Dive Brief:
- Atom Tickets announced an exclusive partnership with The Trade Desk, according to details shared with Marketing Dive. The movie ticketing site will work with the demand-side platform (DSP) to help movie marketers track ticket sales that are generated from their programmatic advertising campaigns.
- As a digital ticketing platform, Atom Tickets — which sells millions of movie tickets, including to repeat customers — can help attribute sales as a direct or probable result of online ads with the help of The Trade Desk. The companies claim their solution to gauge what devices or media types led to a ticket sale is an industry first.
- Atom Tickets, which competes with sites like Fandango, has been developing more digital partnerships. Backed by Lionsgate, Disney and Fidelity Management, the California-based company offers features like inviting friends on Facebook to buy tickets, running online marketing campaigns with major film distribution companies and generating QR codes for food purchases at kiosks in theaters.
Dive Insight:
Directly attributing how advertising translates to sales has been a long-standing challenge for marketers, but Atom Tickets and The Trade Desk are hoping their combined technology and data pools will make an appealing pitch that attracts more studio dollars.
Movie marketers might be looking for ways to better optimize their digital campaigns, including in real time, and target consumers who are going to the movies less frequently in the Netflix and video-on-demand era.
The solution arrives during a dire blockbuster season. While Disney, in particular, has had a good summer at the box office, accounting for roughly half of the industry's total haul of $4.5 billion, business in general has been down. According to IndieWire, the industry needs to outperform 2018 by 14% through the rest of the year just to break even.
The news is another indicator of how Atom Tickets, formed in 2014, is positioning itself to act as much more than just a ticket seller. It also provides exclusive movie content, marketing campaigns with major studios and now a data tie-in with one of advertising's more sizable DSPs.
Competitors like Fandango have also been trying to innovate more on digital channels. In May, Fandango promoted "Brightburn" with Sony Pictures by letting people purchase tickets by taking a picture of a QR code broadcasted on TV commercials for the movie.
