National CineMedia (NCM) Launches New Offerings to Transform Cinema into a Modern, Full-Funnel Media Solution

NCM, the largest cinema advertising platform in the US, today announced its new offerings for the 2024-25 upfront, providing brands with full-funnel solutions to reach sought-after audiences, including programmatic buying and self-serve automation. NCM is also leveraging its data-driven approach and deep understanding of moviegoers to provide business outcome guarantees for select advertisers in their upfront deals, ensuring a return on their ad spend. In addition to these industry-firsts, NCM released the findings from its second attention study, reaffirming cinema as the number one platform for attention.

“NCM is driven by our commitment to innovate and transform cinema advertising into the most effective performance and brand building solution in today’s media marketplace,” shares Scott Felenstein, President of Sales, Marketing and Partnerships at NCM. “We are a true premium video solution and continue to develop new capabilities that provide advertisers with unrivaled reach and scale; a coveted young, diverse audience; and the highest attention metrics, all in a brand safe and culturally relevant ad environment.”

Category leaders including Hyundai, United Airlines, Indeed, SEGA of America, Mazda and e.l.f. Beauty have all tapped NCM in the last year, leveraging long form content and targeted buys with a range of campaign goals spanning across upper, mid and lower funnel metrics.

“Hyundai’s experience with cinema advertising has helped us reach audiences that are fully engaged and receptive to messaging,” said Angela Zepeda, CMO, Hyundai Motor North America. “By offering captivating content that’s featured on the biggest screen available, the movie screen, we have further enhanced our impact with hard-to-reach audiences.”

Innovations in Programmatic and Self-Serve Transform Cinema

NCM’s industry-leading launches of programmatic and self-serve buying expand the ways in which current and new advertisers can tap into the company’s highly valued big screen inventory.

• Programmatic: For the first time, media buyers can access real-time, data-driven trading of cinema ad inventory, bidding on available audiences during NCM’s show, Noovie. Buyers can choose from programmatic guaranteed (PG) and private marketplace (PMP) options for brand safe, 100% human-viewed premium cinema video impressions across NCM’s platform. Additionally, programmatic buys can be customized by reach, geography, film rating, day of the week and time of day.
• Self-serve: NCM’s new Campaign Manager, the first fully automated self-serve solution in cinema advertising, empowers local and regional companies to plan, buy, and schedule their ads to run on the big screen. Additionally, NCM is working with video creation platform Waymark to support clients who seek to create ads by leveraging the power of AI. A first in cinema, the Waymark collaboration with NCM will provide more small and mid-size advertisers who cannot afford to produce their own ads broader access to the big screen.

New Attention Study Reaffirms Cinema as the Top Video Platform