Background

Screenvision Media is one of the nation’s leading cinema, video and media companies, delivering unskippable, high-impact advertising experiences in theaters across the United States. In an era defined by fragmented attention, second-screen behaviors and declining ad recall, Screenvision offers something increasingly rare: a premium, distraction-free environment where audiences are fully present.

Movie theaters are one of the few remaining spaces where brands can tell emotional stories at scale, supported by immersive visuals, powerful sound and a socially shared experience. As advertisers search for environments that do more than simply reach people, Screenvision sought to validate cinema’s unique ability to move audiences emotionally and drive real business outcomes.

Challenge

Despite cinema’s reputation as a premium advertising and media channel, the industry lacked contemporary evidence proving the depth of emotional engagement and its direct connection to brand metrics. Traditional measures like recall and favorability could not fully explain why theatrical ads perform so well or how emotional immersion translates into behavior.

Screenvision needed a methodology capable of measuring the unconscious drivers of engagement, quantifying emotional impact in the moment and isolating what makes cinema such a powerful storytelling platform. The challenge was to capture the real emotional, cognitive and behavioral effect of the theater experience in a natural, real-world setting, not a lab.

Solution

Screenvision partnered with Alter Agents to conduct a breakthrough study combining agile neuroscience with in-theater survey research. Using the Immersion platform, 40 moviegoers wore biometric sensors that captured second-by-second heart rate variability, a proven indicator of emotional engagement and memory formation. This produced more than 24,000 biometric data points across ads, preshow content and the feature film.

To complement the neuroscience, 193 moviegoers completed a pre- and post-experience brand lift survey on-site, capturing conscious responses, emotional shifts, ad recall and changes in key metrics such as favorability, consideration, relatability and likelihood to take action. By fusing unconscious emotional signals with traditional survey data in a live theater environment, the research delivered one of the most comprehensive evaluations of cinema’s impact ever conducted.

Results

The findings confirmed that cinema is one of the most emotionally powerful media environments available to brands, and that emotional immersion directly contributes to stronger brand outcomes.

Key results included:

• Cinema ads dramatically outperformed industry immersion benchmarks, with Screenvision’s preshow delivering an average immersion score of 63, 1.2x higher than both advertising and entertainment norms.
• Viewers experienced a 22% lift in positive emotions post-screening, indicating the environment primes audiences for emotional receptivity.
• Ads shown in theaters were 2.6 times more likely to be described as attention grabbing and 2.8 times more likely to be seen as high quality compared with ads elsewhere.
• Across all brands tested, cinema drove measurable brand lift, including a 7-point gain in favorability, a 5-point gain in relatability, and a 3-point gain in consideration.
• Nearly 60 percent of moviegoers said they would take action after seeing a preshow ad, such as visiting a website, learning more or discussing the brand with others.

We turned to Alter Agents because we wanted more than a good story about cinema attention; we needed proof that not only were moviegoers watching ads onscreen, they were having a measurable emotional response to them. Their agile neuroscience approach showed us, second by second, how deeply people feel our preshow content and our advertisers’ spots and linked that emotional intensity to real shifts in memory, brand favorability, and purchase consideration. It has become a powerful validation of cinema as an emotional engine for brands. – Jennifer Friedlander, Senior Vice President of Insights & Measurement, Screenvision Media