Cinema advertising
In practice, for a UK buyer
The paragraph above is the neutral answer. This is the part a vendor glossary leaves out.
Cinema carries the lowest fidelity score on this site — 40 out of 100, venue-level — and that number is published in the same size type as the 85 on CTV, because a site that only shows you its best number has told you nothing about its method. 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 the plan matches, and the targeting involves no personal data at all, so it sits outside UK GDPR scope. It is booked as paperwork with roughly an eighteen-day lead time, not bought through an API.
Goes deeper: How cinema compiles
What this one connects to
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 is a property of that translation rather than a forecast, and it is not a quality rating.
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.
More on channels and formats
The seven things you can actually buy, and the words the sellers use for them.
45 minutes. Bring a real brief and we compile it live. You describe one audience and watch it compile into seven targeting specifications, each with the score for how much of the definition survived.
Talk it through