The Famous Players movie house chain plans to bring its Big Screen Entertainment advertising to all of its theatre screens in Ontario by May and to those in Alberta by fall.

Beyond those two provinces, says Roger Harris, Famous Players’ vice-president of marketing, the company will look at expanding into the Montreal and Quebec City markets with Big Screen Entertainment in 1997.

Famous Players brought bse to its theatres in the greater Toronto area last May. bse is also widespread in British Columbia. The company has 108 theatres in Canada and 477 screens, 113 of them in and around Toronto and another 66 in the Vancouver area.

Harris, in an interview with Strategy during a Los Angeles business trip in mid-March, likens bse to billboard advertising.

A typical bse advertiser package lasts about 40 seconds and features three slides that fill the entire theatre screen, says Harris.

It’s essentially a ‘fade and dissolve’ program, he continues, that mixes movie trivia, celebrity tidbits and so on with a commercial message.

Among the national advertisers taking advantage of bse are the likes of MCA Video, Music World, Warner Brothers and Kellogg, which bought screen space last year for its tie-in to the latest Batman movie, says Harris.

Other bse advertisers are more local, sometimes emphatically so.

Randy Stewart, director of national accounts at Basstoy/Tribute Publications in Toronto, which sells bse advertising space on Famous Players’ behalf, says some typical advertisers are bars, clubs and restaurants. And during this month’s rsp period, Stewart recalls, a Toronto bank branch that had advertised in a nearby Famous Players theatre offered rsp shoppers a better interest rate if they showed their ticket stubs.

Stewart says the response to bse advertising has been ‘tremendous,’ citing the cases of Music World and MCA Video which both booked 52 weeks.

One of bse’s attractions is its reach, Stewart explains. With a typical three-slide sequence, bse will be seen by 750,000 patrons in Toronto and Vancouver in a month, he says.

Another of its charms is cost. Stewart says bse advertising is cheaper than outdoor, noting the cost of reaching those 750,000 movie theatre patrons in Toronto and Vancouver is $10,000.

Howard Lichtman, executive vice-president of marketing for Toronto’s Cineplex Odeon, says he’s not surprised Famous Players has chosen to expand its advertising activities given the success among advertisers his company has had.

Cineplex Odeon offers on-screen ‘rolling stock’ advertising, says Lichtman in an interview from Chicago, as well as lobby monitor ad opportunities for companies that don’t want or can’t afford big screen production values, plus poster exposure, couponing and sampling.

In Canada, Cineplex Odeon has 621 screens across the country and is Famous Players’ principal competitor.

Harris is careful to point out the difference between bse advertising and rolling stock ads, the latter being filmed commercials with sound and movement, and familiar to anyone who has been to the movies in Britain, France and elsewhere.

Harris says Famous Players doesn’t plan to run any more than one running stock commercial at any time and then it would have to be for a product that was ‘sympathetic’ to the chain’s regular programming.

As examples, Harris points to trailers for theatrical plays such as Sunset Boulevard and Showboat.

There are three reasons why Harris doesn’t see rolling stock commercials becoming big news in Famous Player houses: the chain is cautious about their patrons’ reaction to such ads; time spent on commercials eats into time that could be used to promote new releases; and some movie makers – Disney is one – prohibit advertising before the showing of their films.

Typically, advertisers don’t buy bse space on the basis of one film, says Harris.

When the release schedule is fullest in June, July and August, and November and December, there’s a lot more interest from advertisers who want to buy monthly space because they’re getting more traffic and more impressions.

Similarly, when a company has a licensing tie-in with a picture, it wants to be on-screen during the movie’s run, he adds.