Cinema
The lowest fidelity score on the site.
Fixed at 40 out of 100
One band from the compiler, whatever audience detail the brief carries, because the vocabulary this channel compiles into cannot express more than this. Geography is the only thing that changes it, and it can only subtract: a city the UK table cannot map takes fifteen points off.
Venue/film projection: DCM audience packs + venues whose catchments over-index target Acorn/Mosaic types. No personal data — outside UK GDPR scope.
Standard, and the only band. A cinema screen has no idea who bought the ticket.
Naming a city the UK geography table cannot map costs 15 points here as it does everywhere else, and the rationale on the plan names the city rather than dropping it quietly. That penalty applies on top of the bands above.
What your audience actually becomes here
Each row is a table the compiler matches your persona against, with the provider behind it and the basis the lawful-basis manifest records. The language model extracts the semantics from your brief; these deterministic tables emit the identifiers, which is why a hallucinated segment cannot reach a buy.
Examples are drawn from the sandbox-scale slices of each taxonomy the platform ships with. The full exports load into the same shapes, so catalogue size does not change the compiler behaviour or the fidelity grade. Nothing here has yet run against a full production catalogue, because nothing has run live.
From one sentence to a Cinema targeting spec
The persona is matched against the cinema pack catalogue, and the resulting packs are combined with a venue list derived from the persona's first eight postcode districts. Flights default to two weeks, because that is how cinema is sold. No personal data enters the specification at any point, which is why this is the one channel whose lawful-basis manifest is trivial.
The model never emits a vendor segment id. It extracts semantics from your brief — what kind of person, what interests, what geography, what intent — and deterministic registry code matches those against catalogue keywords to produce known identifiers. That is what makes a compiled plan auditable line by line, and what stops a hallucinated segment reaching a buy.
The fastest way to see this is a real brief compiled live in the session rather than a worked example.
Talk it throughThe rails that reach this channel
4 of the 25 connectors the platform registers touch Cinema. Each one is graded on our own evidence ledger, which is deliberately blunt: a mocked HTTP test proves a client was written, not that a vendor accepted the request, spent money, or returned real delivery.
Vistar MediaBuying API
StubDOOH and cinema supply. Sandbox planning data only.
- What has to happen next
- There is no live client. Forecast, activate, pause, creative submission, reporting and inventory listing all throw before any request. Vistar publishes no stable normalised reporting schema, and creative submission needs an advertiser domain, IAB categories, publisher scope and OpenRTB markup the current shape cannot carry.
- Getting access
- An approved trafficking seat plus separate bidder approval. Partner access, not developer signup.
Digital Cinema MediaBooking workflow
Client builtGenerates the UK cinema booking brief with audience and genre packs, drives the clearance step, and holds the IO state machine.
- What has to happen next
- Ingest and reconcile the first authoritative sales-house delivery statement. These rails automate the paperwork; they do not make the booking and they do not report the delivery. In live mode a report pull throws rather than fabricating rows, and a pause requires sales-house acknowledgement.
Pearl & DeanBooking workflow
Client builtThe same booking automation for the cinema circuits DCM does not carry.
- What has to happen next
- Ingest and reconcile the first authoritative sales-house delivery statement.
CACIAudience data
StubAcorn classifications, intended for ranking cinema and DOOH catchments.
- What has to happen next
- A CACI data licence. No Acorn data is in the product: the stub's scores are deterministic pseudo-random output, and cinema venue ids are constructed from postcode districts rather than from a licensed catchment dataset.
Named on this channel's compiled plans: Digital Cinema Media · Pearl & Dean. Across all 25 connectors, spend-tested stands at 0 and report-verified at 0, and a continuous-integration check keeps those two counts honest.
The whole supply matrix →What Cinema will take
Formats and the limits the product enforces on this channel. Where a limit is a schema constraint, over-long copy fails at the edge rather than being silently truncated on the way to a provider.
DCP
2K flat, 1998×1080, 24fps, 5.1 audio, 60 seconds maximum.
Clearance
Routed via DCM Cinemapper with a CAA clearance certificate before print traffic. The workflow holds the state; it does not advance on a timer.
Storyboard
Generated for the cinema aspect and duration rather than reused from the CTV cut.
Asset production is charged separately and never blended into the media fee. The creative studio, in full
What Cinema can prove, and what it cannot
Cinema exposure is modelled at postcode-sector level, which in principle gives frequency deduplication against DOOH in the same catchment. What it cannot give you is a person-level exposure record, and no cinema seller in the UK can. Delivery arrives through the reconcile step of the booking workflow, and no cinema delivery statement has yet been ingested here.
Provider delivery, observed response, modelled estimates and powered causal evidence stay visibly separate on the report rather than being averaged into one number, and the geo-lift engine returns an underpowered verdict instead of a lift figure when the spend cannot carry the test. The four verbs, in full
Your own site's analytics, read through your token, so brand response is measured on data you already own and can audit.
GA4 as an alternative brand-response source where that is what the advertiser already runs.
Brand-lift survey panels, intended for the fourth measurement verb.
What this will not pretend past.
Every one of the seven channel pages carries one of these, in the same type. The best this channel scores is 40, graded venue-level, and the paragraph beside this is what that score does not cover.
Cinema was around £220m in the UK in 2025 on AA/WARC figures: small, and volatile. It is a distinctive attention product and a poor recurring-revenue wedge. We are emphatically not "the first self-serve cinema" — DCM has run a campaign planner and established buying workflows for years, and the claim is one we have explicitly retired. Cinema here is a booking-paperwork workflow with an eighteen-day lead time, no cinema delivery has ever been reconciled through it, and the Acorn licence behind the catchment ranking is not held. What is different is cinema inside a neutral cross-channel plan with a common audience definition and a common report.
If that limit is disqualifying for your budget, we would rather you heard it in the session than after the invoice.
Talk it throughThe same audience, compiled everywhere else
One audience definition, seven translations, seven published scores. A plan that funds two or three of these with enough weight to prove something beats one that puts a token line on all seven.
CTV & streaming TV
The one channel where a job title survives the translation almost intact.
3 bandsPaid search
One search plan. Two execution rails. Neither of them writes your keywords for you.
3 bandsPodcast & digital audio
You are not buying a person here. You are buying what they listen to.
fixed bandPaid social
Vendor-neutral until the moment of execution, then exactly as native as it needs to be.
3 bandsAddressable & linear TV
The fastest-growing channel on this list, and the one that needs the most paperwork.
fixed bandDigital out-of-home
A billboard cannot know who you are. It can know who walks past it.
fixed bandSee what your audience compiles to on Cinema.
Forty-five minutes. Bring a real audience and we compile it live on Cinema and the other six, with the score and the lawful-basis manifest on screen.
Book a working sessionDesign-partner phase · the sandbox needs no card and no credentials · nothing here sells self-serve media
Cinema questions
Why publish a score of 40?
Because it is the true one, and because a page that only publishes the 85 is a page that has told you nothing about how the other six were arrived at. A venue projection is genuinely worth about 40 out of 100 as a representation of a named audience. It can still be an excellent buy — a full screen with the lights down has an attention profile nothing else on this list matches — and those two facts are not in conflict.
Is cinema really outside GDPR?
The targeting is. Nothing personal enters a cinema specification: it is audience packs, genre packs and venue catchments, all of them aggregate. That is why this channel's lawful-basis manifest is the shortest of the seven. Your own measurement of the campaign may involve personal data, and that is covered separately.