Channels and formats
What is cinema advertising?
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what it means here
Here is what the term means for a UK buyer
The definition above holds anywhere. Buying media in the UK adds the detail below, including where AdBuyMCP does something different.
Cinema carries the lowest fixed fidelity score in AdBuyMCP's catalogue, 40 out of 100 at venue level. A cinema buy is a projection from catchment demographics onto a screen, and no UK seller can give you a person-level exposure record. It has two compensating properties: a full screen with the lights down has an attention profile nothing else in a plan matches, and the targeting involves no personal data at all, so it sits outside UK GDPR scope. Cinema sits outside an AdBuyMCP awareness plan. A named person at the sales house confirms every cinema booking, so allow about eighteen days from approval to screen.
How is UK cinema advertising sold?
Two sales houses sell the UK estate: Digital Cinema Media, which says it holds an 85% share of UK cinema admissions, and Pearl & Dean. Neither exposes a public buying API. You buy an audience guarantee package: a pack of films that guarantees admissions against a demographic, optionally narrowed to titles, venues or postcode catchments, and optionally moved to a premium position closer to the feature at a percentage uplift on the pack rate.
Cinema is sold in runs, and AdBuyMCP's cinema workflow plans two-week runs whatever the length of the wider campaign, because a single week is rarely worth the cost of making and clearing the advert.
What does a cinema line need?
Two steps set the live date: clearance by the Cinema Advertising Association, and mastering the advert into a digital cinema package. Copy with strong language is restricted to 15 and 18 certificate films, which changes the audience a plan can reach, so the clearance pre-check flags it at the script stage.
Venue ranking by catchment is designed around CACI Acorn data, and AdBuyMCP does not hold an Acorn licence. Venue lists come from your own postcode districts, and no venue-level reach figure is published.
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related terms
These terms sit next to this one
Most confusion in media buying comes from two adjacent terms being used interchangeably, so these are the neighbours worth reading next.
Fidelity score
A published score out of 100 answering one question: how much of an audience definition survives translation into a channel's native targeting words. It describes that translation, so it makes no forecast of reach or performance and says nothing about the quality of the media.
Cinema Advertising Association (CAA)
The body that clears advertising for UK cinema, issuing a certificate and an age rating that determines which films an advert may be shown alongside. Separate from broadcast clearance and required before print traffic.
Insertion order (IO)
A contractual document committing an advertiser to buy specified advertising from a specified seller at agreed terms. The mechanism by which media that is not bought programmatically is bought instead.
CACI Acorn
A UK consumer classification that segments postcodes into named types by demographics, lifestyle and behaviour, used to rank areas rather than people. In practice that means catchment work: which cinema, which retail park, which high street.
same group
These terms are also in Channels and formats
The channels UK advertisers buy, and the words the sellers use for them.