A Movie Test

By Jason Carmel | 0 Comments | Posted in in Analytics , Optimization | Permalink

I was sick over the Memorial Day Weekend, not that you cared enough to call or anything.

When I'm sick, I like to watch movies in the theater (preferably), provided I'm not rampantly contagious or bleeding out of both ears. Fortunately, the three day kick-off to the summer blockbuster season affords a lot of movie-watching opportunity, and so I saw the new Indiana Jones flick and Prince Caspian. Before you ask, no, I don't have kids. I saw them because they were at the top of my list. Don't judge me. You're judging me. Stop judging me.

I will provide my review of the films in five words or fewer, and will then get to the point of this post:

Indiana Jones: Still good; please stop now.
Prince Caspian: Not Lord of the Rings.

One thing I noticed (maybe because I was sick and in a foul mood) is how soul-crushingly terrible the movie-going experience is. I feel like I'm getting screwed at every turn. Tickets are north of $10 each, which gives me the privilege of sitting in an uncomfortable, dirty, ice-chest of theater while I get skeezy, full-frontal advertisement until the movie starts. The food is about 4X what you would pay for it at a 7-11, and I saw a helpful woman behind the concession stand counter literally ask a gentleman six different times if he would prefer a combo. (Note: I can't blame the woman for being so effusive about the combo opportunities. There's a sign in front of each register that bribes patrons to narc on the concession folks if they fail to do so.)

I suspect it couldn't be too hard to make movie-going fun again. I can think of tons of things I would try if I owned a theater. Maybe free popcorn (if salted properly, a nice loss leader for soft drinks). Seat consoles that let you vote on what parts of the film you liked or didn't like. Participatory cinema, like the geniuses at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema do in Austin, TX.

I'm probably not the first guy to come up with this and more, so I wondered (while waiting for the NyQuil to kick in) why only the random independant theaters ever do anything that attempts to re-inject the positive back into an experience that can only be defined (generously) as craptacular. It occurred to me that, in all likelihood, the Standard Corporate Theaters (SCTs), such as the ones I patronized this weekend, were capable of the same ideas, but were probably stuck in a rut looking at the wrong things to see real results. My suspicion is that the SCTs rely on a multiplier of concession sales, tickets sold per movie showing, and advertising income to determine revenue. Asking a customer six times if he would like a combo is a good thing, because a test of such would demonstrate an immediate X% lift in concession sales. Any cost (e.g., a bad taste in the mouth for most patrons) wouldn't hit the bottom line until long-after it could be attributable to ComboMania. Now contrast this to a theater owner who gets permission to run a more disruptive (in a good way) free-popcorn test- the test is almost always doomed to failure, since, quite obviously, concession sales will deteriorate significantly in the short term if you are giving away free product, and any positive impact from word of mouth will take many weeks to cultivate. If the SCTs never take a step back and let a deeper change happen, I think we can expect little in the way of real improvement (and, most likely, combo offers in the bathrooms).

Maybe in addition to measuring a radical new idea on the same success metrics, the SCTs could learn something by finding new things to measure, like relative customer satisfaction, propensity to return, etc. When you are looking to fundamentally disrupt the way your business operates, new measurements are generally a necessity. You never want to abandon the bread-and-butter metrics of your business, but it is unfair to hold tests that seek to go beyond the normal parameters of the business model to only those measurements collected for the old business model.