Why are your showtimes not in the newspaper?

This has been the number one question so far. We had been planning to write our answer in an upcoming blog, but seeing as it has just been asked on facebook, we thought we would try to go ahead and answer it tonight. We can take tomorrow night off.

So the short answer to this question is ECONOMICS. Now the long answer....

As a small indy theater, we have a really really tight budget. We desperately want to be able to stay in business for years and years to come. In order to do so one of the areas that we have to keep in check is our marketing/advertising/pr budget. One of the ways we can do that is by relying on the wonderful world of the wide wide web. Other than the cost of our website and our weekly email, everything we do online from facebook to twitter to this blog is FREE.

So...we met with a representative from the WS Journal last week to find out all the scoop on ad rates, in hopes that we were just completely misunderstanding the published rate sheet. Turns out our estimates were a little high, BUT if we were to advertise in the WS Journal, only 3 times a week for a year, we would be spending over half of our entire marketing budget. Just to put this in perspective, we would most likely have an ad the same size as Marketplace. The Marketplace has 6 screens whereas we have only 2. That means we would basically be paying 3 times more per screen for an ad than Marketplace. This is more than we spent on one of our 35mm film projectors!

Don't get us wrong. It's not that we don't want to have our showtimes in print. It would be really convenient for many to be able to open up the paper and find our showtimes next to the other local multiplexes. And we don't discount that. We also appreciate the chicken or the egg conundrum we're in - if our showtimes aren't in the newspaper, how are people going to be able to know when to show up to keep us in business? We hope that over time though as we are around longer, more and more people get used to our system and finding our films and showtimes becomes easier and easier. We are still working out the kinks on our website and trying to make it as user-friendly as it can be. We send out a weekly email to over 1400 individuals with our entire schedule for the upcoming week. If you aren't getting these emails, please go to our website and sign-up right on the front page. For those who don't use computers, we have a voice-recorded message with our showtimes and we are working on getting that extended so that we can leave showtimes for upcoming days as well. We recently put up a calendar in our lobby that displays our upcoming films. There are also a ton of other sites on line to find our showtimes. Here are just a few, some of which I just discovered: google.com/movies, moviefone.com, when.com, flixster.com, movietickets.com, movies.yahoo.com, boxofficemojo.com, rottentomatoes.com, bing.com.

When we do spend marketing money, this is what we want to spend it on: special events (from film screenings to fundraising to local filmmaker events), hosting guest artists, publications and/or events that bring more people downtown in general, co-promotions with our downtown neighbors and Jigar thought it would be funny if I wrote sky-writer (so I'm humoring him). These are all things that we hope make us different than the other theaters in town.

We haven't ruled advertising in the WS Journal out by any means, we just wanted you to know where things stand now.