Revitalizing cinema advertising: How Brightfish transformed pricing strategy for optimal value and increased revenue

How cinema advertising sales company Brightfish partnered with boobook to offer improved value for money 

Over 19 million people go to the cinema in Belgium every year, offering organisations of all sizes a great chance to get noticed. As the only Belgian cinema advertising sales house, Brightfish helps all sorts of companies, from small local or regional businesses to big international brands, devise the best advertising options from different channels, including the commercial that comes before the movie, billboards or immersive experiences. 

“We offer a broad range of services” explained Sylvia Van Cauteren, Chief Marketing Officer at Brightfish “for example, a brand can buy campaigns that last for several weeks in multiple cinemas or they can just pick one cinema that targets their potential clients in a specific area for a limited time”. The offer is wide and tailored to the customer’s needs, however, defining advertising value isn’t always an easy task.

The challenge – Time versus reach

Brightfish started noticing a drop in their customer retention rate in 2018, when an increasing number of local businesses changed their minds about cinema advertising. “This got us thinking”, said Sylvia, “we put our heads together and tried to understand what the problem was. Why weren’t businesses renewing their contracts? Why weren’t they coming back for more?”. 

Initially they assumed that businesses with smaller budgets couldn’t afford a longer campaign, so purchased space for a shorter period of time – sometimes as short as one week. This did not bring them the results they wanted.

“Cinema advertising isn’t very effective in the short term” continues Sylvia, “being on the big screen for a few days won’t drive a higher number of people to your local shop. Small businesses weren’t noticing immediate results from their investment, and that’s why they were churning. They couldn’t see the advertising value”.

Brightfish realised they needed a new pricing strategy for all their customers, where brands were not paying for the time on screen but for the reach that they were getting from it. In order to switch from pay-per-week to a pay-per-reach advertising, Brightfish needed to find out different pricing options, buying behaviour and overall consumer value in order to define what businesses would actually be paying for. 

Finding the right agency

“To implement value-based pricing we needed to team up with a research agency” explained Sylvia. “As a marketer and not a researcher, I really wanted to engage a company with the experience to guide us through this process. We’re a small company. Marketing, that’s 3 people. So we needed to have someone that translates data into something that you can work with and really digest into action”.

Core to the value that Boobook brought was that they helped the team at Brightfish get to the final brief. Working together they planned their research and analysis to understand how the market would react and their interest in a different pricing model. 

Actionable results to determine real value

The findings from depth customer interviews framed the quantitative research.

“From these kinds of exercises, you always get some data, but not necessarily insights” said Sylvia “And we needed clear insights to convince our clients that our proposition was truly valuable. Boobook understood that. From this project’s results they’ve been able to provide us with practical action points and recommendations, which were invaluable for us”. 

Also invaluable was the clear customer profiling that Boobook delivered. This segmentation enabled Brightfish to identify the different type of brands that they were working with and address them with different and targeted pricing and communication strategies.

“Research to take action” was Brightfish’s goal. Boobook didn’t only gather the data but also digested it and turned it into clear, insightful results that answered the questions placed from the initial challenge. With a defined direction Brightfish has then been able to develop a spot-on pricing strategy, based on actual clients’ needs, to deliver true value.  

Exceeding expectations

Thanks to an accurate value-based pricing strategy and a deeper understanding of their customers, Brightfish has noticed a real shift in the relationship with their clients. They weren’t only receptive to the new information, but they were also able to pinpoint which one was the best offer for them. The new pricing strategy has been particularly welcomed by the business development team, which has been able to use these insights to better communicate the value behind Brightfish’s proposition.

“Especially when it comes to negotiation, we can now establish a conversation with a brand that talks about value rather than offering discounts and reductions”.

Finally, the market responded very positively to the changes and Brightfish saw a significant increase in their revenue, “it had a broader impact on the business than we were anticipating” continues Sylvia “and I got more return on the project than I expected”. Increase in revenue and more return than anticipated? Now, that’s priceless!