Consumer Perspectives into the Cinema Advertising : An Institutional Approach

Due to highly fragmented audiences along with intensified competition for optimal media options, marketers are finding it increasingly difficult to reach key target consumers and achieve effectiveness for ad campaigns. Consumers are also avoiding traditional promotional messages through digital technologies designed to thwart marketers. Taken together, these trends reflect the challenges marketers face in today’s marketplace and, as a result, marketers are looking to innovative media such as cinema advertising. Given the unique nature and practice of cinema advertising, this study is to explore how consumers perceive and view cinema advertising in contemporary consumer culture. and develop a in-depth understanding of the institutional role of cinema advertising in light of consumer sovereignty and advertising ethics on a basis of the model for understanding the existing literature of advertising and public policy presented by Rotfeld and Stafford (2007). The findings of 16 in-depth interviews depict the basic concerns of cinema advertising as communication impact, consumer socialization, economic equity, vulnerable consumer, escapism, attitude toward theatre owner and advertiser, secular consumerism, and skepticism from a consumer perspective. This article concludes with a discussion of implications for out-of-home advertising management and for public policy related to consumer welfare.2