How Smart Strategy and Insights Ramp Up Movie Rentals

At one2one Entertainment, we serve multiple studios and more than 150 movies a year to various markets, so we have the scale to understand trends that studios would never be able to see on their own. Here’s some of what we’ve learned.

Previous behavior is the best predictor of future rentals.

We found that 92% of VOD rentals come from households who’ve already rented through their cable provider, regardless of that household’s affinity for a specific genre. It makes intuitive sense to target a horror movie to a household has indicated an affinity for that genre, but you’ll have much better luck targeting any movie to heavy renters since they’re the ones doing almost all renting. This finding surprised us, and it necessitates a huge mindshift on the part of studios.

Rentals need a completely different approach than theatrical releases.

We used to market movie rentals like we market theatrical releases–targeting people who watch movies on channels like TNT.  While these people do like watching movies, we found they’re not going to tune-away from a free movie to rent a movie On-Demand. Same goes for advertising rentals during major TV events. We have much more success advertising rentals in syndicated content. People are much more likely to tune away from a rerun of Friends to rent an On-Demand movie than they are to tune away from the season finale of their favorite show.

Free On-Demand is a valuable advertising tool for On-Demand rentals.

Existing renters are five times more likely to convert than those who’ve never rented, including those who rent free On-Demand content. People watching free On-Demand have overcome a major barrier to entry by indicating that they’re familiar with accessing the On-Demand portal. Ad spots on free On-Demand are usually fast-forward disabled, so we know people are much more likely to see them. In fact, we recently found that 79% of films advertised in free On-Demand had a positive effect on ROI.

These aren’t the kinds of insight studios can get on their own.

We’re able to track rental ROI for studios because of the scale we have. Operators won’t produce the data needed to fuel these campaigns unless it makes economic sense for them. The cost for a studio to do this kind of analysis with an MVPD for a single movie would be prohibitive. Since we work with most of the major studios, we’re able to pool movies from different studios to negotiate a price that works for all parties. Our relationships allow us to get data that shows which tactics contributed to rental conversions, and we’re able to share those insights back out with our valued clients.

Partnering with one2one Entertainment can give studios the insights and strategy they need to make the most of this substantial distribution channel.

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