The Mother of all Screens
At the conference of the international cinema advertising association Screen Advertising World Association (SAWA) a few weeks ago, Sir John Hegarty gave a highly acclaimed keynote speech as an introduction to an ambitious seminar program that focused on the digital revolution and its consequences for communication, for the media and therefore also for cinema.
John Hegarty discussed the importance of technology - and its relationship to content. The "advertising guru" (more of an understatement given the many awards he and his agency BBH have already won) gave the following memorable examples: Les Paul invented the electric guitar, but didn't write a song of any real significance. Gutenberg invented letterpress printing with interchangeable letters, but was the first to print a text that was well over 1000 years old. This shows that leaps in technology - as we are seeing now - initially generate a creative deficit that must first be filled with ideas, with content. We are currently in this process.
This quickly becomes clear when we look at the development of web formats: After several boom years, the success of display advertising formats now seems to have ended virtually overnight. This is somewhat reminiscent of the Andersen fairy tale "The Emperor's New Clothes", because the previously advertised offers could turn out to be a sham. The salvation now lies in the moving image. Well, that's not a ground-breaking new insight for a pronounced cinephile like me. I'm just a little surprised at how sacred storytelling is now being spoken of. We've all known this for a long time: the best form of transmission and communication is a good story. To tell a story in moving images, you need a projection surface - today it's called a screen. We encounter these screens every day as a PC screen, a smartphone, a television at home, an LED board on the street, a screen in the supermarket and a very large screen in the cinema - described by John Hegarty as "the mother of all screens".
It is important that we accept cinema advertisers: The reality of consumers is shaped by these many screens. However, it was also important for John Hegarty to emphasize that, from the cinema's point of view, we should not enter into a competition for the performance of various screen formats, because this would clearly be won by the cinema per se. It was nice to hear this message so clearly. The original wording is not quite quotable, so I'll try the following: "Don't try to beat the small screen - you have the biggest f...... screen in the world!"
However, this raises the question of whether cinema, as the last bastion of monoscreen storytelling, where even smartphones are stowed away in pockets after a few minutes, needs a dialog with the help of a second screen to enhance the experience. Sir John had an answer to this question that was as simple as it was obvious. If the interaction between content on the big screen and the smartphone offers people a clear advantage, then it will prevail. In his view, advantage means: entertainment value, experience, joy, excitement, exchange. If this is not realized ... "forget it!"
Next year, we will definitely try to expand the possibilities of communication in cinemas to include precisely this strand. It will then depend on the content as to whether this interactive channel will prove to be an enrichment for cinema fans and therefore also for advertising clients. We are more than excited about this process.
In any case - the success of this development or not - we can look forward to what is probably one of the most promising cinema years of modern times, to a blockbuster cinema year 2015 the likes of which we have not seen for a long time. Looking forward to it Florian WeischerChairman WerbeWeischer and President of SAWA.
