Faith-Based Titles Find Success with Custom On-demand Audience

As we head into spring and approach a few religious holidays including Easter and Passover, we wanted to shine a light on Cadent’s unique approach to achieving success with on-demand faith-based films.

Each year, we work with a handful of faith-based titles and take a special approach planning them. That’s because we can’t treat a faith-based film in a particular genre with the same targeting approach as we might use for other films in that same genre. For a drama title with a $1-10 million opening box office, for example, the on-demand revenue is $2.5 million on average, compared to about $1 million for a faith-based drama.

We know broad targeting approaches won’t work here. The audience for faith-based titles is very specific, and while there is definitely opportunity for success on-demand, there aren’t obvious attributes with which to target these potential viewers. Additionally, we have to work within regulations on using faith and religious preference data.

Our solution was to leverage the volume of faith-based titles we planned to develop a custom audience segment with a distribution partner that doesn’t use any PII to reach likely viewers.

This content segment utilizes first-party data and lets us target renters we know have interest in faith-based content from previous activity, not personal information. Using addressable advertising, we can promote new releases and catalog faith-based films while adhering to privacy rules.

This refined segment works. On a recent faith-based drama, Cadent used addressable advertising to target a custom audience and saw a 328% lift in the platform buy rate compared to the baseline campaign metrics without addressable support. Reaching that right audience can make or break a revenue goal–especially for campaigns with limited or no theatrical support.

There are many more opportunities to refine performance by homing in on the right target. Consistently, we see about 7% of on-demand sales come from new renters. Sampling only our faith-based films, that average is closer to 13%. This indicates a rich potential for a sales lift with the right audience.

There are also opportunities for success through aligning with seasonal events. We see substantial sales lifts annually thanks to certain holidays like President’s Day, which sees a 71% boost in transactions compared to a normal Monday.

Looking at the month ahead, Easter usually isn’t one of these occasions. It always lands on a Sunday and tends to carry a minimal lift of about 5%, not really big enough to warrant backing with a large budget. That is not the case for faith-based titles–the transaction lift can be upwards of 400%! Easter represents a big opportunity for this custom audience.

The same can’t be said for all faith-based holidays: Christmas, for example, doesn’t drive a significant increase, likely because there are other seasonal catalog titles in addition to a plethora of major new releases competing for attention.

Our custom addressable solutions open up a lot of new opportunities to promote and find success with smaller-budget, niche-audience films like these.

Learn more about Cadent in-home entertainment.