EXCLUSIVE: Exhibition marketing firm PaperAirplane Media, which has been a crossways for movie theaters and studios since launching during the pandemic in August 2020, has reached a milestone in its digital asset download portal, The Hanger, with 500K studio marketing assets downloaded.
Lionsgate vets Mike Polydoros and Will Preuss saw an opportunity and a need in the exhibitor relations realm and capitalized on it promptly in 2020, even though movie theaters weren’t 100% open. Essentially, their Hanger portal is an area where studios can deposit all marketing materials for movie theaters, which they can then download for promotional purposes.
PaperAirplane connects movie theaters, studios and theatrical media ad agencies, creating and fostering in-theater promotions. Essentially exhibitors don’t have to go distributor-by-distributor in finding the materials they need to open a movie in any given weekend.
PaperAirplane has also been instrumental in providing guidance to theater circuits on how to optimize their royalty subscription lists, and market specifically to those members, as well as informing studios about exhibition’s digital promotion rollout. The firm also assists indie distributors with their in-theater marketing support.
The Hanger launched in October of 2020 seeing 3,700 digital assets downloaded on its platform in that year. That surged to north of 103K in 2021, and 226K-plus in 2022. This year looks to surpass that number as over 170,000 assets have been downloaded already.
Last year, The Cinema Foundation worked with PaperAirplane to communicate and host digital assets for their membership in support of National Cinema Day. Over 7K assets were utilized by exhibitors of all sizes in support of the initiative.
PaperAirplane CEO Polydoros said, “It is a testament to the partnership between exhibition and the studios when you see over a half a million digital assets have been downloaded over the last 2 ½ years. Remember, that is a half a million times that exhibition has promoted a film through one of their owned and operated channels, such as social media, an email blast, push notification, digital lobby or menu board displays. It is truly remarkable.”
Said PaperAirplane President Will Preuss, “It is fascinating that, after 2½ years, we now have the data to see trends and patterns in the marketplace, giving us visibility to which assets work best for exhibition. This helps us guide our clients to seed their materials more efficiently. We have also seen a tremendous increase in usage, with over 1,000 assets a day being downloaded.”
“Mike Polydoros and the PaperAirplane team have revolutionized the theatrical materials delivery system with their studio partners enabling far more visibility to movie lovers of the trailers, digital and social media assets. They can also turn on a dime getting any creative changes immediately into theatres” said Steve Bunell, EVP of Content Strategy for Marcus theatres.
With over 3,000 registered users, PaperAirplane works with virtually every studio, both large and small, and now counts 99% of the North American Box Office as users of the platform. Over 300 unique exhibitors a day visit The Hanger, spending 12 minutes a session perusing and downloading digital assets that they then use to promote upcoming films.
“Congratulations to Mike, Will and the entire PaperAirplane team on this amazing milestone of 500,000 downloads,” said Richard Grover, Head of Marketing at Regal. “The Hanger has greatly improved the flow of studio content and materials to exhibitors. By creating a single efficient source, our teams can better execute promoting the movies with streamlined studio and exhibition coordination.”
Mike Bowers, CEO of Harkins theatres commented, “I, and the rest of the Harkins team, congratulate Mike and Will on their success with PaperAirplane. The rapid growth of PaperAirplane can certainly be attributed to their vast industry knowledge, creative marketing strategies and possibly most importantly, their honest business approach.”
“Today, digital marketing means personalization at scale,” said Adam Cassels, VP Global Marketing at Cinionic. “Delivering our digital marketing ambition requires partners and agencies that understand today’s trends, technologies, and the theatrical ecosystem. PaperAirplane’s unified platform & industry expertise has allowed us deliver multiple, localized co-branded promotions in several countries.”
PaperAirplane recently completed an equity buyback from their former JV partner and is now completely self-owned.