Changer

This iteration of Movio Media we’ve dubbed 'Insights.'

Right now Movio Media is a comprehensive platform to help you confirm correlations between comparable titles and deeply understand the audiences, allowing to you to make foundational marketing decisions. Movio Media will highlight for you the out-of-the-ordinary stuff, giving you strategic insight.

People in the industry already make these decisions on a daily basis, and they do it well in general, but Movio Media is about adding high degrees of accuracy and taking things to the next level.

The ultimate goal of the first release is that studios and distributors will have similar insights to what exhibitors have now. It’s about bridging that gap and connecting with people directly.

Studios can now have a perspective they’ve never had before, optimizing spend and increasing yield.

Over and above data insights, Movio Media has the ability to bridge the gap between studios and moviegoers.

Studios will be able to isolate an exact target audience and directly communicate with them via exhibition loyalty programs delivering precise content and rewarding engagement.

The Future

Future releases of the product will allow users to model their movies rather than starting from a position of comparison. Movio Media will then tell you what the real comparable titles are. You’ll be able to look at which actors should be in my movie? What product placement should feature? If I screen it on this date, over this holiday period what would I expect to yield? That’s when you start getting into the big league; the real game changing stuff like ‘Is this film even worth making?’

There are hundreds of applications for how the industry could use Movio Media. We think it’s pretty revolutionary and that it’s going to change the way that studios think about marketing, and in the future, about making movies.

Movio Media will be our flagship product, complementing our existing products. There will be a lot of high-end development that goes into it which will naturally filter down to Movio Cinema.

The two products Movio Cinema and Movio Media are symbiotic. We’ll always keep exhibition in our foresight. The concept of Movio Media is to impact all facets of cinema. It’s a genuine win for all participants: studios, distribution, exhibition and the moviegoers.

Our job is to get in the middle and help the film industry to deliver a better experience to every moviegoer.