Pathé Cinemas Attract Moviegoers with Hyper-Local, Weather-Based Ads

Relevance Is the Heart of Well-Performing Advertising - Especially for Location-Dependent Businesses.

Relevance is the heart of well-performing advertising, especially for location-dependent businesses. Great looking, highly personalized, and relevant creative is a key element for engaging consumers.  

Pathé, a leading cinema chain in the Netherlands, working together with the agency Oogst, a Merkle company, wanted to create more relevant, localized ads for potential moviegoers. A key component was that users should only be targeted with ads featuring movies that are: 

1. Available in theaters close to them and 
2. The most popular in each location. 

Pathé needed the ads for 27 theaters, all showing a different set of movies. 

In addition, to make the ads even more relevant, they wanted to include weather-based copy and imagery into the ads. For example; when it was raining in one location and sunny in another, the weather would be shown properly in the ads of each location.

‘’We at Merkle create data-driven campaigns to challenge the current marketing landscape to be more relevant. Smartly.io helps us making more relevant campaigns and the great results prove that this is working.’’

Daniëlle Antonis - Sr. online marketing consultant at Oogst, a Merkle company

Planting Lush Creatives and Optimization for Performance

With Smartly.io, the media agency combined Pathé's product catalog with an Automated Ads weather feed with each theatre location, always showing the top-10 selling movies for each location in real-time. 

Through the feed they were able to implement the following elements dynamically in the creative:

• Movie inventory
• Theatre location
• Weather element (sun, rain, cold, control)
• Plf's (Imax, Dolby, 4DX)

The creative agency created Image Templates to localize the ads and incorporated the weather-based copy text into them, resulting in a hyper-relevant creative with endless variations based on the dynamic elements depending on the time of the day.

Blazing Results on Marketing ROI 

Thanks to Smartly.io’s automation solutions, they were able to create 104 ads automatically and update them based on weather conditions and user location. Once the setup was in place, manual work was not required to maintain the campaign. When weather conditions changed, ads were automatically updated in each location to reflect the changing weather conditions.

The added weather component resulted in both an uplift in CTR and conversion rate and resulted in a 13% decrease in CPA.

“Weather conditions have a significant impact on our cinemas. Smartly.io helps us to create more relevant online advertisements by taking into account the local weather forecast.”